Summary

1.         In the beginning, the policy of the Com­munist governments was to maintain a clear and open persecution of Religion; for the Church there was no alternative: it had to react vigorously against them. During the course of dramatic incidents, the blood of the martyrs flowed abundant­ly, and Communism did not succeed in extinguishing the faith in the souls of the peoples subjected to it.

After a while, certain Communist governments began changing their tactics, inaugurating an era of limited tolerance, which opened up the possibility of a tenuous freedom of worship and speech for the Church ‑ a most tenuous freedom indeed because even where those limited concessions reached their limits the Church was still openly combated by the official ideological propaganda and spied upon by the police.