Religion: A Priest for Moscow

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Before the end of this month, the 150-odd U.S. Roman Catholics living in Moscow will be able to go to confession regularly again for the first time in three years.

The Roosevelt-Litvinov agreement of 1933, under which the United States, after years of back-turning, extended diplomatic recognition to the Communist regime, stipulated that U.S. clergymen be permitted to live in Moscow to minister to the spiritual needs of Americans there. Four priests served in this treaty-made capacity, all of them Assumptionist fathers, a missionary group with a special concern for the churches of the East. In 1955, when the U.S. State Department refused to extend the 60-day visa of the Moscow Patriarchate's Archbishop Boris to permit him to serve as Exarch for North and South America, the Communists retaliated by expelling Assumptionist Father Georges Bissonnette and refusing to grant a visa to his successor, the Rev. Louis F. Dion.

Meanwhile, Catholics of the U.S. community in Moscow continued to attend the Church of St. Louis, but avoided going to confession or calling on the church's Russian priest for any but the most urgent needs lest he be compromised by too much contact with foreigners.

The deadlock was broken when the State Department announced that it had granted a 90-day visa to Archbishop Boris. And last week Father Dion, 44, a native of Worcester, Mass., where he is registrar of Assumption College, had his visa at last, planned to leave the U.S. on Jan. 20.