User talk:SouthWriter/sandbox/An atheist's objections/@comment-1493085-20100707010901

Stalin killed people for many reasons, such as the polish prisoners or war in what is known as the Katyn massacre.

Also if I may quote Wikipedia, "Stalin had a complex relationship with religious institutions in the Soviet Union. One story reports that while he studied at a seminary, he became a closet atheist. However, this story fails on several obvious accounts, including Stalin's remaining religious, even pious, for some years longer. One account states that Stalin's reversal on bans against the church during World War II followed a sign that he believed he received from heaven.

Historian Edvard Radzinsky used recently discovered secret archives and noted a story that changed Stalin's attitude toward religion. The story in which Ilya, Metropolitan of the Lebanon Mountains, claimed to receive a sign from heaven that "The churches and monasteries must be reopened throughout the country. Priests must be brought back from imprisonment, Leningrad must not be surrendered, but the sacred icon of Our Lady of Kazan should be carried around the city boundary, taken on to Moscow, where a service should be held, and thence to Stalingrad Tsaritsyn." Shortly thereafter, Stalin's attitude changed and "Whatever the reason, after his mysterious retreat, he began making his peace with God. Something happened which no historian has yet written about. On his orders many priests were brought back to the camps. In Leningrad, besieged by the Germans and gradually dying of hunger, the inhabitants were astounded, and uplifted, to see wonder-working icon Our Lady of Kazan brought out into the streets and borne in procession." Radzinsky asked, 'Had he seen the light? Had fear made him run to his Father? Had the Marxist God-Man simply decided to exploit belief in God? Or was it all of these things at once?.'"

I'm not implying necessarily that Stalin committed the atrocities of World War 2, the purges of the Red Army and other massacres until his death in 1953 but I think it is incorrect to blame it on Atheism. Stalin & the USSR were driven by Communism, marxism, power and the lust for control. The church would be the basis for a resistance against totalitarianism.

Certainly I'm not arguing that all Catholics sided with Hitler, there were some cases like you mentioned where some Catholics did some noble acts to save innocent Jews from Hitler and his murderous thugs. I am more critical as you are of Pius XII and the other top "brass" in the Catholic church.