The Bulgarian connection:

...This is not in the least surprising, for the Bulgarian police are ruthless and efficient...

...Dobranov had actually been consecrated by Pope John XXIII in 1959, but was rejected by the government as being too strong and uncompromising a personality...

...Her work has been published in America, Christian Century, Worldview, Our Sunday Visitor, and other journals...

...Though most prisoners were released by the early 1960s, brutality, now usually in the more subtle, hidden guise of pressure and intimidation, remained...

...Eugene Bossil-kov, had been executed after his trial back in 1952...

...As we have seen, there were things which no one would talk about...

...Besides this, Catholics have benefited from overall relaxation within their country since the late 1970s, from the confidence generated by their having a Slav pope who understands existence under a Communist regime, and from the modest religious revival which started spontaneously in all denominations in 1977, though particularly in the Pentecostal church...

...Anti-religious teaching in schools seemed effective...

...it regards them as mere tools of the Soviet Union...

...In Methodius Stratiev, the senior bishop, the church has an outstanding spiritual leader...

...With the position of Catholics only so recently ameliorated, and now possibly deteriorating again, the silence of the Vatican over the "Bulgarian Connection" is hardly surprising...

...there were still a fair number of elderly worshippers the State wasn't bothered about them but few others...

...Between 1948 and 1975 all relations between the Bulgarian government and the Vatican were cut, and it was only in 1975 that the Vatican was definitively informed that the much esteemed Bishop of Nikopolis, Msgr...

...they shared similar languages and scripts, and were both Orthodox in faith...

...To some extent the reason lies in the days before the Communist takeover...

...All teaching of the faith had to be done through sermons and services...

...Their subservience has brought material benefits to their people in the form of Soviet cash, making Bulgaria one of the more prosperous Eastern bloc countries...

...One result is that miraculous healings have been reported...

...Catholic visitors were appalled to find their priests and nuns, old and almost destitute, living in makeshift accommodations such as bell-towers, sacristies, church choirs and shacks...

...Msgr...

...Subsequently the gratitude of ordinary Bulgarians quickly evaporated in horror and disillusionment as they experienced excesses as bad as any in Eastern Europe and realized that they had lost the independence gained in 1908...

...Well-restored historic churches, church choral singing for which Bulgaria is renowned and the ritual of Orthodox services are all powerful tools of evangelism...

...That it didn't is a tribute to its caliber and explains the high regard in which it is held by the Vatican...

...A Pentecostalist church was demolished...

...An unexpected result of this was that during Vatican II the notably hard-line regime actually allowed one bishop to attend each session...

...To Bulgarians their church is an integral part of their national history and culture...

...There are also about 10,000 Eastern rite Catholics, descendants of former Orthodox who, in 1860, left that church in protest at Greek domination of it...

...they are even planted in church congregations...

...The government thought it would...

...Compared to five centuries, three decades of Communist rule and atheist pressure is a short time, and religion is proving more resilient than the regime expected...

...Neither would they accept gifts of money or of religious literature, even though it was desperately needed...

...Their clergy were so well educated and of such a high caliber that not one subsequently renounced his vocation under Communist pressure...

...Despite the fact that Bulgaria was the first Warsaw Pact country to open its doors to Western tourism as long ago as 1969 Christians still suffered from an isolation more complete than that of any other Iron Curtain country Albania always excepted...

...On the positive side, their experience under Turkish rule had made Bulgarian Christians a resourceful and tenacious people, able to bend before the storm but also bide their time...

...Furthermore, no Eastern bloc state is more closely tied to the USSR, or a more reliable ally...

...When the Communists first came to power the leader of the Orthodox Church was spared, for Archbishop Stefan was a man of outstanding spiritual, moral, and intellectual caliber, well-known internationally...

...Although the seminary is not being reopened, two young men are studying in Rome...

...A handful of pilgrims were allowed to attend the 1981 Bulgarian celebrations in Rome and the Lourdes Eucharistic Congress...

...Negatively, Christians in Bulgaria during that period were automatically second-class citizens and their religion came to be more a matter of national feeling than personal commitment...

...Though Stefan died in 1957, he still has his dedicated followers today, including two monks who defected while on a visit to Britain in 1978...

...Church life seemed to be stagnating...

