The ancient land of Portugal is yielding in a slow but gratifying way to evangelical Protestant penetration. Much Spanish and Portuguese Catholicism remains hostile and intolerant of evangelical Christianity, some of the most “conservative” churchmen participating in Vatican Council II coming from this European peninsula. Yet believers are daring nonetheless to pray daily that Portugal may be stirred by divine blessing upon the courageous witness of united evangelical forces.
The Portuguese are in fact adrift from their traditional Romanist moorings. Some Dutch Catholics are said to consider Portugal a mission field. In a land the size of Indiana, with almost ten million inhabitants, some 70 to 90 per cent of the people are not attending Catholic churches, the figure varying with the provinces. Of Catholic candidates for the priesthood, proportionately fewer arrive at the goal from seminaries in Portugal than in any other country in Europe. Some 40 per cent of the population remains illiterate. In some sections there is but one priest to every 12,000 inhabitants. In this land of the legends of Fatima, religious life is crassly superstitious, and for many Portuguese Catholics the doctrine of Mary’s assumption into heaven has become more significant than the ascension of Jesus. When the Baptist Convention of Portugal during an evangelistic effort in Porto paid for billboards proclaiming Christ the hope of the world, Catholic zealots superimposed the words “Christ and the Virgin.”
Despite the deterioration of their own religious position, some Catholic leaders repeatedly exert subtle political pressures to repress Protestant evangelistic efforts. A Keswick convention of sorts was held annually at Carrascal until Catholic pressures forced the Y.W.C.A. to discontinue building a rest home there in 1948. Jesuits in Portugal as well as in other lands label evangelical workers as Communists or as political agitators and through the hierarchy’s publications discredit them as pernicious and dangerous. Evangelical pastors are denied the vocational identification card granted to priests and to bricklayers and barbers because their category is nationally “unrecognized.” Alongside this religious prejudice against Protestants, new restrictions have recently been placed on the importation of evangelical books—even Bibles. In some cases postal and customs authorities have turned back as much as 75 per cent of such literature, and some Sunday schools now lack quarterlies for lesson studies despite repeated appeals to Portuguese authorities. Government funds are used to build Roman churches, and church-state relations are interpreted specially to benefit Catholicism. A papal concordat exempts Catholic priests from paying income taxes.
Although Portugal’s long history has many anti-papal facets, and neither the prime minister nor the people want to be “stepped on” by the Catholic hierarchy, the present situation is ambiguous. The hierarchy’s anti-evangelical temper flashed hot in the aftermath of a sudden and in some ways amazing evangelical breakthrough in Portugal earlier this year. A cooperative evangelical thrust in Lisbon, with the Lebanese evangelist Samuel Doctorian as speaker, resulted in nightly crowds of 3,000 persons, a cumulative attendance of some 70,000, and at least 1,400 decisions—including priests, atheists, and persons from all walks of life. After the meetings had run twenty nights they were halted by police. A protest to the civil governor of Lisbon was unavailing. Orders to intervene (reported reliably to have come from the Cardinal of Lisbon) were provoked by anxieties lest all Lisbon become unsettled by evangelical preaching.
Then evangelical workers in the southern province of Algarve near the Straits of Gibraltar (where evidence is still found of the Moorish invasion and five centuries of occupation) united for a small but successful evangelistic effort. But most spectacular was a thirteen-day crusade to the north that for the first time united virtually all evangelical workers in Porto, the nation’s second city. There were some 400 decisions. After the first week a Methodist minister invited workers to a tea which, they discovered, was arranged by twenty-two young people converted during the opening nights.
Evangelical leaders contend they can hardly be charged with proselyting since the masses have neither heard the Gospel nor maintained their church ties, and the people themselves are showing signs of new interest in Christian realities. Among Protestant leaders a few express fear that mass evangelism will provoke Romanist countermeasures. But these same spokesmen seem also to oppose foreign missionary effort and mass evangelism under any circumstances.
While there is little open persecution of Protestants, there is underground opposition, and evangelicals are disallowed full freedom of public evangelistic meetings. For about two years new congregations have been unable to gain “legal personality” as corporate entities with property rights except as missions of older efforts previously recognized.
What marked the evangelical breakthrough in Portugal was a vivid sense of sin and shame which overpowered those attending the special meetings and constrained many to cry out for divine salvation. At one banquet even the waiters were convicted and filled with a longing for deliverance, and several were converted.
Although the Portuguese are outside the churches, they respect God and are open to the Gospel. But the hunger of the people is now awakening more rapidly to material than to spiritual desires in a land of much hardship and poverty. The fact that many evangelicals are themselves “have-nots” gives them special appeal in speaking of blessings beyond the material.
Pentecostals have the largest church in Lisbon (seating 1,500) and are active in personal work and diligent in stewardship, But vigorous churches are also maintained by the Brethren, Independents, Baptists, Lusitanians (Episcopal), Methodists, and Presbyterians. The number of evangelical believers is now thought to exceed 30,000. Baptists have the most seminary-trained ministers. In one Presbyterian church in Lisbon twenty-two persons recently responded to a Communion Sunday call for converts, and prayer-meeting attendance has multiplied several times.
