Religion: Holy Russia

If Karl Marx was right in calling religion the opium of the people, the air over Moscow must have been blue with fumes last week:

> Dr. Cyril Forster Garbett, Archbishop of York, who is on a visit to Patriarch Sergei of the Russian Orthodox Church, declared that there is complete freedom of worship in Russia, that the Soviet Government has stopped all antireligious propaganda. Said the Archbishop: “Stalin, being a great statesman, has recognized the power of religion.”

> To listeners in Germany the Moscow radio beamed speeches by German clergymen, Catholic and Protestant. Many of the speakers were said to be captured German army chaplains. They praised Moscow’s National Committee for a Free Germany (TIME, Aug. 30), told how the Russians allow them to practice their religion in the prison camps, urged listeners in Germany to pray for peace, work against the Nazis.

> A German clergyman, whom the Russians call Josef Kaiser, read prayers in German every morning through the Moscow microphone.

> Orthodox priests appeared on the street in their black cassocks for the first time since the Bolshevik revolution. Astonished children trotted along beside them, asked who they were.