(4 of 5)
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.