“On behalf of all Ccee members, we wish to join your happiness, while remembering all those who managed to keep their faith, even at the cost of their lives”. This was said by the presidency of the Council of European Bishops Conferences in a letter to the Catholic bishops of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, who celebrate today the jubilee of the post-communist reorganisation of these churches. Actually, on 13th April 1991, under John Paul II’s ruling, the Catholic church of the Latin rite was reorganised in the three former soviet republics. “After over seventy years of silence and persecution, ‘tragic yet glorious pages’ for the viability of faith” (quoting the “Pastoral letter of the Russian Catholic Bishops Conference for the Jubilee Year of Mercy), “a rediscovered religious freedom enabled the Catholic church to grow and bring those faith and hope that seemed to have disappeared for so many years”.