The Limits of Valor

Eleven years ago I covered (not uncritically) for this journal the Second All-Christian Peace Assembly in Prague. Since then, perhaps because I was erroneously listed as a participant, I have received regular communiques that augment my collection of Czechoslovak stamps, make me an enigma to our local post office, and give me an intimate though selective account of Christian activity behind the Iron Curtain. The Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania; not many Western Christians could name all nine easily; fewer could cite individual features that distinguish them; some have merely a shrewd suspicion that there are such places.

At last, however, we have a paperback that brings together information in concise form. An Anglican clergyman has written it, instigated and assisted by a British Council of Churches working party with “multiple expertise.” The group does not agree that in Eastern Europe “the only authentic Christianity is underground,” indicates that the range of conditions in this area is enormous, and holds that some parts have “more freedom than in some countries of what used to be called the mission field.”

The book, Discretion and Valour: Religious Conditions in Russia and Eastern Europe, by Trevor Beeson (Collins Fontana, 348 pp., 60p), deals with developments up to January 1, 1974, taking each of the countries in turn, from 110 pages on the U.S.S.R. to less than five on Albania (“the bleakest place in Europe”). Beeson is good at putting things in perspective. Thus, “The Russian people as a whole have never become Marxist, and … there are more convinced Marxists in Western Europe than in the East.” Or (of Poland), the British and Foreign Bible Society has “found it much easier to function under a Communist regime than under the Catholic-dominated government of pre-war days.”

All kinds of fascinating details are given: only East Germany recognizes a form of legal conscientious objection to military service; the heads of the Reformed and Lutheran churches in Hungary serve in their country’s parliament, and both are on the WCC Central Committee; the (Orthodox) Holy Synod in Bulgaria “urged the clergy to hold special services in honor of Stalin’s seventieth birthday,” and many priests who objected were arrested and sent to labor camps; the U.S.S.R., which had fifty-seven seminaries in 1914, now has only three; in Poland ordinations to the priesthood are double the pre-war figure and attendance at Sunday Mass in urban areas is 77 per cent, in rural areas 87 per cent. Yet about the latter, Beeson adds that “the level of personal and social morality is falling quite dramatically.” With a much smaller percentage of church attendance, East German ecclesiastics also are realizing that “Leninist ideology is not the Church’s chief enemy,” which is rather that growing secularism which afflicts any industrial society.

The degree of oppression varies from country to country and time to time. In an open letter circulated clandestinely, two Moscow priests are quoted:

During the period 1957–64 the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church radically changed its function, becoming instead of a department of arbitration an organ of unofficial and illegal control over the Moscow Patriarchate.… Such a situation in the Church could occur only with the connivance of the supreme ecclesiastical authorities, who have deviated from their sacred duty before Christ and the Church.

The jovial Metropolitan Nikodim, without whom no WCC Central Committee meeting would seem complete, comes in for a bit of stick. It is remarked too that the four years following his appointment as head of the Foreign Department of the Moscow Patriarchate saw “a massive increase in atheistic propaganda and very severe repression of religious institutions.” Beeson quotes Anatoli Levitin, a Russian writer who sharply criticizes Nikodim’s overseas travels and holds that he is evidently “still influenced by the Stalinist atmosphere in which he was brought up, allowing his admiration for the all-embracing invincible State to serve as the criterion for all the deeds of the Church and people.”

The book repeatedly warns against the assumption that the Church’s problems in Eastern Europe can be blamed entirely on Communism. No one will quarrel with this so long as no attempt is made to dissociate Communism from the Church’s plight.

Similarly, one will be careful of Beeson’s statement that barriers between Eastern European and other Christians were there long before the Communists came; it is true, but one must then go on to ask what Communism has done to pull down those barriers, or whether it has not reinforced them by manipulating different traditions and reviving old antagonisms for its own ends.

The concluding chapter, in discussing East European churches and the WCC, says candidly that “for more than a decade the WCC, while being acutely critical of many unjust regimes in different parts of the world, has found it difficult to make any public criticism of what has been happening in Eastern Europe,” as though Eastern European membership were dependent on reticence about “the negative aspects of Soviet policy.” Thus arose, says Beeson, the charge of “selective indignation.”

He is of the opinion that Soviet policy is being faced up to at last, now that “the subject of human rights has been placed on the agenda of the WCC.” But on this question the WCC had committed itself—on paper—much earlier than Beeson seems to think. The Hague Consultation report in 1967 urged that the Church should be prepared to say a “costly word,” declaring the truth even when “men will not dare to utter it.” A world body that goes for valor in attacking South Africa, Rhodesia, and Chile must have good reason if it opts for discretion in approaching other areas where there is an Orthodox Church and even more serious violation of human rights.

Perhaps a good place to start would be to take action on the sort of cri de coeur that came in 1972 from a number of Catholic priests in (Soviet) Lithuania:

Help us with your prayers and tell the world that we want at the present time only as much freedom of conscience as is permitted by the Constitution of the Soviet Union. We are full of determination, for God is with us.

Beeson quotes this reasonable plea, which surely calls for a word that would not be too costly even for the discreet. Not the least valuable feature of his book is the way it frankly raises problems that, had they been mentioned in past WCC press conferences, would have been regarded as very hot potatoes indeed. The British Council of Churches has fathered some odd publications that I’ve disliked intensely, but for this one I have nothing but praise.

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