Vatican "unable" to talk with atheists

IN AN assessment of the Church's relations with nonbelievers throughout the world, a Vatican official has said that dialogue with atheists is "almost impossible" because of their intolerance and political opportunism.
Writing in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano about a recent meeting in Vienna, of the Vatican Secretariat for Non-Believers, Fr Franc Rode, the organization's undersecretary, was particularly critical of the "state atheism" of communist regimes. Such regimes, he said, "have not given up the dream of seeing religion disappear."
"If structural dialogue with plain non-believers is difficult," Fr Rode said, "it is practically impossible with organised atheists (with some exceptions).
"If they are in power, they generally refuse dialogue with believers — as is shown by the situation in Soviet block countries. If they are among the opposition, as in Western countries, they tend to manipulate dialogue for political ends", he said.
Relations between believers and non-believers have been especially difficult in the communist countries of East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Poland, Fr Rode said.