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`Aspects of the communist experience are still affecting the lives of the people of Central and Eastern Europe.' Philip Walters suggests that these aspects should be examined in order to avoid mistakes and misunderstandings as the people in Europe try to forge the way to greater unity.
Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are home to a wide variety of religious denominations. In communist times these were at best tolerated (East Germany), at worst, forbidden any visible existence (Albania). In all communist countries, whatever the severity of the regime, the Churches and other religious organisations, by their very nature, represented a symbolic alternative to the official ideological system. As such their role in communist times was a unique one in that even if they had little opportunity to work or witness in society they were frequently an institutional focus for opposition and the source of a vocabulary of dissent. In one communist country, Poland, the Roman Catholic Church had greater legitimacy than the State.
In the ten years since the end of communism the new environment for the Churches has meant that they now increasingly resemble their counterparts in Western Europe. They are all now minority bodies in a pluralist and increasingly secular world - even the Catholic Church in Poland, which in the 1980s saw itself as synonymous with Polish identity. They have had to lose the sense of uniqueness they had under communism. At the same time they have been able to involve themselves in all the areas of public life in which Churches are normally involved in the West.
And yet, there are aspects of the communist experience which are still affecting the lives of the people of Central and Eastern Europe, and of the Churches of which they are members, and which are worth examining in order that misunderstandings and mistakes may be avoided as Europe continues to aspire towards greater unity.
Expectations
`It's easy enough to turn an aquarium into fish soup', said a Polish sociologist, surveying her society as communism collapsed, `but it is a different matter turning it back again.' At that time the Churches were widely seen as the only source of energy and expertise for social and moral regeneration, and they...