Word: eastern
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...climate, the revival of Polish Catholicity will be exciting to all believers. The Pope has told people in effect, that they should be dissidents." And if the Pope's ecumenical thrust toward Orthodoxy succeeds, "it could bring the fire of Poland into the Russian heartland. The other governments in Eastern Europe will try to do everything to isolate their people from the events in Poland, but who can now predict what will happen...
...Catholic population is small in four other nations: heavily Lutheran East Germany (whose Christian daily ran a front-page story on the papal tour); Rumania, where Eastern-rite Catholics were forced into the Orthodox Church in 1948 by the Communist regime; Bulgaria, which now has a full complement of Catholic bishops for the first time in 35 years; and xenophobic Albania, which claims to have exterminated all religion...
...evolving situation in Eastern Europe is influenced not only by the Pope's commanding personality and the religious fervor of his Polish people, but by the nature of the current struggle between Marxism and religion. Marx originally objected to religion in the belief that it encouraged men to ignore human suffering in the present in hopes of future spiritual salvation. He predicted that the forces of economic history would grind religion into oblivion. Then, somewhat perversely, his own theory became a secular faith. Before long it was actively contributing to human suffering, while encouraging men to endure the pain...
...June 1976, at a congress of Eastern and Western European Communist parties in East Berlin, leaders of the three parties flaunted their differences with the Soviet model of socialism, as Leonid Brezhnev stonily looked...
...Marchais' French Communist Party, about 700,000 strong, is still ostracized in what French politicians call le ghetto, outside the mainstream of national politics. Increasingly it has reverted to more traditional hard-line postures: it has vehemently opposed the Common Market, revived its loyalty to the Soviet and Eastern European parties, and cracked down on dissent within the party itself...