One of Pope John Paul II’s most important goals was to put an end to the scourge of atheist communism

The communist regime was atheist but did not succeed in turning all people into atheists.

Fr. David Hudson (former Protestant Evangelical)said:

For a long time I had thought about doing missions in “Post-Christian” Western Europe, where only about 20% of the population attends church regularly. Just then the Berlin Wall fell, and we were swept up in the tide of missionaries going to former Communist countries, which we believed had been effectively “atheized”.

Guess what happened while on mission in a former Communist country: he became an Orthodox priest!