...all presbyteries had been confiscated...

...Teaching religion to minors is banned, but Catholic clergy use carefully devised question-and-answer sessions...

...He promoted intercommunion and friendship between the Catholics of different rites today priests minister to Catholics of either rite...

...They were the outcome of missionaries sent in the nineteenth century, who resuscitated a church all but obliterated after a rising against the Turks in 1688...

...The Vatican seems to bear the regime no animosity...

...The excellent Orthodox bratrstva were banned...

...If the State made use of the churches, for instance in allowing "favored" clergy abroad to attend Peace Conferences to promote Soviet policy, Christians have also shown themselves capable of using such openings...

...Western Christians found it almost impossible to establish contact with them...

...Meanwhile Pope John Paul is not prepared to say anything which could in any way jeopardize this heroic little church...

...The churches too have been very astute in taking full advantage of every anniversary of the major events of Bulgarian history...

...There was no seminary, no Catholic press, no literature...

...Thus when at the end of the Second World War, Russian troops helped local revolutionary forces to seize power and set up a Communist regime, they didn't have to face the same opposition they met elsewhere...

...They have benefited from the training given to young priests and are surprisingly well-informed...

...After the overthrow of the Turks, Catholics had made a social, cultural, and educational contribution out of all proportion to their numbers...

...The Vatican has no illusions about Bulgaria...

...The future John XXIII also promoted close relations with the Orthodox, and won such esteem and affection that Bulgarians still call him the "Bulgarian Pope...

...Congregations were mostly elderly and poor peasants, with few young people except in the traditionally Catholic villages around Plovdiv...

...Priests do not have to have a civil license so they are less likely to be dismissed from their parishes than those in the USSR...

...This is one of the reasons why there has been no organized movements for human rights or religious JANICE A. BROUN is a free-lance writer currently doing research on the religions of Eastern Europe...

...To understand the religious situation is impossible without reference to Bulgaria's five centuries under Turkish rule...

...Also, between 1925 and 1934 the nuncio in Sofia was none other than Angelo Roncalli...

...discrimination against, and pressures on, church-going professional people could be intolerable...

...According to State estimates the poverty-stricken, isolated Catholic church should have died out...

...They also had voluntary parish groups, men and women who cleaned the churches, sang in the choir, went on outings with the priest and even helped him train some members as lay preachers...

...There are seventy nuns, few but of excellent quality, and they include a handful of young vocations...

...After interrogation he returned home in great distress and died the next day...

...The regime has found him tougher than they reckoned after fourteen years in prison camps...

...freedom to cause the government concern or attract unwelcome attention in Western media, though a more compelling reason is the security police's tight control, exercised through intense surveillance and the memory of past terror...

...Few of those who survived talk of their experiences...

...now only those paid to do it are allowed to clean churches or sing in the choir...

...Dissent surfaced only very briefly in 1978 with one solitary human rights manifesto...

...Most tourists were only interested in the golden Black Sea beaches...

...There were show trials...

...DESPITE THIS depressing picture there were positive aspects of church life too...

...HOW CHRISTIANITY SURVIVES The Bulgarian connection JANICE A. BROUN As THE COMPLEXITIES of the "Bulgarian Connection" were explored, one of the least challenged hypotheses was that the Bulgarian Secret Service might be utilized by the USSR to provide cover for its own involvement in the attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II...

...The ban on instructing minors was reiterated, and significantly it was the Catholic bishops who were specifically told to make their priests stop it...

...Thousands of Christians, including over three hundred Orthodox priests and most of the two hundred Catholic ones, except foreign nationals, were imprisoned, mostly on Belen Island...

...Negotiations on statutes for the two churches are taking place, Sofia-Plovdiv was given the official status of diocese and a new bishop, Msgr...

...Visitors report a heartening growth of confidence and openness among Catholics, now less cautious...

...Last year the government, responding to the religious revival, began to clamp down again...

...These groups, known as "Bratrstva," would be impossible in a Russian Orthodox parish...

...TWO FURTHER FACTORS need to be borne in mind in order to understand Bulgarian Christianity today Communist brutality, and extreme isolation...

...After intensive brain-washing all but one of fifteen leading Protestants "confessed" to espionage, and two Catholic nuns "confessed" to having had drunken orgies with men in their convent...

