Word: communist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Alongside this long-range ecumenical battle, the Russian hierarchy last week held its first council since the Communist Revolution that was summoned for purposes other than to elect a new Patriarch. The four-day assembly was attended by 74 bearded bishops behind the fortress-like walls of the Trinity- St. Sergius Monastery in Zagorsk. Nearly 1,000 of the faithful stood for hours in the withering heat to catch a glimpse of the gathering holy men. With the church's head, Patriarch Pimen, 78, so ill from diabetes that he made only brief appearances at most of the millennial events...
...resolved the Russian Church's most bitter internal problem: control of local parishes. According to Orthodox canonical tradition, the priest is the head of his parish. In 1961, however, during the height of Nikita Khrushchev's antichurch campaign, the Orthodox hierarchy was forced to accept a ruling that gave Communist Party-approved lay delegates full control over each parish, making the priest a mere salaried functionary who presides at worship. In a major concession from the Gorbachev regime, the much hated regulation was revoked at last week's council. The new church charter also provides for regularly scheduled national-level...
Other analysts point out that Gorbachev vitally needs the support of his country's 50 million Orthodox Christians in order to succeed in his far- reaching reforms. The Russian Orthodox Church is the largest organized body in the Soviet Union, far exceeding the Communist Party in membership. Says one Western expert on the Soviet Union who attended the millennium: "This is a society facing social disintegration. They have a youth that is disaffected, an intolerable abortion rate and a serious alcohol and drug problem." Religious believers, points out this observer, "tend to be constructive members of society...
Erich Honecker, General Secretary of East Germany's Communist Party, also announced that his government would rebuild the Oranienburgerstrass e Synagogue, prewar Berlin's largest Jewish house of worship, which was ravaged by Nazi mobs during the Kristallnacht violence of 1938. The East German leader cautioned that his country might have to dole out the money in installments, since it lacked the hard currency to pay survivors all at once...
...student protesters massed at Yonsei University in downtown Seoul last week. Their goal: to accompany an unofficial 13-member delegation to the "truce village" of Panmunjom, 30 miles away, in the Demilitarized Zone. There a matching delegation of 13 from Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, the Communist North Korean capital, waited to hold "reunification talks...