The following article consists of major extracts taken from a larger article published first on July 16, 1990, in the New American and entitled "Pragmatic Atheists". It is important for our readers to be able to more fully understand what is going on in Russia and other communist countries today so that they realize more clearly that only Our Lady can help us at this time. This is especially true today when even many Catholic newspapers and Church officials are confused by the yoyo policies (up again down again) of the Communists regarding religion.

       Consider for a moment the following headlines, based on news stories emanating from the USSR: "Thousands of Churches Reopen in the Soviet Union"; "Monasteries and Convents Allowed to Organize"; "Government Lifts Ban on Church Seminaries"; "Soviet Government Appeals to Church Leaders to Assist in Regeneration of the Motherland." Interesting, are they not? Did anyone, a few decades ago, ever think that we would live to see such stories? Imagine, the militantly atheistic Soviet regime giving freedom to believers and asking the Church's help to rebuild the country!

       From yesterday's newspaper, right? Wrong! These headlines are not from the era of Gorbachev and glasnost. They are taken from stories reported almost fifty years ago, during the height of the bloody reign of Joseph Stalin - the greatest mass murderer in the history of mankind and religion's most determined foe. How is this possible?

New Policy Toward Religion?

       On June 22, 1941, the USSR was unexpectedly attacked by Adolf Hitler's Germany. Initially, the German offensive was an enormous success. For several months it appeared that it would end swiftly in victory. Russians, Ukrainians, and others at first believed that they were being liberated.

       To prevent the citizenry of the Soviet Union from rising as one man during the invasion and obliterating the Bolshevik regime, its henchmen, and the entire apparatus of communist terror, Stalin engineered what then appeared to be an historic break from communist doctrine. With fiendish cleverness he surprised the world by launching a new policy toward religion.

       Previously, throughout the 1920s and '30s, Soviet policy had aimed at the total elimination of religion from the national life. Virtually the entire Church hierarchy had been murdered, incarcerated, or forced into exile. Tens of thousands of priests were killed. Monasteries and convents were closed and their inhabitants consigned to forced labor camps.

       Most local parishes had been shut down, and huge numbers of church buildings, some dating back to the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, were demolished. Before the Bolshevik Revolution there were nearly 60,000 parishes in the Russian Empire. By 1941, just prior to the German assault, only several thousand of these parishes remained.

       Despite all of this carnage, Stalin had ingeniously kept alive a handful of bishops and priests as trump cards for possible use in the future. These were not clergymen noted for their forthright resistance to communism. Quite the contrary. For the most part, and especially in the higher ranks, they were the "Sergianists," the followers of Metropolitan Sergius, who had stated in 1927 that the Russian Orthodox Church must maintain absolute loyalty to the Soviet State and Soviet leadership:

       "Your joys are our joys, your sorrows our sorrows," he wrote in his infamous declaration of submission to Soviet control.

       Incredible as it now sounds, Metropolitan Sergius even went so far as to deny, in a public sermon from the steps of his own altar in 1930, that any believers in the USSR had ever been persecuted for their faith. The thousands of clergy who failed to support the pro-Soviet, Sergianist position were automatically regarded as enemies of the people and swiftly executed.

"Soviet Church"

       Late in 1941, therefore, with the USSR fighting for its existence and with desperate need to win public support at home and mislead public opinion abroad, Stalin trotted out his waiting "Soviet Church" for all the world to see. A "Patriarch" - in the person of Metropolitan Sergius himself - was enthroned. Several thousand parishes were reopened. Throughout the '40s and '50s - that is, during the war and its immediate aftermath - this official Church experienced relative calm and considerable growth. Nonetheless, it was for the most part a grotesque charade.

       Stalin hated and mistrusted all believers, including the Sergianists. Thus liturgical services alone, celebrated on a more or less regular basis, constituted the full extent of approved activities. Officially proscribed by Stalin's 1929 "Law on Religious Cults" were such things as teaching religion (especially to the young), Church charitable activities, pastoral visits to the sick, religious education, auxiliary Church societies of any kind, religious libraries, religious publishing of any sort, outdoor religious processions, and the participation of minors in Church services or even in choirs or as altar boys. In other words, those things that make religion an integral part of the fabric of daily life were prohibited.

