Unholy Alliance

Pope Pius XII last week challenged the unholy alliance between Atheist Joseph Stalin and his tame churchman, the Patriarch Alexei of Moscow, head of the Orthodox Church in Russia. The Pope charged that Russia was ruthlessly stamping out Roman Catholicism in Ruthenia, implied that Alexei was Stalin's eager catspaw.

In a 10,000-word encyclical devoted wholly to the situation in Ruthenia, a Czechoslovak province ceded to Russia last June, the Pope asked: "Who doesn't know that Patriarch Alexei, recently elected by the dissident Russian bishops, directed a letter to-the Ruthenian Church, which wants nothing to do with the dissidents, in which he openly preached desertion from the Catholic Church?"

The Ruthenian persecution was important in itself, and also as an example of Stalin's use of the Orthodox Church to further Communism's Pan-Slavic program in southeastern Europe. But the Pope's encyclical highlighted an even more important global aspect of the Stalin-Alexei alliance, which had recently reached imperiously into the U.S. Last month the Russian Orthodox hierarchy of the U.S. and Canada, who cut loose from Moscow in 1917, met in Chicago. They heard the Patriarch Alexei's delegate demand submission to Moscow. In pious language, they told him to peddle his Moscovite peanuts elsewhere. Metropolitan Theophilus of San Francisco, a stout believer in freedom for conscience and for God's church, told Alexei to repeal his Ukase 94 of last February. Key section of that ukase: Orthodox Churchmen in North and South America must "abstain from all political activity against the U.S.S.R."

Alexei's other activities in behalf of Holy Communist Russia include close contacts through the Middle East. Last summer he made a state visit to his fellow Patriarchs of Alexandria, Jerusalem and Antioch. Thus Stalin, who is already playing footie with the Muslems of the Middle East, has also got a means of influencing the Levantine Orthodox Christians.

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