>
> It's interesting that, in the period of great turmoil
> before 1917, the Russian Orthodox clergy showed this
> division. The Church at the village level was so
> leftist that the Church hierarchy felt compelled to
> purge it periodically. There was a lot of material
> being written and preached at the village level about
> the People of Christ being oppressed by the Tsar,
> about how the message of Christ meant being liberated
> from the wealthy and powerful, and so forth. This is
> the reason that the 1905 pogroms targeted seminarians.
> And the closet Marxist seminary Stalin attended was
> more the rule than the exception.
================================
And, of course, the most recent historical example is liberation theology in
Latin America, also bitterly resisted by the Roman Catholic church
hierarchy.