Religion Within the Iron Curtain
| Autor: | Clarence A. Manning |
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| Rok vydání: | 1950 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 271:112-121 |
| ISSN: | 1552-3349 0002-7162 |
| Popis: | AN analysis of the religious situation within the Iron Curtain, as of many other aspects of Soviet life, is more complicated by problems of interpretation than by disputes over facts. This may seem a surprising statement in view of the efforts of the censorship and the interference with communications. The general outline is clear, but the reasons for events are sometimes almost unintelligible to a person of the West. The Soviet ideology, based on a fusion of atheistic international Communism and the Muscovite-Great Russian tradition, employs terms in a manner that is completely alien to people who accept life and the definitions of words as they have been developed in America and western Europe for centuries. Religious freedom and obedience to the law, like all other terms, have been modified, and much of the western confusion is due to this fact and an unwillingness to face the realities of things as the Soviets announce them. To appreciate the religious situation within the Iron Curtain today, we must look at the picture offered before World War II in eastern Europe. At that time the bulk of the population of Latvia and Estonia was Lutheran. Eastern Germany was predominantly Protestant, and in both Czechoslovakia and Hungary there were large Protestant minorities which had existed since the time of the Reformation. In the other countries, Protestantism played a minor role and was largely the result of the labors of foreign and domestic missionaries. The dominating religion of the people of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Serbs of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Rumania, was Orthodox. Among the Croats and the Slovenes and in Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, and in parts of Rumania, the Roman Catholic was the prevailing faith. Among the Ukrainians (Ruthenians) of Eastern Galicia and the Carpathian regions and among the Transylvanians of Rumania, the population was largely Catholic of the Byzantine Rite. Throughout the area there were large settlements of Jews, and in various parts of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria there were millions of Mohammedans and a small number of Buddhists and Lamaists, although these were almost negligible. The fate of each group has varied according to the emphasis laid upon Communist or Russian influences in the Soviet Union. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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