       The official church that Stalin built to help in the war effort acted as a compliant mouthpiece for Soviet propaganda, covered reassuringly in the ancient vestments of religion. Outside this sphere, it remained in an iron strait jacket. Instant punishment awaited any cleric who forgot, even for a moment, who was master.

       Along with this official, Soviet-sponsored Russian Orthodox Church, quite similar patterns were followed in establishing official, Soviet-controlled Baptist and other Protestant Churches and, in certain major cities, rigidly-supervised Jewish congregations.

       The two-pronged Soviet formula, which mercilessly attacks religion while, at the same time, permitting small subservient Church groups to serve communist ends, is followed elsewhere in the communist world. In Red China, for example, the communist leadership has acted in an identical fashion in carefully preserving a highly publicized, schismatic, "Patriotic" Catholic Church, the hierarchy of which is not in communion with Rome.

Khrushchev's Crackdown

       Beginning in 1960, Khrushchev launched a general crackdown on religion. The communist system had by then regained its strength and confidence. The war was long over. Rebuilding was well under way. The agencies of mass terror again held sway. And a puppet church no longer served the Soviet Union's purposes.

       Once again thousands of parishes were closed. The establishment and operation of seminaries were forbidden. Atheistic propaganda was stepped up and believers by the thousands, representing all religions, hounded into concentration camps.

       The fruits of Sergianism were bitter indeed. For all of their sickening compromises and whining sycophancy under Stalin, the leadership of the "Soviet Church" had gained nothing. Khrushchev proved that there could be no genuine modus vivendi between religion and communism.

       We see in this overview of the history of Soviet relations with the Russian Churches a certain model, broad patterns and principles that govern communist tactics and that typify the communist mentality. On the one hand, communism, by its very nature, remained the relentless enemy of God and of religion, regardless of the form in which religious belief manifests itself.

       As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes: "Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than their political and economic pretensions."

       On the other hand, during times of crisis, when the communist state is threatened, communism is more than willing to seize whatever weapons are at hand to assure its ultimate survival, whether these be modest concessions in military affairs, "democratic reforms," or certain tightly circumscribed, but highly advertised "freedoms" for religious groups.

       What we see on television news programs or read in our newspapers about "revolutionary changes" in Eastern Europe, and especially in attitudes towards religion, should come as a surprise to no one. A careful reading of history tells us that these changes are nothing new at all.

One of the chief weapons that Communist Russia is using against the West in its unchanged goal of world domination is lies, half-truths and disinformation. That Glasnost and Perestroika are such a fraud is demonstrated by the above pictured KGB defector's book published in 198.1. This book outlines those tactics of disinformation several years before they took place. (This book is available from The Fatima Crusader)

Demonic Hoax

       Communism is a demonic hoax, an "ideology" of serpentine deception. A combination of verbal legerdemain, subterfuge, and terror on the grandest scale in history, it is everything it claims it is not and it is nothing it pretends to be.

       It follows quite naturally, then, that for the intelligent, dedicated communist, the graver the crisis, the more elaborate and colorful must be the "Potemkin villages" - the more serious the threat, the more comprehensive must be the cosmetic "perestroika." Faced with virtual economic collapse and a population that has "had it," communism is using its facility for the lie and its expertise in propaganda in new and unheard-of-ways. But only the trappings are new. The trick is an old one.

       Religion is, apart from its spiritual significance, a vital and extremely powerful element in a nation's cultural psyche. If handled carefully it can, on a temporary basis, prove extremely valuable when employed to serve communist goals. At the same time, as soon as religion no longer plays a functional role in communism's plans, it is easily liquidated, along with the "useful idiots" who temporarily serve its ends.

       SOVIET UNION: As in 1941, the Soviet State today must deal with an alarmingly threatening crisis. This time it is not an invader who poses a danger, but the catastrophic insufficiency of a basket-case, socialist planned economy coupled with an extremely expensive drive to build an irresistible, overwhelmingly superior Red Army.

       To prevent collapse and to enable the continuation of military buildup, it is vital that world socialism receive, without delay, a massive injunction of hard currency in the form of Western aid, investment, and funds generated by favorable trade arrangements.

       To execute such a scheme, it is a prerequisite (as it was in Stalin's day) that the West be anaesthetized. This is being accomplished very simply, by convincing everyone that "changes" are taking place. Since communism's foremost enemy has always been religion, what better way to gull the credulous Westerner than by appearing to seek a rapprochement with religious believers? By deliberate intent, then, much of the steam has gone out of the campaign - begun by Khrushchev and continued through the early years of Gorbachev - to discourage the practice of religion in the USSR.

