RELIGION, Page 74Cross Meets KremlinGorbachev's historic visit to Pope John Paul II seals a truceafter 72 years of bitter spiritual warfareBy Richard N. Ostling
Of all the events that have shaken the Soviet bloc in 1989,
none is more fraught with history -- or more implausible -- than
the polite encounter that will take place this week in Vatican
City. There, in the spacious ceremonial library of the 16th century
Apostolic Palace, the czar of world atheism, Mikhail Gorbachev,
will visit the Vicar of Christ, Pope John Paul II. Before
delivering formal speeches in the presence of their entourages, the
two East Europeans will sit down alone to chat in Russian without
interpreters.
The moment will be electric, and not only because John Paul
helped inflame the fervor for freedom in his Polish homeland that
has swept like brush fire across Eastern Europe. Beyond that, the
meeting of the two men symbolizes the end of the 20th century's
most dramatic spiritual war, a conflict in which the seemingly
irresistible force of Communism battered against the immovable
object of Christianity.
Until recently, the battalions of Marxism seemed to have the
upper hand over the soldiers of the Cross. In the wake of the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Lenin had pledged toleration but
delivered terror. "Russia turned crimson with the blood of
martyrs," says Father Gleb Yakunin, Russian Orthodoxy's bravest
agitator for religious freedom. In the Bolsheviks' first five years
in power, 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were cut down by the red
sickle. Stalin greatly accelerated the terror, and by the end of
Khrushchev's rule, liquidations of clergy reached an estimated
50,000. After World War II, fierce but generally less bloody
persecution spread into the Ukraine and the new Soviet bloc,
affecting millions of Roman Catholics and Protestants as well as
Orthodox.
The violence did not cease with Stalin's death in 1953. In 1981
Pope John Paul barely escaped assassination. It is believed in the
highest circles of the Vatican that Gorbachev's Kremlin
predecessors were the masterminds, though the Soviets deny this.
The reason for the attack, claims a ranking official of the Holy
See, was that the Polish Pope refused to accept the division of
Europe into East and West. "The East bloc," says this official,
"realized he was a destabilizing factor."
That he was. While Gorbachev's hands-off policy was the
immediate cause of the chain reaction of liberation that has swept
through Eastern Europe in the past few months, John Paul deserves
much of the longer-range credit. His triumphant tour of Poland in
1979, says a Polish bishop, altered the "mentality of fear, the
fear of police and tanks, of losing your job, of not getting
promoted, of being thrown out of school, of failing to get a
passport. People learned that if they ceased to fear the system,
the system was helpless." Thus was born Solidarity, backed by the
church and led by such friends of the Pope as Lech Walesa and
Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who subsequently became the Soviet bloc's first
Christian Prime Minister.
But the Pope's vision stretched far beyond Poland. Just before
he ascended the throne of Peter in 1978, Karol Wojtyla had confided
to some German bishops an astonishing prediction of European
Communism's inevitable demise. As an ideology, said the onetime
philosophy professor, Communism had nothing more to say and stood
for nothing except the perpetuation of power. As an economic
system, it had failed utterly. During the Pope's 1979 visit to
Orthodoxy's Ecumenical Patriarch in Turkey, a papal adviser told
TIME's Wilton Wynn that John Paul urgently hoped to bring Rome and
the Eastern Orthodox Church together. Reason: the Pope was
convinced that Communism faced inevitable collapse and that Soviet
bloc nations would turn to Christianity to fill the void.
Though talk of Communism's collapse seemed like wishful
thinking at that time, John Paul based his uncanny prediction on
a keen sense of moral and historical dynamics, and also on personal
experience. Unlike other leaders in the West, he knew what it was
like to live under a Marxist regime day by day. Through the 1980s
his speeches hammered home the concept of a Europe reunited from
the Atlantic to the Urals and inspired by Christian faith. John
Paul marked 1988's millennium of Ukrainian and Russian Christendom
by evoking Europeans' "desire that barriers should be broken down."
If those barriers have really begun to topple, it is largely
owing to the political reforms Gorbachev has inspired throughout
the East bloc. In the process, the Soviet leader has let Christians
start rebuilding their devastated institutions. Gorbachev is not
motivated by religious belief, though he was baptized into
Orthodoxy by his grandparents, and his mother remains a faithful
churchgoer. His aims are temporal and pragmatic: he hopes to
harness the force of Christianity in the fight against his
country's moral decay, seen in growing drug abuse, alcoholism,
suicide, sloth and a 50% divorce rate. Says Russian Orthodoxy's
Metropolitan Pitirim: "Everyone has realized that failures in the
economy and politics are a result of ethical violations. We want
a renewed sense of spiritual values."
