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Until very recently, the Russian Orthodox Church would probably have vetoed reunification under pressure from the Kremlin. Now, with the Communists less inclined to interfere, the idea of unity seems more feasible. The main Orthodox fear, observes one Vatican official, is that "we are too powerful and centralized." But in the end, he speculates, the authority of the papacy will not be an "insurmountable problem." According to this analysis, "the church could revert to the 1st millennium model, a communion of churches with greater autonomy," instead of the centralized church structure of the past 1,000 years. That is an astonishing scenario coming from a high-ranking official of the Holy See.
The second aspect of the Pope's vision, a revival of Christianity as Marxism recedes, is as problematic as the goal of church reunion. But John Paul is not the only person to foresee such a momentous development. Alexander Ogorodnikov, the Orthodox dissident whose Christian Democratic Union was the first non-Communist political party to request official recognition, predicts a "second Christianization" of Russia.
Father Franc Rode of the Vatican's Council for Dialogue with Non-Believers says Westerners can barely comprehend the "horrible spiritual desert" that resulted when the Bolsheviks turned atheism into a political ideology, attempting to expunge God from the human soul. "This entire experiment," he asserts, "is now proving to have been a dismal failure, one of the most horrible in man's history." If that experiment is in fact nearing its end, then much of the credit can be claimed by two improbable allies: Mikhail Gorbachev and John Paul II.