...Kokov's excellent translation of the reformed services into the vernacular is followed intently (as are the excellent sermons) by a laity which has been outstanding in its dedication and faithfulness...

...55-year-old Vasco Seirekov for Nikopolis, and, very surprisingly and belatedly, Bogdan Dobranov for Sofia-Plovdiv...

...Hardly any of the fifty surviving priests were under fifty years old...

...Nevertheless, to account for its silence over the whole affair, we have to look at the overall religious situation there, and then focus more closely on the particular situation of the small Catholic community...

...However in 1948, when he made it quite clear that there were certain areas in which the church could not compromise and demanded a national plebiscite of the whole people on the question of their rights and freedoms, he was "retired" and replaced by a more flexible leader...

...The Orthodox seem to be under greater pressure not to have contacts with other Christians...

...Msgr...

...Without even bothering to consult his church office in Sofia, Zhidkov assented to Pope John Paul's two candidates for the episcopate...

...In 1978, for instance Bulgarian emigre Georgi Markov, a BBC broadcaster and satirist living in London, died after a jab from a poisoned umbrella...

...Under Communist pressure religious observance dropped more drastically than anywhere else...

...The presence of ancient churches and monasteries still provides a visual reminder of the stormy past, when priests and monks were instrumental in keeping the nation as well as the Christian faith alive...

...Samuel Dzhundrin (previously sentenced to twelve years as a French spy after his return from France) replaced the beloved Vasco Seirekov, who died after two years of unsparing and heroic itinerant pastoral work...

...How was it that the Catholic church survived...

...those who were Christians could find little to arouse enthusiasm...

...When a German newspaper printed a photograph of Bishop Simeon Kokov's episcopal "palace," one room with no running water, divided by a curtain, the government was furious...

...In 1975 Zhidkov's attitude was probably that Catholics, being a mere one percent of the population, were insignificant...

...Yet, relatively speaking, Catholics had maintained their numbers far better than the much larger Orthodox church or the smaller Protestant ones...

...By 1974 there were no Western-rite bishops, only Methodius Stratiev, Exarch for the 10,000 Eastern rite Catholics...

...Bulgaria is riddled with informers...

...The church as a whole could have retreated into a ghetto and died a slow death...

...The Bulgarian government follows the Soviet regime closely in the field of legislation on religion, but there were a few loopholes, and the Orthodox church has made good use of them...

...As recently as 1975 the aged Capuchin Father Bogdan Giev got into trouble over this...

...This applies not only to the majority Orthodox Church, to which about three-quarters of their nine million people nominally belonged in 1946, but also to its next largest Christian community, the 70,000 or so Catholics...

...This had positive and negative results...

...Although later and to a smaller degree than in other Eastern bloc countries, young people have been showing an increasing interest in Christianity, and Catholics show an ecumenical spirit...

...In the nineteenth century, during Bulgaria's struggle for independence from Turkish rule, it was to Russia that its citizens turned for help...

...The reasons for this are largely historical...

...FOLLOWING THE reestablishment of relations, and the frank discussions between the pope and the regime's representatives in 1978, the church has won some, admittedly very limited, concessions...

...The government reacted by sentencing five leading Pentecostalist evangelists to terms of up to four years in 1979, on charges of currency irregularities, but all are now free...

...Catholics therefore are not an alien minority, but loyal Bulgarian citizens, as the pope emphasized during his private talks with foreign minister Peter Mladenov in 1978...

...Their leaders, however, have maintained a close, loyal relationship with the Soviet Union, and co-operation in a "security operation" would entail no ministerial discussions, but merely a direct order from Moscow...

...Active Christians, Protestants in particular, are again underpressure...

...The 1300th anniversary of the nation was due in 1981, so in 1975 the Prime Minister, Todor Zhidkov paid an unexpected visit to Rome to request access to the Vatican's invaluable Bulgarian archives...

...It was too risky...

...As for literature, no Bibles were printed there between 1925 and 1982 when the first of 30,000 Bibles promised for Orthodox parishes appeared...

...It was such an apparently fortuitous event which enabled the Vatican to reopen negotiations with the regime and demand fairer treatment for Bulgarian Catholics...