Pope-Putin visit: Is church détente in the works?

John Paul’s popularity was huge in his native Poland, and Catholicism persisted despite the officially Marxist regime in power. Some historians, in fact, consider John Paul II to have played an instrumental role in eroding Soviet influence in Eastern Europe and ultimately, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Notwithstanding Stalin’s sentiments (“The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” he famously was quoted by Winston Churchill as saying), the KGB was intensely wary of the power of the Catholic Church and its doctrines, as a challenge to Marxism-Leninism. As prize-winning journalist and historian Anne Applebaum wrote in 2005: Under communism, “no one was allowed to own a private business, in other words, and no one was allowed to express belief in any philosophy besides Marxism. The church, first in Poland and then elsewhere, broke these two monopolies, offering people a safe place to meet and intellectually offering them an alternative way of thinking about the world.”