Source: The News-Sentinel/McClatchy-Tribune News Service
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/news/editorial/17258324.htm
The following editorial appeared in the Dallas Morning News on Friday, May 18:
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We live in a time of global change so rapid that it's often difficult to savor the astonishing nature of particular events. Thursday in Moscow, something amazing happened, something few 20th-century people could ever have dreamed they'd live to see. And something that gives hope to the people of the 21st.
In 1931, Joseph Stalin demolished the vast Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Thursday, inside the rebuilt cathedral, which rose again after the fall of Soviet communism, Russian President Vladimir Putin kissed an icon and celebrated the formal reunification of the Russian Orthodox church with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, the overseas branch that broke away after the Bolsheviks yoked the church.
The resurrection of Christianity after seven decades of savage persecution and police-state atheism is one of the most remarkable fruits of Russia's post-Soviet freedom. Though the number of practicing Christians is relatively small, the legacy of 70 years of oppression and martyrdom, an estimated 80 percent of Russians identify at least culturally with Christianity. Skeptics wonder whether Putin's professed Orthodox Christianity is real or merely a politically useful pose to gain more power. Whatever the truth, Russian society is in deep trouble and much in need of a new start.
The death rate is shockingly high, especially for men; the birth rate is far below replacement levels; and the abortion rate is one of the world's highest. Alcoholism, heavy smoking, AIDS and a staggering level of violence (the murder rate is 20 times as high as Western Europe's) are turning Russia into a land of the dead.