The Catholics are going to cope and see the even more about how they totally are super conservative again. The Ku Klux Klan was ultimately right about the Catholic Church undermining nations. The Catholic menace is a real thing. He's a friendly reminder that the Orthodox Church we condemned absolutely every single person who ever even remotely entertained the ideas of Communists. The Catholics, on the other hand, embraced it through liberation theology.
Yes yes, the turbobased Orthodox, totally not known for being the absolute bitches of whichever state happened to be lording it over them dating back to the Byzantine Emperors.
So formidably anti-Communist that they literally issued a declaration of unconditional loyalty to the Soviet Union to avoid getting buckbroken any harder by Stalin instead of accepting a martyr's crown.
We need to show, not in words but in deeds, that not only those who are indifferent to Orthodox Christianity, not only those who have betrayed it, but also its most zealous adherents, for whom it is dear as truth and life, with all its dogmas and traditions, with all its canonical and liturgical structure, can be faithful citizens of the Soviet Union, loyal to the Soviet government. We want to be Orthodox and at the same time recognize the Soviet Union as our civil motherland, whose joys and successes are our joys and successes and whose failures are our failures. Any blow directed at the Union, be it a war, a boycott, some kind of social disaster, or just a murder from around the corner, like the Warsaw one, is recognized by us as a blow directed at us.
And who, under the Tsars, went almost 200 years without a Patriarch because Peter the Great said so, instead being led by a
'Most Holy' Synod and a secular
Ober-Procurator (both appointed by the Tsars in what must've been the closest Orthobro approximation to Anglicanism), and even being required to break the seal of confession to report seditious activity to their secular overlords. Ironic that the first time the Orthodox Church in Russia got to break free from such overbearing state control and get its own Patriarch again, was when the last Tsar was overthrown and the Communist persecutions were right around the corner.
Meanwhile the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople also went along with Ottoman rule and bowed to the Sultans with hardly a complaint for nearly 500 years in exchange for authority over basically all Orthodox subjects within that Islamic empire via the
millet system. No doubt they would've sold out to the Catholics too, considering the entire existence of the Council of Florence, had the Crusade of Varna actually worked instead of being stomped by the Turks who
did eventually gain their allegiance instead. The various Balkan kingdoms' churches were also basically extensions of their governments and governing ideologies (the Serbian Orthodox Church, for instance, were extremely supportive of WW1 and the Yugoslavist ideal, even sending out ideologue clerics like
Nikolaj Velimirovic to broadcast such messages as far as the USA).
Say what you will about the Caths, at least the Catholic Church
tries to not be the bitch of various worldly powers throughout history. In the same timeframe as all of the above, even after losing the Papal State and Rome itself to the secular Italian Kingdom,
the Popes preferred to jump into an emo phase and refused to bow to their conqueror for decades, until eventually Mussolini made a concession and acknowledged the Vatican as its own country rather than a direct subject of the Italian state. And while liberation theology is a problem, at least it's one the Catholic authorities eventually recognized as such and pushed back against under JPII and Benedict (who in fact was one of JPII's enforcers against that Marxism-in-a-cassock charade back when he was Cardinal Ratzinger & head of the Inquisition). Meanwhile way too fucking many Orthodox priests sold out to the commies before the Iron Curtain fell and it wasn't just in Russia either, ex.
something like 80% of Romanian priests were informants for the Securitate and
11 out of 15 members of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church's own Holy Synod were literal secret police agents).
(As a matter of fact I actually do like quite a few aspects of Orthodoxy and Orthodox history - certainly the moments where they
aren't buckbroken thralls of their respective states - but come the fuck on, posts like this are straight up lobbing boulders from a glass house.)