The Infant of Prague vs. Joseph Stalin

"The Church will yet prevail, even in Europe, the forgetful continent," concludes Thomas Basil, reporting from sixteen different countries — Travels in Europe's Once & Future Faith. The first two paragraphs of an absolute must-read:

In 1950 the government of Czechoslovakia began building a granite statue of Soviet leader Josef Stalin. Finished in 1955 and towering ten stories high on a hill overlooking Prague, communist authorities dynamited it in 1962 following Khrushchev's famous denunciation of his predecessor. Stalin's colossal statue endured seven years, and today exists only in photographs at Prague's Museum of Communism. This remarkable museum documents what life under socialism was really like, such as deluxe watches as prizes for any border guard who shot an escapee from Stalin's "workers' paradise," or the Baroque core of Prague left to fall into ruins.

But somehow the city's famous wax doll less than three feet tall has endured nearby since 1628, when the Little Infant of Prague was donated to a Carmelite monastery by a wealthy benefactor. For some 380 years the doll has attracted devotees of Christ the King, who humbled Himself as a child and asks for childlike trust. That this little doll has outlasted countless European tyrants and secularists seems a metaphor for Christianity on the Continent: small and weak yet still splendid, and perhaps with more of a future than we dare hope.