Soviet assaults on the Church

Just found this book while downloading podcasts from Our Lady of Perpetual Help's podcast. I already have 3 books coming in from Amazon/Half.com so I need to retract my child-like need to have everything "Now now now!" If you are not similarly afflicted, go here to order.

"This epic work traces the history of Soviet Catholicism from its rich life in 1914 through its tentative fate in the first sixty years of the USSR. Rev. Christopher Lawrence Zugger tells of the faithful men and women shackled by dictatorship, doomed to deportation, and abandoned by their own church in the west.

Soviet Russia was an empire born of atheism. Religions, per se, were viewed as a threat to the State's notion of individualism. By 1932 Dictator Josef Stalin firmly declared that religion would be extinct in the USSR within five years. In this compelling volume, Rev. Zugger details the Soviet campaign against Catholicism among many ethnic groups, several Catholic rites, and devout worshippers whose devotion would not be shaken.

The author, himself a Byzantine-Ruthenian Catholic priest, weaves numerous dramas of laymen and clergy alike into one gripping epic of persecution and consequence. He shows how they kept faith alive in prison camps, in remote villages, in monastery prisons, and in the secrecy of their homes, where the light of faith continued to burn brightly while churches crumbled or became dance halls and office buildings.

This is the first book in English to recount in detail the fate of Catholic Russia and the Church in the various lands conquered by Soviet rule and its resistance to annihilation. It is at once a memorial to those who perished, a tribute to those who survived, and a testament to the enduring power of faith."