The growing interest of Protestant pastors and evangelists in a united “evangelism in depth” effort on a nationwide basis is one of the significant developments, since the divisions among Protestants are an obstacle which Catholics exploit. Interdenominational activities have helped prepare the way across the years, under sponsorship such as the Evangelical Alliance, the Comissao Inter-Edesiastica Portuguesa, Christian Endeavor, the Portugal Sunday Schools Union, and in some areas the Y.M.C.A. also. There are now 600 Protestant churches and missions and 300 pastors and evangelists in Portugal. A large number of missions are led by laymen, many because of a shortage of ministers or lack of financial ability, although the Brethren prefer a lay ministry. Among Portugal’s 70,000 gypsies a growing company of converts now includes numerous voting people determined to prepare to preach the Gospel to their own people. Another hopeful factor is the emergence of an organization of Christian businessmen meeting periodically in Lisbon and aggressively interested in an evangelistic thrust.
A Campaign Against Christianity
Placed in the hands of church authorities in London last month was a detailed document describing what it tails the “dreadful persecution” of Russian Orthodox believers in Byelorussia and the Western Ukraine.
Brought by a British tourist who visited the Soviet Union, it was signed by a group of “parishioners and pilgrims of the Orthodox churches throughout Russia” and addressed to the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul and to the Patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem, “and others.”
Church sources said they regarded the document as exceptionally important not only in describing the atheistic policies of the Soviet regime—as reflected in two important areas of Russia—but in indicating the courage and tenacity of great masses of Orthodox believers in resisting all attempts to wean them from religion.
One source said that “while many visitors to the U.S.S.R. have reported on evidences of the strong religious devotion still found there, this document offers a tragic but inspiring insight into precisely what this means in terms of personal courage and fortitude.”
Although undated, the document appeared to have been written subsequent to August 6, the most recent date mentioned in the text.
The document confirms reports last December that monks at the Pochayev Monastery in the Tarnopol region of the Western Ukraine have been subjected to severe persecution at the hands of Soviet secret policy.
In Byelorussia, it charged, churches and monasteries have been ordered closed and torn down, ruthless campaigns of persecution have been carried out against parents who seek to give their children a religious education, clergymen have been forbidden to conduct religious services, and monks have been hounded and vilified.
The document also charged that “in order to exterminate the Orthodox faith and to speed up the closing of the churches, the government is secretly training its godless Communists as priests. They appoint them as heads of churches and cathedrals and make them bishops and priests.”
Worse still, it said, some priests through weakness, have become servants of “the Anti-Christs who may well convert the Orthodox Church into a heretical church.”
According to the document, the current anti-religious campaign began in 1959 when children of school and pre-school age were forbidden to serve as acolytes to bishops anywhere in Russia. This was done, it said, on orders of Vladimir Kuroyedov, president of the State Council in charge of Russian Orthodox affairs.
Between 1960 and 1962, it said, three churches were closed—two of them were later demolished—in Minsk, Kozyrevskaia, and Semitskava. In 1961 authorities in Byelorussia forbade the reception of Holy Communion and church attendance by children under eighteen.
“The mockery has gone so far.” the document said, “the strict representative stands next to the church of the Minsk archdiocese, spying on the children. If he finds any children in the church, he speaks to the churchwarden and this servant of Anti-Christ collars them and knocks their heads against the wall.”
The report said one of the children was the son of a pious widow, whose house was later visited by state investigators who stripped the walls of all ikons, and took away all her religious books. The agents also threatened to send her son and her other children to a boarding school where they would be protected from the “contamination” of religion.
Citing similar cases, the document said many parents in Minsk had pleaded with the civil authorities “not to drive their children out of church.” Some, it said, even went to Moscow to plead before Premier Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders, “but their appeals were ignored.”
On May 30 last, the document recalled, many pilgrims from all over Russia came to venerate a famous ikon of the Blessed Virgin in the village of Zhirovitsy in the Grodno district, but local authorities barred clergymen from conducting services.
Minsk and Grodno authorities also sent agents to intimidate young men planning to enter a monastery in Zhirovitsy, the report said, and as a result none of them enrolled.
Pentecostal Aid
How Pentecostal churches may help other denominations receiving gifts of tongues was one of the keynotes of the sixteenth annual convention of the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America, held last month in Montreal. The Rev. Thomas Zimmerman. general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, said the Pentecostal movement has the responsibility of guiding those experiencing this phenomenon to prevent the tendencies to excess which often characterized the Pentecostal movement in its own early days.
The $500,000 Virgin Of Kazan
The Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of America, at its quadrennial Sobor (general convention) in New York City, agreed to purchase a 500-year-old ikon of the Virgin Mary from a private collector for $500,000.
Measuring 10 by 13 inches and encrusted with some 1,000 diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and pearls, the ikon, known as the “Virgin of Kazan,” is named for the Russian city where it was painted in about 1400.
Plans call for the ikon to be displayed in the New York World’s Fair pavilion of the Russian church, which does not recognize the Moscow Patriarchate. The painting was shown at the Holy Virgin Protection Cathedral in New York during the convention, and before that was on a tour of the United States and Canada.
Credited with many miracles, the ikon is believed to have been in a Moscow Orthodox cathedral until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. It was sold by the Communists and is now owned by Miss Anna Mitchell-Hedges of Farley Castle, Berkshire, England, who agreed to sell it to the Russian church in America.
Depicted in the ikon with the Virgin Mary is the Child Jesus resting in her arms. The gems around the painted wooden panel are encrusted in a silver gilt rizza which covers all the ikon except the faces of Mary and Jesus. It is believed that this rizza was added to the picture in about 1600.
