Cardinal Meets Gorbachev, Delivers Pope’s Letter on Church Freedom

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev met with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Vatican secretary of state, in the Kremlin on Monday and received a letter from Pope John Paul II expressing concern about treatment of Roman Catholics in the Soviet Union.

The 90-minute meeting was the highest-level session so far between the avowedly atheistic Soviet Union and the tiny Vatican state, seat of Roman Catholicism.

Although President Andrei A. Gromyko, then foreign minister, had audiences with the Pope in the Vatican in 1979 and 1984, the meetings did not involve the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union--the position Gorbachev now holds as the real leader in the one-party Communist state.

The Kremlin reception of Casaroli, the No. 2 official in the Vatican hierarchy, was held against the backdrop of the current celebration of the 1,000th anniversary of Christianity in Russia.

Casaroli said the Pope’s letter contained an addendum that expressed the Vatican’s concerns about the religious freedom of Catholics in the Soviet Union, who are largely centered in Lithuania and the Ukraine.

“It (the addendum) was an objective statement of some of the questions that the church felt must be treated for Catholics to have freedom of expression in the Soviet Union,” a Vatican official told reporters.

“Religious liberty is not merely the internal freedom to think and believe what you want but also the freedom to express this publicly and socially as a group,” the official said.

The questions raised at the meeting included the opening of seminaries, the question of the 4 million Uniate Catholics in the Ukraine who recognize the Pope as Catholic leader, and the nomination of bishops, the Vatican official said.

Casaroli described the meeting as one of “a good atmosphere, in which we talked freely and Gorbachev talked freely.”