Before the end of this month, the 150-odd U.S. Roman Catholics living in Moscow will be able to go to confession regularly again for the first time in three years.
The Roosevelt-Litvinov agreement of 1933, under which the United States, after years of back-turning, extended diplomatic recognition to the Communist regime, stipulated that U.S. clergymen be permitted to live in Moscow to minister to the spiritual needs of Americans there. Four priests served in this treaty-made capacity, all of them Assumptionist fathers, a missionary group with a special concern for the churches of the East. In 1955, when the U.S. State Department...
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