The Soviets sent loyal agents to study at seminaries to learn how to perform the liturgy so that they could then install those clergymen in place of the validly ordained clergy.
[5] One author described the Stalinist view of the Catholic Church this way: The struggle against organized religion continued; it was especially vicious as far as Roman Catholicism was concerned, because it had ties beyond the limits of the Soviet sphere.
The Soviets instead kept one Catholic seminary open, infiltrated it with KGB agents, recruited seminarians, put mandatory pro-Soviet education in place, and attempted to use the Church to become a means of anti-religious policy.
Following World War II, the Soviets took over Catholic news sources, scholarly journals, and other means of communication to spread their message.
For example, one author writes that once-Catholic theological journals would only sell copies within the Soviet Union, and were focused on converting Ukrainian Greek Catholics to Orthodoxy.
[16] In an attempt to control the seminaries in Romania, the Orthodox hierarchy conducted conferences where anti-Vatican theological journals would be presented and discussed.
[17] In 1967, in response to growing Catholic unrest, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union passed measures which called for increased & intensified atheistic propaganda, including enhancing Scientific materialism training in the schools.
[18] In 1979, prior to the creation of the Polish Solidarity trade union, the Communist leadership in Poland grew concerned about domestic instability.
While Communist leadership attempted to use the words of the Primate of Poland Stefan Wyszyński to fabricate a view of the Church hierarchy as supporting the cessation of struggles against Communism, the efforts only backfired.
[26] One allegation was that part of Operation Seat 12 involved the production of the 1963 play, The Deputy, which is a dramatization depicting the Pope in a negative light.
The 1978 election of Karol Józef Wojtyła as John Paul II as the first Polish pope in the history of the Catholic Church caused great alarm within the Soviet leadership.
[27] On the one hand, the Soviets maintained an official policy of atheism and continued atheistic propaganda against the Catholic Church and religion in general.
The article was published by Iosif Grigulevich, now known to have been an illegal operative of the KGB serving as a diplomat, agent, and expert on Latin America and the Catholic Church.
[30] Grigulevich was known as an anti-Catholic voice in the USSR for his attacks on the broadcasts of Radio Vaticana as being “heated propaganda and destructive religious fanaticism.” [31] Further, when the pope issued requests to the faithful to commemorate through prayer the murders of Polish Catholics by the Soviet NKVD, the Soviets lumped the entire Church in with others taking part in “anti-Soviet action… with other hostile groups.” [32] During the Pope's visit to Poland in 1979, the pope distanced himself from the breakaway Catholic groups, such as the ‘Neo-Znak’ publication, as he did not want to provide legitimacy to the groups which promoted Soviet goals & propaganda, according to one author.
[33] In response to the papal visit, a meeting of government religious affairs agencies met to discuss strategies and tactics aimed at reducing the influence of the Vatican and countering their activity.
[34] Part of the effort included mandatory "patriotic education" in Catholic seminaries to teach clergy about Soviet laws.
Further, the Polish authorities held workshops with the media sources in the country to prepare them to respond to difficult questions about religious freedom that would arise domestically and internationally following the visit.