QUOTABLE

When Father Leonid Kishkovsky, 43, the first Eastern Orthodox president of the National Council of Churches, was in Los Angeles this week he praised the Soviet legislature for lifting a longtime ban on religious education at churches and ended government funding of atheism classes:

“Critically important in the new law . . . is what appears to be the disengagement of the state from the propagation of atheism. If the churches were given freedom of educating children but the state continued to propagate atheism through the curriculum in schools, what you would have is still second-class status for believers. That is a very significant step . . . to create an even playing field, as it were. The law removes the official advantages of atheism from education.”