Dear all (and @ratio1 specifically – the words I have for your bewildering naiveté and prideful contempt for a faithful cardinal of the Church who actually has first-hand experience of the terror imposed on Chinese Catholics have no place on this forum), as someone whose country suffered under a Communist dictatorship for 41 years, I feel I might be justified in giving you first-hand experience of what this means for the Church in such a country and why, to someone like me, the Pope’s arrangement seems like nonsense on stilts.
In my country, a priest needed explicit permission from the state to perform his duties. When one’s loyalty to the Church conflicted with the demands of the state, one ran a great risk of having this permission revoked – and indeed, this is what happened hundreds of priests who were then often forced to work in manual labor, sweeping the streets, pulling rubber in tire factories etc. The current Primate of my country was jailed for eight years. And that was not even that bad – the priests old enough to cross the state in the dreadful fifties often found themselves deep in uranium mines working themselves to death. And on the other hand, if the state
wanted its confident to be consecrated, its wishes were usually granted, since denying them, or making too much noise in the Vatican, would only mean more persecution, forced expulsion of seminarians etc.
On the surface, everything looked dandy – both the Vatican and the State got a say as far as Bishops were concerned, but when it came to priests, the state ruled supreme. My grandparents were a part of a network of faithful Catholics who kept themselves informed about where it was safe to go to Confession – because in the unsafe churches, the state-serving clerics
routinely broke the Seal of the Confessional and reported to the secret police.
There was a group of state-sponsored clerics known as
Pacem in Terris. Pay note to the sweet words they used to describe themselves.
Peace in the World.
Friendship between nations. But in reality, this devil-spawn sought to gain ever more control of the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia, undermine its authority and control the clergy through threats. They controlled the Catholic charity organisation. They censured Catholic journalism and literature through control of the single sanctioned Catholic newspaper and all publishing houses. They were a puppet of the regime, shown to the world as proof that there was no religious persecution going on. The UN
praised them and granted them the title of the UN Messenger of Peace – this was achieved through backstage machinations with hope that this would encourage the faithful to trust PiT more, but the only effect this had was that in eyes of Czechoslovak Catholics, the reputation of the UN plummeted to a record low.
And guess what? This monstrosity started losing power only after JPII became pope and started taking measures against the Communists. Our beloved Pope
Saint John Paul II who, hailing from Communist Poland,
actually knew what he was doing.
www.crisismagazine.com
