wfn.org | Hungarian grievances dominate European Reformed meeting

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Note #7396 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

21-August-2002
02313  

Hungarian grievances dominate European Reformed meeting 

Ecumenical groups failed to speak out against communist oppression, 
they charge 
  
by Andreas Havinga
Ecumenical News International
  
ORADEA, Romania - Wrongs that ethnic Hungarians charge have been committed against them in eastern Europe and especially Romania, particularly during the communist era, have dominated the opening days of a European meeting of Reformed Christians, taking place in Romania.  

Forty-eight delegates from Reformed churches are gathered in the border town of Oradea, close to Hungary, for the Aug. 18-23 meeting of the European Area Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC).  The council meetings take place every seven years.  

Krister Andersson, the president of WARC's European area, told delegates that questions about the legacies of communist rule had been repeatedly raised in past years in the European Area Committee, a body that meets between the council meetings.  

Hungarian-speaking churches have a special position within the WARC, representing almost all of the 2.6 million Reformed Christians in eastern and central Europe, mainly in Hungary and neighboring countries.   

The meeting opened Aug. 18 with a ceremony held in a local sports stadium. The 3000-capacity indoor arena was packed with Hungarian speakers from the region, some in traditional costumes, as well as participants of the WARC meeting.  Historical flags with the Hungarian national colors of red, white and green were prominently displayed.  

While many of the foreign guests were moved by the passionate singing of the largely local congregation, there were mixed reactions to the strongly national tone of the event. Some remarked that it seemed more like a political rally, featuring a succession of mainly Hungarian-speaking dignitaries from the region.  

The gathering is also the first occasion that WARC's European Area Council has met in a former communist-ruled country in Eastern Europe.  
Andersson noted, "Many in the West cannot really understand what you in the East went through."    

The delegates from other parts of Europe had, he said, come to "humbly listen" to what their Romanian hosts and others in former Soviet bloc countries had to say.  

For his part, Laszlo Tokes, bishop of the host church, the Reformed Church in Romania, told the delegates, "We need to confess past sins."    

Tokes warned that "the past lives on in the present" and that in Romania the ghost of former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu "still haunts us at every turn."  He called on WARC's European council to take "a clear stand" on the crimes of the communist past.  

Tokes charged former WARC general secretary Milan Opocensky, a Czech theologian, with playing down the "communist terror" of the Soviet era and "flatly denying that either the catastrophic world?political role of communism or its atrocities could be compared with the horrors of fascism."  

Some delegates also doled out harsh criticism of the World Council of Churches (WCC) for what they said was its failure to denounce human rights violations in the former communist countries of eastern and central Europe.    

The WCC's silence caused the world body to become "allies of our oppressors," a former Czech dissident, retired pastor Alfred Kocab, charged in a keynote paper read at the conference.  

Kocab was prevented from attending the WARC meeting in person because of the floods that have been wreaking havoc in the Czech Republic.  

In his paper he said the WCC's failure to criticize human rights violations dated from when the Orthodox churches in Eastern Europe became members in the world body after 1961.  

By contrast, the WCC continued issuing public statements against human rights violations in other parts of the world, such as the apartheid system of racism in South Africa and the 1973 coup of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile.  

WCC representative Michiel Hardon told journalists that "the worst the WCC could do would be to duck the issue" of past wrongs.  He explained that the WCC's interest in behind-the-scenes diplomacy on human rights during the communist era was "to keep open the links with our official churches in totalitarian countries in other parts of the world."  However, the WCC had "paid a high price" for this policy.  

Hardon pointed out that WCC general secretary Konrad Raiser had held talks with former dissidents of the Charter 77 human rights movement that were "very open, very honest."    

"We will continue these discussions," he assured delegates. However, facing up to this past was not just a matter for the WCC but a matter for the ecumenical movement as a whole.  "We will press for [this], but so far we have not been very successful," he admitted.  

German historian Katharina Kunter encouraged the churches to face the past, as this could also be liberating.  However, she warned that if churches had no vision for the future, then the past could seem threatening.  Dealing with the past needed to be more than churches merely insisting on lost rights, such as properties confiscated by the state. 
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