This article from the NYT Tuesday issue, November 11, 2012, makes me just shake my head and wonder if the Church, any church, ever learns from the past. I think like us, they tend to believe that what has happened will not happen again. It’s an old idea, God warns us throughout the OT about Kings and their problems but finally relents to the Jews plea for a King because are too silly to get along without them.. and so still in Europe they exist and in some cases like the UK highly applauded. But in this case it is only 100 years ago that the Russian Tsar and the Orthodox Church became too closely aligned and both fell. The Church not to lose faith in such an unholy alliance pursued Lenin and then of course their own dropout Stalin — both rejected it. Then I think somewhere with Kruschev or Breshnev the Church started to come back, albeit tentatively.. with the fall of the curtain the church started to openly retake lost ground but so did other Christian Churches namely the Methodist and Mormons. I guess to counter that the Church fell into this black hole — one can only pray it ends better this time. There are really a lot of souls at stake.
In my anguish... 