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Government concessions are almost as hard to negotiate in Czechoslovakia, where the Catholic churches—Latin and Eastern rite—still suffer from the repressive fallout of the Prague Spring of 1968. About two-thirds of the population are nominally Catholic but, observes an American diplomat, "there has been a notable erosion of belief due to apathy." A number of Catholics are so unimpressed by the caliber of official clerics that they are turning to underground churches manned by priests who have been outlawed by the state for political reasons.
Orthodox Christianity is the prevailing religion in Bulgaria and Rumania, with the usual cooperative church-state relationship that Orthodoxy has developed over the centuries. A tiny minority of Roman Catholics in Bulgaria is allowed very limited freedom. In Rumania, the regime tolerates Latin-rite Catholics in Transylvania, but has totally suppressed the Eastern-rite Catholics, who were forcibly incorporated into the Orthodox Church in 1948.
Last year's new Constitution of the Soviet Union, like the one that preceded it, guarantees freedom of religion, but Christians of any stripe are suspect. The dominant Orthodox Church has survived through an accommodation with the regime that limits its social mission. When Orthodox Priest Dmitri Dudko gave a series of controversial sermons in Moscow that led to his arrest in 1974, he was banished by embarrassed church authorities to a remote country parish.
Many Baptists in the Soviet Union became so disaffected by their official church's concessions to the state that they founded an underground church; it is now relentlessly persecuted. Roman Catholics—the great majority in Lithuania —have fared no better. Since the Soviet Union incorporated Lithuania into its territories, the most active part of the church has gone underground, and circulates a widely read anti-regime publication called Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church. Moscow forced the Eastern-rite Ukrainian Catholic Church to merge with the Orthodox Church in 1946, when the membership was estimated at 5.5 million. But loyal Ukrainian Catholics still meet in secret in private homes and apartments, served by some 300 to 350 underground priests and at least three bishops. The Ukrainians also maintain clandestine religious orders of both sexes.
Beyond the confines of Eastern Europe, the fate of Christians in Communist countries varies widely. In Cuba, where the median age is only 19, the education of children is a state monopoly from the time they are two. The Vatican has a nuncio in Havana, and the churches are open, but it is mainly the old who attend.
What remains of Christianity in Cambodia must be far underground, if anywhere. Catholics are fleeing the Communist regime in Laos. In Viet Nam, restrictions have been imposed on the once flourishing churches in the conquered South, as they have long been in the North. The major mystery in Asia is the fate of some 2 million Catholics presumably remaining in Communist China. No churches have been open since the Cultural Revolution except for one Catholic and one Protestant church in Peking, both reserved principally for foreigners.