The Subversive God

A census taken in Yugoslavia early this year showed that 84% of the people still believe in God after nine years of life under Communism. So reported a U.S. newsman from Belgrade last week. At a time of grave political and military defeats for the West, this figure marks a significant spiritual victory. Westerners who complain that they lack an "ideology" to oppose Communism overlook Christianity.

The Communists themselves are not overlooking it. Last week brought news from Communist countries of a strong new drive against the "subversive" forces of religion.

P:In Moscow, Pravda front-paged an editorial scolding the Communist Party, trade unions and youth organizations for shirking their duty of stamping out God. Children, Pravda complained, are especially vulnerable to these dangerous doctrines. The Literary Gazette complained that farmers in the province of Kirov had recently been allowed to abandon their fields for a three-day religious festival that was "only an excuse for drinking." And the trade-union paper, Trud, demanded that the government close down a spring near Moscow that has been attracting thousands (including even some Soviet bigwigs) to its "healing waters."

P:In Germany's Soviet zone, Communist mouthpieces took up the hue and cry against some East German Protestant clergymen who were too outspoken at the recent Kirchentag held by the Evangelical Church in Leipzig.

P:In Yugoslavia, Metropolitan Arsenije Bradvarevic, 71, of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro, was sentenced to 11 1/2; years of solitary confinement in prison. The indictment was not published, but the metropolitan's offenses were clear. He had boldly led the fight against a Communist-run front organization of fellow-traveling priests, and had refused to resign his post when the government ordered him to.

P:In Hungary, factory workers noticed that scrap metal delivered to them contained fragments of church bells.

P:In Prague, after a two-day trial, Czechoslovakia's supreme court sentenced Roman Catholic Bishop Stepan Trochta, 49, of Litomerice, to 25 years in prison for "spying" for the Vatican. At the same time three priests who were associated with him were sentenced to 20, 15 and seven years. As a leader of resistance against the Nazis and a known friend to Christians, Jews and Communists during years as a prisoner in Mauthausen and Dachau concentration camps, Trochta was long wooed by the Czech Communist regime, which hoped to turn him into a "progressive" bishop. Trochta himself had hoped to get along with the state by sticking strictly to "the things that are God's," found that under Communism, Caesar demands all things.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.