Communism's War on Religion

...In the Decalogue of the Soviet system, the First Commandment reads: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me...

...In every country where they rule, the Communists have been able to recruit priests and ministers for their "national churches," their associations of "progressive Catholics," their "Union of Orthodox Priests...

...Those who dared sign this protest were, of course, promptly arrested, including Bishop Augustin Pacha, who was condemned to a forcedlabor camp at the age of 80...

...Shuster devotes several restrained pages to Professor Barth's equivocal role in the struggle of the Hungarian Protestant community, but the reader who has absorbed the catalogue of merciless fact in this book will not be so forbearing...

...Safe and snug in Switzerland, he spreads abroad a peculiar personal brand of Christianity which undermines the will to resist of his co-religionists behind the Iron Curtain and abets neutralists in their equating of Soviet tyranny with the alleged materialism of the West...

...But by no means all the clergy in the satellite states have risen to the nobility of open opposition in behalf of their faith...

...However, what is one to say of a Christian spokesman like Professor Karl Barth...

...Reviewed by Richard Hanser Documentary film writer, critic and translator This painstaking survey of what is currently happening to religion in the Soviet sphere begins with the words: "This is not a pleasant book...

...Religion Behind the Iron Curtain is a document comparable with anything ever presented at Nuremberg as a record of calculated atrocity raised to the level of state policy...

...Shuster wisely admonishes the reader to pause in his condemnation of the clerical Quislings and ask himself how he would act under Communist physical and moral pressures...

...From this basic blasphemy all the subsidiary horrors follow as a matter of course...

...In Czechoslovakia, many members of the hierarchy have cast their lot with the Red regime even in the face of excommunication...

...It is, in fact, an appalling one...

...On the basis of authenticated documents, of reports by eye-witness refugees, and of the laws, pronouncements and actions of the Communists themselves, Religion Behind the Iron Curtain covers comprehensively a story which the daily press reports only in driblets...

...Internecine strife is being fostered, the country is in tears over rampant injustice, and a wound gapes which cannot be healed over except by doing away with laws and measures which have struck and are now striking at the Catholic Church in the Rumanian People's Republic...

...What it leads to in practice is expressed in the agonized protest of the Rumanian bishops, which mirrors the ordeal of all religions in all countries behind the Iron Curtain: "Millions of citizens have been deliberately wounded in the innermost core of their human feeling by the very authority to which there has been entrusted, in the presence of the nation and the whole world, the defense of the interests of the people...

...We are by now calloused to the idea of physical torture inflicted at the whim of the commissar...

...In Poland, one priest in twenty is estimated to have done likewise...

...That in this case the target is not man's body, but his soul, makes the record an even more compelling appeal to the conscience of the twentieth century...

...In recording these disheartening facts, Dr...

...But here we are confronted with the ultimate violation of the human personality: invasion by the state of the secret places of the heart...

...Thought police" and "brainwashing" have largely lost their capacity to shock...