The churches that would not die

...In preparation for international assemblies on peace, justice, and the integrity of creation in Basle and Seoul, three ecumenical assemblies were held in the GDR which, Bishop Forck told me, drew the Catholic, Free, and Lutheran churches into "intimate contact...

...She pointed out that Eastern Rite Catholics did not want to be forced into a church with an alien rite...

...The recognition of the basic liberties of Ukrainian Catholics, a veritable minority, is an elementary task, the completion of which would not threaten the stability of the Soviet Union...

...He recently spent two weeks in East Germany...

...Together with Orthodox leaders, it discussed restitution in terms of a referendum to be held in each parish...

...Events of recent months, however, have been disappointing...

...The government, although officially contending that all Eastern Rite Catholics had been successfully integrated into the Orthodox church, eventually gave up hope of pressuring Catholics to do so...

...For this reason Soviet governmental authorities are developing new ways of combating this community, while not abandoning all previous strategy...

...Two years before his death in 1970, Hossu was secretly named the first Romanian cardinal...

...Attitudes are divided on the active political role taken on by many pastors...

...Meanwhile, there is another vexing problem, the restoration of property that had been commandeered by the state and transferred to Orthodox jurisdiction...

...If they won a new credibility among the general population through helping the growth of opposition groups, these groups no longer need the "space" and protection provided by churches...

...According to Father Georgii Edelstein, a member of the reform movement Perestroika and the Church and a Russian Orthodox priest, the government hastened the registration of these Russian Orthodox parishes in western Ukraine not to meet the needs of what is in fact a small Orthodox population, but to preempt the registration of Ukrainian Catholic parishes and to mislead Western opinion...

...Bureaucratic obstacles have been uniquely tailored to undermine the Ukrainian Catholic resurgence...

...necessary for the functioning of normal ecclesiastical life...

...The irony of his new position cannot be lost on his former persecutors: he is minister for defense and disarmament...

...Romania Few Romanian intellectuals enjoy a better reputation with ordinary Romanians than the slight, sixty-year-old Doina Cornea...

...Out of these grew the East bloc's only independent peace movement with its biblical slogan, "Swords into ploughshares...

...But Metropolitan Alexandur Todea, leader of the Eastern Rite Catholics, found this suggestion unacceptable since Eastern Rite Catholics lack the resources, legal status, and numerical superiority of the Orthodox...

...For Ukrainian Catholics, "normalization" is no closer than it was six months ago...

...This smoke screen has had some success in the Soviet Union, but even more so in the West...

...Most priests and lay people were forced to join the Orthodox church, but continued to worship with nearly the same ritual and in the same church buildings as before...

...When I met him in East Berlin in 1982 (as leader of the underground peace movement), he was one of the GDR's best known dissidents...

...Monsignor Karl-Heinz Ducke, assistant general secretary to the Berlin bishops' conference, explained to me that the Catholic church has never had firm roots in this part of Germany where it has been a small minority since Reformation times, numbering now about one million people...

...Even the Russian Orthodox have raised their voices in protest...

...He is one of four pastors in the government...

...Through caring for such people, Forck added, "we are not going to make ourselves popular...

...But he sees a prophetic role in "attempting to create an alternative to Western society, for example through openness to one's neighbor, through stressing solidarity...

...She was not allowed outside without Securitate guards, was beaten and threatened with death, and her visitors were intimidated and turned away, including the British ambassador...

...And yet the dramatic revival of the Ukrainian Catholic church vividly illustrates that the quest for the spiritual cannot be repressed by any means, be they brutal or bureaucratic...

...Those priests who were released from captivity or exile were systematically persecuted...

...The Lutheran pastor, Markus Meckel, has become leader of the Social Democratic party (SPD) and foreign minister in the new East German government...

...It led to the awakening of our national consciousness...

...Perestroika has done away with the most egregious forms of persecution and the late-November announcement from Kiev gave rise to hopes for the rehabilitation of Ukrainian Catholics, the real legalization of the Ukrainian Catholic church, and the restitution of its property...

...Two anniversaries fell on that day, both of which made the police tense...

...frequent intermarriage caused few problems...

