MOSCOW (CNS): Among the 69 religious groups working in Russia, the Roman Catholic Church poses the most serious threat to national security, according to a Moscow newspaper’s published excerpts of an internal government report.
The December 5 story in the Moscow daily Gazeta attracted intense local media interest and sparked a quick reply from the country’s leading Catholic bishop to the report that ranked Catholics as more dangerous than Satanists.
“If this is true, then I am in shock,” Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz of Moscow, who is chairman of the Russian bishops’ conference, said in a written statement released that evening.
“How can a civilised society consider as an extremist organisation a Church which has 2000 years of history, makes every effort to stamp out conflict and fights terrorism? It is inconceivable.”
Although not officially acknowledged by the Russian Ministry of Nationalities and Migration, for whom it was reportedly prepared, the 15-page document “is real”, said Church historian Yakov Krotov, who is familiar with it and believes analysts with the FSB, Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, had a strong say in its drafting.
