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The end of communist rule in Europe, which began 25 years ago this month, was not all positive for Christianity because it brought tensions between Rome and Russia back to the surface, a senior Vatican official said on Monday.

Cardinal Kurt Koch, the top Roman Catholic official for inter-church relations, said the re-emergence of Eastern Catholic churches in Ukraine and Romania after decades of suppression had created major tensions with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Russian Orthodox leaders have accused the Vatican-aligned Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church of trying to take back churches and woo away believers from the Moscow Orthodox Patriarchate. The Ukrainian church and the Vatican deny this.

Moscow prelates cite this as a hurdle to closer ties between the Orthodox and the Catholic Church, which for decades prayed for the conversion of the Soviet Union only to see the newly resurgent Russian Orthodox Church become a difficult partner.

"The changes in 1989 were not advantageous for ecumenical relations," Koch told Vatican Radio. "The Eastern Catholic churches banned by Stalin re-emerged, especially in Ukraine and Romania, and from the Orthodox came the old accusation about Uniate churches and proselytism."

"Uniate" refers to eastern churches with Orthodox-style liturgies that recognise the pope as their spiritual leader.

Pope Francis will meet Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul late this month. The Orthodox spiritual head supports more cooperation with Rome, but cannot ignore the wary Russians, who make up two-thirds of the world's 300 million Orthodox.

Koch, who spoke a week after the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall, and on the same day as Czechs marked the start of their democratic revolution, noted that talks on closer ties between Catholic and Orthodox theologians were suspended between 2000 and 2006 because of tensions between the two sides.

"There are always setbacks, but I'm convinced we can make more progress," the Swiss-born cardinal said.

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Vatican: 'End of Communism was not all good news for churches'

Published November 17, 2014

Women place candles to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the so-called Velvet Revolution in Prague, Czech Republic, Monday, Nov. 17, 2014. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)(The Associated Press)

A woman places a candle to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the so called Velvet Revolution in Prague, Czech Republic, Monday, Nov. 17, 2014. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)(The Associated Press)

Thousands of Czechs, using the 25th anniversary of the anti-communist Velvet Revolution, gather to call on the controversy-prone Czech President Milos Zeman to resign in Prague, Czech Republic, Monday, Nov. 17, 2014. The crowd gave Zeman a symbolic red card on Monday for demeaning the importance of human rights, a pro-Russian stance in the conflict in Ukraine, using vulgar language and recently downplaying the brutal use of force by police 25 years ago. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)(The Associated Press)

Thousands of Czechs, using the 25th anniversary of the anti-communist Velvet Revolution, gather to call on the controversy-prone Czech President Milos Zeman to resign in Prague, Czech Republic, Monday, Nov. 17, 2014. The crowd gave Zeman a symbolic red card on Monday for demeaning the importance of human rights, a pro-Russian stance in the conflict in Ukraine, using vulgar language and recently downplaying the brutal use of force by police 25 years ago. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)(The Associated Press)

A woman places a candle to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the so called Velvet Revolution in Prague, Czech Republic, Monday, Nov. 17, 2014. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)(The Associated Press)

PRAGUE Thousands of Czechs gathered in central Prague on Monday to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Velvet Revolution that toppled communism -- but festivities turned into an appeal for President Milos Zeman to resign.

The center of the rally was a street in downtown Prague where police cracked down on a peaceful anti-communist student march that came a week after the collapse of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 17, 1989.

The demonstrations began with fiery speeches against the hard-line communist regime at a university campus, prompting thousands of students to march downtown. The police blocked the street from both sides, squeezing the protesters with armed vehicles before attacking them with truncheons; hundreds were injured. Undeterred, the students went on strike and crowds mushroomed in the days that followed.

On Dec. 29, 1989, dissident playwright Vaclav Havel became Czechoslovakia's first democratically elected president in a half-century.

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Czechs to celebrate 25th anniversary of fall of communism

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Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, at the Berlin Wall memorial. Photograph: Kay Nietfeld/dpa/Corbis

Marx and Engels proclaimed in 1848 that a spectre was haunting Europe the spectre of communism.

As it turned out, the spectre did eventually materialise, in the form of Soviet communism, which spread after the second world war to eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall was built 16 years later, in 1961, to put a stop to the way East Germans were voting about communism with their feet.

There have been celebrations recently to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall in November 1989. That fall was followed in 1991 by the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, a Soviet Union about which President Putin appears to harbour nostalgic feelings.

After those events there was an inevitable burst of triumphalism in the west. Some of us feared that, with the disappearance of the communist threat, some of the worst instincts of casino capitalism would be evinced; and so they were.

I myself had what I thought was a bright idea of writing a book called The Spectre of Capitalism. I hoped the catchy title would make my fortune indeed, make me a capitalist but it has to be said that sales fell woefully short of anything written by Marx.

Now the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has followed Marx with a declaration last week that a spectre is now haunting Europe the spectre of economic stagnation.

This phrase received about as much attention as that book of mine. It was uttered during the presentation of the monetary policy committees quarterly inflation report, and people were much more interested in the outlook for interest rates: the story remains that rates went outside after the financial crash, and will continue to remain outside for some time.

But, as the Bank is keen to emphasise, the outlook for the British economy is a lot better than that for Europe in general: it may be the slowest recovery in centuries, but our economy is now on the mend. However, there is a still a long way to go to make up the ground lost after Chancellor Osbornes woefully misjudged decision to abort the 2010 recovery he inherited with a needlessly deflationary and (literally) counterproductive fiscal policy.

Which brings us back to the spectre haunting Europe. Carney was not referring to David Cameron, but it intrigues me that when the prime minister and a legion of others go on about the need for reform in Europe, they are barking up the wrong tree. As Llewellyn Consulting points out in its current bulletin, the universal chant when the subject of the eurozones plight comes up is that what is needed is more structural reform.

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The spectre of communism? Europe should fear the spectre of austerity