...As Cornea wrote Pope John Paul II in December 1988, in a letter protesting Ceausescu's latest attempts to suppress the church: "It played a vital cultural role in our history...

...But the roots of the churches' stand go much deeper...

...But, crucially for Romania's history, a number of young Catholics sent to Rome for study rediscovered there the Latin roots of their nation's language and origins...

...PEADAR KIRBY Peadar Kirby is a free-lance writer who has reported frequently for Commonweal...

...The huge marches, particularly in Leipzig, that brought the crisis to a head last October began from churches where participants had been urged not to provoke the police...

...Most German, and some Hungarian, priests provided a Romanian Mass for them...

...In 1969 the Vatican made matters easier for Eastern Rite Catholics, issuing instructions that allowed them to receive the sacraments in the Orthodox churches, and even to marry in Orthodox churches if this did not cause scandal and if they did not abandon the faith...

...Christians could not become officers in the army nor were there Christians in the government...

...Clergy and faithful refusing to heed NKVD persuasion and subscribe to the decisions of the noncanonical synod followed their bishops into prisons, labor camps, and Siberian exile...

...Thus the National Catholic Register, by no means unsympathetic to the plight of the Ukrainian Catholic church, called the permission to register parishes a "relegalization" of the Ukrainian Catholic church...

...Moreover, American policymakers need to stay well informed on these issues and the facts, as they now stand, are as follows: the kangaroo synod of 1946, organized by the state, has not been denounced by the state...

...Another is the former Communist leader, Erich Honecker, currently living with a Lutheran pastor is a village just outside Berlin...

...The Front, eager not to alienate 16 million Orthodox votes in May's elections, opted for the status quo...

...In Soviet parlance, the Ukrainian Catholic church has not been rehabilitated...

...Only a magnanimous and disinterested group can have any hope of winning the trust and sympathy of our people," says Cornea...

...He was on the three-person commission set up to oversee the disbandment of the Stasi...

...But Bishop Forck's role was more important than simply intervening to protect protesters...

...George's Cathedral, the most symbolic shrine of the Ukrainian Catholic church, should be returned for use to its rightful owners in time for Easter...

...it will mean we will not always be loved...

...In these movements lie the roots of the peaceful revolution that swept what seemed to be such an entrenched Communist leadership from power...

...While she fears the pressure now to return to a purely spiritual role, she believes that many church people continue to see a political role for the church...

...the Cathedral of St...

...In her letter to the pope, Cornea denounced the policy as a ploy to split the Catholic church...

...Bishop Gottfried Forck of the Lutheran church of Berlin-Brandenburg acknowledges that it was relatively easy in the past for the church to know what position to take...

...BORYS A. GUDZIAK Borys A. Gudziak is a junior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C...

...but in Berlin Marienkirche, Bishop Forck did...

...Physical attacks on Ukrainian Catholic clergy and faithful have not ceased...

...His intervention is seen as having been very important in preventing violence, particularly on the evening of October 7, 1989...

...He agreed, but only on condition that this would be done on an ecumenical basis...

...On the eve of the Roman encounter officials of the government Council for Religious Affairs in Kiev, the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, announced that after almost half a century of brutal repression, Ukrainian Catholics would be permitted to petition for the registration of individual parish communities...

...Their families were harassed, their children became victims of psychological intimidation in school and in the mandatory Communist youth organization, and were later submitted to institutional discrimination in the work place...

...Forced underground in 1946 after Stalin's attempt to liquidate it, this body of four to five million Catholic believers constitutes the largest of the Eastern or Byzantine Rite churches in the Catholic communion...

...Those who resisted six hundred priests and religious, five thousand lay people, and all six of the church's bishops were imprisoned...

...This will cause us trouble...

...Bishop Forck concludes on a somewhat sober note: "My hope for the future is for a church that doesn't live off being popular but tries to be faithful to Jesus Christ...

...It was precisely because her church had kept alive faith, courage, and a cultural tradition incompatible with state control that the government wanted to eliminate it, she wrote...

...Recent ecumenical developments have, however, drawn the Catholic church more into the life of the GDR...

...Bishop Forck, however, was more positive...

...candidate in Slavic church history at Harvard...

