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07/31/2004: "WCC: we were wrong. Kind of, sort of, well, not really..."

At a conference on the Church and 20th century dictatorships in Germany, Konrad Raiser said the World Council of Churches didn't give enough support to opponents of Communist tyrannies. According to Ecumenical News International:

The Rev. Konrad Raiser said during a conference here that the WCC should have been more supportive of groups, such as Solidarity in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, that opposed Communist regimes.

"While being aware of the situation and basically sympathetic to their struggle, the WCC gave priority attention to the struggles against racism and for justice and liberation in the southern countries," Raiser said during the July 16-18 conference on the Christian church and 20th century dictatorships.

"In retrospect, it would appear that the ecumenical organizations have not sufficiently recognized—at least at the official level—the historic legitimacy and the political potential of the dissident movements in the Communist countries," said Raiser, who retired at the end of 2003.

So the WCC didn't recognize the "historic legitimacy and the political potential" of the dissidents. Not, "the oppression suffered by Christians and millions of others under Communism." Not, "the righteous cries for help from those we ignored and derided as 'anti-Communist.'" Raiser, who is reputed to be unable to walk and chew gum at the same time, went on to further justify the WCC's neglect of the world's most oppressed people:

Organizations such as the WCC and the Conference of European Churches "tried to break through the Iron Curtain and to include the churches in Communist countries in the ecumenical movement," he said, but "in place of prophetic protest, the ecumenical movement concentrated on bridge-building and cooperation."

Is this starting to sound more like an explanation than an admission of error? The story definitely goes on in that vein:

The ecumenical movement had been able to "make contacts and to keep open lines of communication across the so-called Iron Curtain, when few others could," said the Rev. John Arnold, of England, a former president of the Conference of European Churches.

For church leaders in Eastern Europe, Arnold said, the ecumenical movement was "a lifeline and oxygen supply combined, and the only means of engaging in public issues other than by simply supporting the 'peace policies' of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

The "so-called Iron Curtain"–can't bring himself to admit that maybe Winston Churchill was right, that the metaphor was an apt description of the Communist domination of Eastern Europe. And what the second half of that sentence means is anybody's guess, given the history of unbroken support for Soviet policy given in WCC forums by Orthodox representatives who were frequently more government collaborators than churchmen.

There is no evidence that the church bodies helped prop up Communist regimes, said Arnold, chair of a committee on East/West relations for the former British Council of Churches. Still, the entry into the WCC of the major Orthodox churches from Eastern Europe after 1961 did "radically change the ethos of the (World) Council," he said.

"Its focus of concern shifted away from Europe to the Third World, and this was skillfully exploited by representatives of the ROC (Russian Orthodox Church) to sideline or at least 'relativize' the concern felt in many western European churches for persecuted Christians and dissidents," he said.

If by "prop up," Arnold means that the WCC never sent guns to the Soviet Army, that's certainly true (southern Africa, unfortunately, was another story). But throughout the Cold War, the WCC stood unwaveringly with the Eastern Bloc, and against the West in its efforts to contain the spread of Communism. The WCC has long opposed any efforts by the West, and the United States in particular, to do anything to try to change the behavior or change the regimes of Communist states. The idea that the Western Europeans were champing at the bit to do so, but were stopped because of the work of ROC reps, suggests that they were either complicit or dupes. Given the current WCC preoccupation with condemning the United States, and demanding that tyrants be left alone to continue the slaughter of their nation's populations, it doesn't look like much has changed.