The Archbishop of Canterbury rose in the House of Lords
on Tuesday to ask the Government for information about the arrest by the Bolsheviks of Monsignor Cieplak, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Petrograd, and other Catholic priests, and also.as to the position of his Holiness Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, who, it appears, is awaiting his trial at the hands of the Soviet authorities. Appa- rently this new attack on. the persons of priests, of what- ever denomination, is but part of a general anti.religious campaign. The Bolsheviks, less interested in economics now that they am facing the bill of the rigid. application of dogmatic but inaccurate theories, have turned their- attention to what they call " the front of ideas" and are attempting to root out religion by every means, by sowing internal dissension in the Russian Church and by direct persecution. But in so doing they have, as the. Times points, out, achieved one remarkable thing : they have united all the dissentient bodies of Christendom, who have made combined protests against this more than mediaeval persecution.
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