NUNS SENT TO PRISON.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 27 December 1924, Page 3

NUNS SENT TO PRISON.

PERSECUTION_OF CHRISTIANS. METHODS OF THE SOVIET (By Capt Francis McCullough, in the Daily Mail:) The Soviet’s attitude towards the (ffiurch varies, just .at the attitude of R ol f a n Emperors varied. Sometimes the Reds make mad, frontal attacks on the Church, as they did 18 months ago. But they are much more dangerous when they promote dissension inside the Church, as they are doing npw, and quietly effect the arrest of ministers of religion without causing any open scandal. \

such ministers of religion—all of them Russian clergyfheh—were arrested during the last month. Lenin himself, when asked in 1918 what sort of Government exactly had come into existance, replied with his usual grim humour ..with ,a. metaphor drawn, appropriately enough, from a volcanic eruption. '“Untill the explosions cease,” he said, “and the smoke clears away we cannot tell into what shape precisely the ground has hardened. ’ ‘

Applying this metaphor to Lenin’s ecclesiastical policy, I should say that as in a. volcanic eruption there ‘is one thing always constant amid superficial changes in the shape of the cone —the unquenchable fires in the heart of the crater—so, despite all superficial changes mto the Bolshevist policy towards the Church, there is one factor that never alters, and that is the intense hostility in the heart of the Beds for every form of Christianity. DIABOLICAL HOSTILITY.

So diabolical is that hostility, and so sharp is the antithesis between Christ’s Lrospel of love and Lenin’s gospel of hate, that one is sometimes tempted to recognise in Bolshevism the Veritable antichrist of revelation.

... IhWs of a State, as dictated by Bolshevist policy, inevitably come into conflict with the Christian law. Persecution is a natural correlative of a Go vei mnent formed on the Marxist plan. In these articles I have refrained purposely from detailing the horrors I could have detailed, of telling how Mgr. Budkiewicz was brutally murdered in a cellar under circumstances carefully calculated to make him a martyr, die in an undignified manner, without a prayer on his lips. ■! '

I might have told how a convent of Dominican nuns was broken up. Those nuns led the lives of saints. They did invaluable work tending the sick and the poor and teaching the young, while sleeping themselves oil bare boards and living on bread and water. They were a shining light in the darkness of Moscow. Every one of them is now in prison, the Mother Superior-being/in In Pl'ison of all, the prison of the Ugpu in the Lubyanka, where I myself spent once three terrible days. COOL MENDACITY. . ‘Six months ago Eakovski declared m this country that none of the nuns had ever been arrested. Again that cool, insolent mendacity which I have already described as the hall-mark of Bolshevism*! The foreign represent-atu-es in Moscow know that lie lied, lhey know that those nuns are in prison still. But God alone knows what their fate is. One of the Catholic priests condemn, ed at the Cieplak trial lost his reason for a time. A Russian girl who was arrested last year in Moscow was, after six months’ imprisonment, transferred : to a lunatic asylum, for her mind had hopelessly given way.

But I purposely avoid dwelling on these horrors, for they are only details like the murder of oyer a thousand priests, the seizure of everv altar vessel on the false pretext that it was wanted for famine relief purposes, the stopping of the supply of clergy to the 'Church by the closing of the seminaries (the

Roman Catholic seminary in Petrograd has been converted into a “university” where Red Estonians are taught the principles of revolution) and the stopping of the’ supply of laymen to the Church by the operation of the law prohibiting religious instruction. All these details become dwarfed almost into insignificance bv the grandeur of the diabolical scheme wherein they are framed—the scheme for overthrowing Christianity and erecting here on earth the very gates of hell.