Gorbachev has also grasped the fact that political and economic
survival depends upon the goodwill of the Soviet people, among whom
Christians have always far outnumbered Communists. Gorbachev,
moreover, needs the cooperation of the West, observes Father Mark,
a reform-minded Orthodox priest in Moscow, who considers
Gorbachev's program within the U.S.S.R. "a result of foreign policy
necessity." More than any of the 18 summit meetings between Soviet
leaders and U.S. Presidents, Gorbachev's pilgrimage to the papal
library will make his nation a respectable participant in world
discourse.
The road to this week's Vatican meeting was paved by 212
decades of subtle diplomatic maneuvers. Beginning with John XXIII's
papacy and the Second Vatican Council, the Vatican's master
diplomat, Agostino Casaroli, pursued church Ostpolitik that sought
openings in Eastern Europe in return for a more conciliatory stance
toward Communism. But neither that strategy nor John Paul II's more
hard-nosed approach achieved much before Gorbachev took power.
The big breakthrough came when the Pope boldly dispatched
Casaroli, by now Vatican Secretary of State, and seven other
Cardinals to Moscow last year to celebrate the Christian
millennium. Casaroli managed a 90-minute meeting with Gorbachev and
handed him a three-page letter plus a memo from John Paul listing
complaints about treatment of Catholics. Gorbachev responded
directly to several of the Pope's requests. Last year Lithuania's
two leading bishops were returned to head dioceses after a combined
53 years of internal exile, and the cathedral in Vilnius,
previously used as an art museum, was restored for worship. This
year the Belorussian republic got its first bishop in 63 years.
That paved the way for Archbishop Angelo Sodano, who oversees the
Vatican's foreign relations, to make the arrangements for
Gorbachev's historic visit to the Holy See.
These concessions to Catholicism are only part of Gorbachev's
religious liberalization. Television is broadcasting worship
services, and religious art is openly displayed. Last month the
Orthodox Eucharist was celebrated in the 15th century Assumption
Cathedral, inside the Kremlin, for the first time since 1918.
Most important, 3,000 new churches have opened in the past nine
months. However, Russian Orthodoxy's current 10,000 churches are
a far cry from the 18,000 that existed when Stalin died, and just
a fraction of the 54,000 before the Bolshevik Revolution. Ever
since World War II, when Stalin fostered a revival of Orthodoxy in
order to enlist its support in the war effort, the Kremlin's policy
has been not to liquidate the church but to infiltrate and control
it. For that reason, the Soviet regime has always preferred docile
Russian-led Orthodox and Protestant churches to Catholicism, which
is more independent and led by a feisty Pope in Rome.
But the battle for religious freedom is not yet won. The
Supreme Soviet has still not taken up a long-anticipated revision
of the repressive religious statute instituted by Stalin in 1929.
There is no certainty whether, or when, parliament will scrap the
hated law, which subjects all church activities to Communist
control and forbids parish education. Nor, given the history of the
U.S.S.R., is there certainty that rights proclaimed in speeches and
laws will be honored by bureaucrats.
Many of the gains made by the Soviet Union's 70 million
Christians have also been enjoyed by the estimated 74 million
Christians who live in the six satellite nations. Poland's
Communists "have realized that unleashing conflict with the church
has been a mistake throughout the past 45 years," says Alojzy
Orszulik, the Polish bishops' spokesman. The nation, which remains
95% Catholic, this year became the first in the Soviet bloc to
enact a law restoring all basic rights to the churches. Diplomatic
relations with the Holy See were established in July. Hungary, also
rapidly liberalizing, is 60% Catholic and has sizable Lutheran and
Reformed churches. The regime is rewriting the religious-control
laws, has abolished the repressive state Office for Church Affairs
and, after talks last week at the Vatican, has indicated that
diplomatic relations will be re-established. The Pope is due to
visit Hungary in 1991.
The surging crowds that toppled Czechoslovakia's rulers last
week were inspired by, among others, Frantisek Cardinal Tomasek,
90, who has become an increasingly militant proponent of change.
