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Alexander Tomsky, an émigré from Czechoslovakia who monitors East European church life at Britain's Keston College, expects that within Poland "nominal Catholics are going to be unwilling to make the small daily compromises to keep the party and the system satisfied." Beyond Poland, Tomsky thinks that the arrival of John Paul occurs "at a time when the Soviet Union is tired ideologically. In this climate, the revival of Polish Catholicity will be exciting to all believers. The Pope has told people in effect, that they should be dissidents." And if the Pope's ecumenical thrust toward Orthodoxy succeeds, "it could bring the fire of Poland into the Russian heartland. The other governments in Eastern Europe will try to do everything to isolate their people from the events in Poland, but who can now predict what will happen?"
In most other Communist nations, churches and political dissidents are in incomparably weaker situations because they do not have a single church that enjoys the backing of virtually the entire populace. As in Poland, the freedom of the Catholic Church in each Communist nation generally reflects the degree of liberty permitted in politics and communication.
In Yugoslavia, which was expelled from the Stalinist Cominform in 1948, the church faces typical Communist harassments in attenuated form. In Hungary, it is precisely 30 years since Josef Cardinal Mindszenty was drugged, stripped naked and whipped with a rubber truncheon in preparation for his Communist Party show trial as a traitor. Today Catholic bishops are installed in every see, but the bureaucracy has control even of the assignment of priests, and it tightly restricts seminary enrollment. Czechoslovakia is nearly a throwback to Stalinism. Only three bishops, all aging, hold permanent appointments among the 13 sees. Two seminaries exist, all but empty, and there is a freeze on admission to religious orders.
The Catholic population is small in four other nations: heavily Lutheran East Germany (whose Christian daily ran a front-page story on the papal tour); Rumania, where Eastern-rite Catholics were forced into the Orthodox Church in 1948 by the Communist regime; Bulgaria, which now has a full complement of Catholic bishops for the first time in 35 years; and xenophobic Albania, which claims to have exterminated all religion.
A' home, the Soviet Union maintains rigid repression of religion and shows little real sign of any change. It is generally assumed that Poland refuses to allow Catholic radio and TV broadcasts partly because the Soviets do not want to encourage believers on their side of the border, especially in Lithuania. Tied to the Poles by culture and history, the Lithuanians are particularly oppressed and particularly resentful. It is an act of courage there even to attend Mass. Lithuanian clergy were reportedly forbidden to go to Poland during the Pope's visit. All six dioceses in the country, which was appropriated by the Soviets in 1940, are led by temporary administrators who face unending pressures from Moscow. When he named 15 new Cardinals last month, John Paul kept the identity of one of them secret. It is widely supposed that the man so honored in pectore—held "in the breast"—is Julijonas Steponaviĉius, the temporary "apostolic administrator"