       It cannot be denied that many of the restrictions formerly placed on religion have been lifted. The current Gorbachev strategy seems to be to channel religious feeling and growth towards groups that are officially approved and, so to speak, "licensed" and directed by the Soviet state. These groups include Orthodox, Catholic, Baptist, and Jewish religious organizations.

       In the Russian Orthodox and Baptist Churches, as in the Jewish religious groups, the old, pro-regime officeholders still maintain their power. Even under Gorbachev, the Catacomb Orthodox Church of Russia and the heavily-persecuted, underground independent Baptist Churches have flatly refused to come out of hiding and to join with their co-religionists in government-approved bodies. This fact speaks volumes about glasnost as it touches upon religious matters.

Bishop Paul Vasylyk and Josep Terelya recently came to visit Father Gruner at our T V studio. Both the Bishop and Josep confirm that Russia is still persecuting the Ukranian Catholics. Josep suffered 23 years imprisonment in Soviet prisons and work camps because he refused to give up his Catholic faith. He tells us that Gorby is worse than Joseph Stalin. We know that the persecutions of the Church - in open or hidden form will continue until the Pope and the Bishops obey the solemn request of Our Lady of Fatima to consecrate Russia.

       The American press makes much of a shipment of one hundred thousand bibles to the USSR. To the unthinking, this seems impressive proof of a monumental turnabout by the Soviets. But the USSR has, according to the Soviet government estimates, some 90 million believers. Moreover, does anyone monitor what actually becomes of these Bibles, once they reach the hands of ostensibly grateful, smiling communist government officials? Some do reach the hands of believers. There is no question about this. But what percentage? Some years ago one communist government allowed a shipment of Bibles into the country. It was sent to a factory where it was reprocessed into toilet paper!

       Stories have appeared in the Western media claiming that Church organizations are now free to publish. Indeed, some actually now publish journals and periodicals. But, what the media does not mention is that printing, as an industry, is still mostly in the hands of the Party. Thus, religious groups must pay particularly heavy premiums, often in hard currency only, for the privilege of publishing anything. More importantly, normal distribution channels are not open to them. One Church member who wished to subscribe to the new Moscow Church Herald discovered that the government does not allow it to be circulated by subscription through the Soviet post.

       Meanwhile, Stalin's 1929 "Law on Religious Cults" still remains the legal foundation under which religion exists in the Soviet Union. Protestant pastors are still arrested for holding services in homes without government permission or for holding services in places where minors are present.

       The unauthorized use of buildings by Baptists still results in their demolition, and desecration of wall plaques containing Scriptural passages is ubiquitous. Believers with large families still do not receive the extra ration cards that non-believers automatically receive.

       And untold numbers of Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant men and women still languish, as they have for many years, in the dark, foul gloom of the gulag, or in psychiatric torture chambers.

Jesus Christ was mocked in His Sacred Kinship by the Crowning with thorns. Communist Russia has for 70 years mocked the rights of Jesus Christ, "the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords". This continues under Mr. Gorbachev. Because Russia is not consecrated according to God's own solemn request given through Our Lady of Fatima, Jesus' Sacred Kingship is still mocked today in Russia.

       Under governments of men, and not of law, that which the government gives, it can also take away. Sooner or later the communist tyrants of Eastern Europe and Asia will take from their religious subjects all that they have now given them.

       How easy this usurpation of new-found freedoms will be. For these "freedoms" are built on the caprice of communist rulers and in the gullible minds of those who believe that evil suddenly becomes good.

       Once the communist regimes have succeeded, or failed for that matter, in getting their hands on Western capital - once they need no longer dazzle their Western "friends" with a heavenly display of religious fireworks, while their hands rifle the pockets of naive and awed onlookers - religious freedom in Eastern Europe, and in other bastions of Marxism, will last no longer than snowflakes on the blazing sands of the Sahara.

       EDITOR'S NOTE: Because we were unable to find space for the whole article we had to shorten it. It outlined the yo-yo policies of the Communists in the Ukraine, Poland, Albania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, East Germany, Red China, and Romania. To obtain a complete copy of Father James Thornton's article "Pragmatic Atheists" write us at The Fatima Crusader or phone us at 1-800-263-8160.

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