The Catholic Church and the Soviet Government in Soviet Occupied East Europe, 1939–1940

Abstract

The interplay between the Catholic Church and the Soviet authorities in Soviet occupied Poland during 1939–1940 offers a unique prism to understand the religious policy and the decision-making process of the Soviet Government. Before the war the Soviet Government had been quite hostile to the Catholic Church in the U.S.S.R. and had institutionally decimated it, leaving by 1939 only a few scattered churches and clerics and an Apostolic Administrator in Moscow, Leopold Braun, who was tolerated because he was also chaplain to the American embassy.1 The Soviets’ animosity rested upon a series of reasons. (1) The Communists believed, as Marxist-Leninists, that religion’s extirpation would advance the socialist revolution.2 This ideological factor, of course, must always be balanced by the pragmatic nature of Marxism Leninism which would permit tactical changes, including an alliance with religion, if such alterations would serve the interests of the Party. (2) The Bolsheviks inherited from the tsars a legacy which pegged Catholicism (especially in its Uniate form) as an historical foe of the Russian people.3 (3) The Soviets could not abide Catholicism because it preached a world view irreconcilable with their own. (4) Catholicism was an international movement competing with Communist internationalism. (5) It was a religion led by a foreign, independent authority — the Vatican — over which the Communists had no influence. (6) It was a source of nationalism for some major, national minorities in the U.S.S.R., including Poles, Volga Germans, Belorussians, and Ukrainians (after 1940 one would also include Lithuanians and Latvians), and thus it blocked not only these peoples’ ‘Sovietization’ but the totalitarian aspirations of the Soviet Government. Finally, the Church was identified — dating from the time of the revolution, the civil war, and the Russo-Polish war — with the internal and external enemies of the regime.KeywordsBaltic StateReligious LifeNational MinorityCatholic ChurchSoviet GovernmentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.