Word: freedom
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...many things to think about. Take our congregation: we have very little, so we have nothing to be preoccupied with. The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have, the more free you are. Poverty for us is a freedom. It is not a mortification, a penance. It is joyful freedom. There is no television here, no this, no that. This is the only fan in the whole house. It doesn't matter how hot it is, and it is for the guests. But we are perfectly happy...
...have just seen the most celebrated toppling of a wall since Joshua took Jericho. More than any other event, it symbolizes the rebirth of freedom in Eastern Europe. The amazing political changes in what used to be called the Soviet bloc raise questions about changes yet to come. Hasn't an economic barrier also fallen? Don't new opportunities beckon? Shouldn't Western business pioneers be packing their suitcases...
...Marxism seemed to have the upper hand over the soldiers of the Cross. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Lenin had pledged toleration but delivered terror. "Russia turned crimson with the blood of martyrs," says Father Gleb Yakunin, Russian Orthodoxy's bravest agitator for religious freedom. In the Bolsheviks' first five years in power, 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were cut down by the red sickle. Stalin greatly accelerated the terror, and by the end of Khrushchev's rule, liquidations of clergy reached an estimated 50,000. After World War II, fierce but generally less bloody...
...moment will be electric, and not only because John Paul helped inflame the fervor for freedom in his Polish homeland that has swept like brush fire across Eastern Europe. Beyond that, the meeting of the two men symbolizes the end of the 20th century's most dramatic spiritual war, a conflict in which the seemingly irresistible force of Communism battered against the immovable object of Christianity...
...battle for religious freedom is not yet won. The Supreme Soviet has still not taken up a long-anticipated revision of the repressive religious statute instituted by Stalin in 1929. There is no certainty whether, or when, parliament will scrap the hated law, which subjects all church activities to Communist control and forbids parish education. Nor, given the history of the U.S.S.R., is there certainty that rights proclaimed in speeches and laws will be honored by bureaucrats...