The ousted Jakes regime, which had permitted the appointment of six
new Catholic bishops, only two weeks ago concluded a round of talks
at the Vatican. In East Germany, the bloc's only predominantly
Protestant state, this year's pro-democracy movement emerged from
small church gatherings that, through the 1980s, criticized the
Communists' handling of foreign policy, disarmament and the
environment. A bishops' statement read from every pulpit Sept. 10
detailed "long overdue" changes. Most of the mass rallies and
marches since then have gathered at Protestant churches.
As in the U.S.S.R., the dominant Orthodox Church has been
subservient to the regimes in both Bulgaria and Rumania, remaining
mute when the leaderships closed churches and repressed clergy.
Rumania's huge Eastern Rite Catholic community has forcibly lived
underground since 1948.
The most contentious religious problem within the Soviet Union
concerns the 4 million or so Catholics in the western Ukraine,
whose plight is a key agenda item in this week's talks between
Gorbachev and the Pope. Friendlier contacts, and a papal visit to
the U.S.S.R., cannot occur unless this, the world's largest
underground religious community, is restored. Under Stalin, all
Ukrainian Catholic bishops were imprisoned and a fraudulent 1946
synod dissolved their jurisdictions, handing over 4,100 churches
to Russian Orthodoxy. The majority of the Catholic priests rejected
the takeover and either were arrested or went into hiding.
Decades later, ten bishops and an unknown number of priests
are still functioning. "They deny us the right to praise our God
openly," says Catholicism's Metropolitan Vladimir, 83, who
faithfully celebrates clandestine Masses daily on a makeshift altar
in his tiny Lvov apartment. Last September more than 100,000
demonstrators wound their way through Lvov to the St. Yuri
Cathedral, one of the former Catholic churches currently operated
by the Orthodox. Subsequently, Ukrainians in Lvov and elsewhere
have retaken control of some Orthodox church buildings.
Rebirth of the Ukrainian churches may stir the sort of
nationalist fervor that is inextricably linked with religion. Along
with economic failure, this unrest poses the gravest of threats to
Gorbachev's regime. Yet Gorbachev apparently calculates that the
movement will be safer aboveground and in contact with a Pope who
preaches against political violence. The major reason that
Gorbachev has not done more for the Ukrainian Catholics has been
pressure from the Russian Orthodoxy, which stands to lose half its
flock in some regions.
Once the Ukrainian problem is resolved, assuming the
Gorbachev-inspired liberalization continues, the Roman Pontiff can
pursue his overarching vision of reunion with the whole of Eastern
Orthodoxy. The churches of the East and West are like "two lungs
of a single body," John Paul is fond of saying. Religious
negotiations have made surprisingly brisk progress on the
ecclesiastical and theological bases for union.
Until very recently, the Russian Orthodox Church would probably
have vetoed reunification under pressure from the Kremlin. Now,
with the Communists less inclined to interfere, the idea of unity
seems more feasible. The main Orthodox fear, observes one Vatican
official, is that "we are too powerful and centralized." But in the
end, he speculates, the authority of the papacy will not be an
"insurmountable problem." According to this analysis, "the church
could revert to the 1st millennium model, a communion of churches
with greater autonomy," instead of the centralized church structure
of the past 1,000 years. That is an astonishing scenario coming
from a high-ranking official of the Holy See.
The second aspect of the Pope's vision, a revival of
Christianity as Marxism recedes, is as problematic as the goal of
church reunion. But John Paul is not the only person to foresee
such a momentous development. Alexander Ogorodnikov, the Orthodox
dissident whose Christian Democratic Union was the first
non-Communist political party to request official recognition,
predicts a "second Christianization" of Russia.
Father Franc Rode of the Vatican's Council for Dialogue with
Non-Believers says Westerners can barely comprehend the "horrible
spiritual desert" that resulted when the Bolsheviks turned atheism
into a political ideology, attempting to expunge God from the human
soul. "This entire experiment," he asserts, "is now proving to have
been a dismal failure, one of the most horrible in man's history."
If that experiment is in fact nearing its end, then much of the
credit can be claimed by two improbable allies: Mikhail Gorbachev
and John Paul II.
-- Ann Blackman/Moscow, Cathy Booth/Rome and Angela Leuker/Vienna