...All of the Ukrainian Catholic churches, monasteries, and ecclesiastical institutions the seminaries, schools, publishing houses, orphanages, and hospitals were handed over by the government to the Russian Orthodox church, confiscated outright, or simply closed...

...Only by being able to do this is social change possible in this country...

...The point of the matter is that the church as a whole is not a juridical person and has no legal rights to operate any ecclesiastical institutions...

...A perestroika built on broken promises, betrayed trust, and a neglect of basic human liberties will not bring the Soviet Union out of its vertiginous social, economic, environmental, and ethnic crisis...

...The moral and existential deprivation of Soviet citizens is a central cause of the tensions and dilemmas plaguing Soviet society...

...One needs only to recall that over approximately a twelve-month period inl988-1989 more than one thousand Russian Orthodox parishes were registered in western Ukraine...

...But following World War II, the Orthodox leader, Patriarch Justinian, collaborated with the Communist government in reab-sorbing the church into the Orthodox fold, and a canonically invalid Eastern Rite Catholic synod in 1948 requested reunion...

...Soviet PR specialists have been clouding the issue of persecuted churches by casting the government as mediator and peacemaker between opposing denominations when in reality the government is the cause of the suffering and tension...

...It is, however, the state, as sole proprietor of religious edifices according to Soviet law, that determines whether a community can lease a particular church edifice...

...As of mid-April, five months after the November announcement, out of approximately 800 applications submitted in western Ukraine, 26 have been reviewed in Kiev, and a grand total of 7 parishes have been registered in Moscow...

...In addition, a catacomb church existed, led by secretly consecrated bishops who applied repeatedly for the restitution of their church, and who suffered constant intimidation from the Securitate...

...It was back to the 1948 situation when the government had demanded charters from all denominations as a prerequisite for their official recognition a demand with which both branches of the Catholic church had refused to comply...

...However, as in most other aspects of its policy, the provisional government's concessions were partial...

...The outcome of May's elections as well as last month's bitter repression of dissidents bear out her concerns...

...Bishops Pavlo Vasylyk and Filemon Kurchabar, auxiliaries of Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk respectively, have documented numerous attacks on their priests...

...This happened particularly in Transylvania, where most Western Rite Catholics are Hungarian-speaking, or, to a lesser extent, German-speaking...

...During all this time a nucleus of Eastern Rite priests celebrated the liturgy in homes, to which the authorities increasingly turned a blind eye, provided only family and friends were present...

...Ukraine On December 1 of last year the president of the Soviet Union was received by the head of state of the Vatican...

...At the present rate, it will take another fifty years to register just those Ukrainian Catholic communities which have emerged from clandestinity...

...This state of affairs is troubling in itself and in light of broader processes...

...THE CHURCHES THAT WOULD NOT DIE VICTORY & STRUGGLE IN EASTERN EUROPE PEADAR KIRBY BORYS A. GUDZIAK JANICE BROUN East Germany While the churches' key role in East Germany's revolution last autumn is universally recognized here, church leaders are well aware that they now face new challenges in adapting to a pluralistic society...

...JANICE BROUN Janice Broun is Eastern Europe correspondent for News Network International.stern Europe correspondent for News Network International...

...He had given his personal backing to the more activist role being played by pastors and church groups in the GDR over the last decade, a role that had drawn opposition from more conservative pastors and congregations...

...On January 31 in the village of Stariava, Mostysk Region, Ivan Hel, head of the Committee for the Defense of the Ukrainian Catholic church, and the Rev...

...Furthermore, no steps have been taken to renounce the acts of 1945-46 which stripped the church of its juridical status and sent it into the underground...

...After all, the job of the pastor is not just to pray, to educate, or to bury the dead...

...Over the last decade, some fifty thousand Romanian-speaking Western Rite Catholics were moved from the eastern province of Moldavia to work in Transylvania's industrial centers...

...While the opening of parishes has been given lip service, absolutely nothing has been done to return to the Ukrainian Catholic church any of the ecclesiastical institutions (seminaries, schools, etc...

...It was in March of 1946, after the imprisonment of the entire Ukrainian Catholic hierarchy, that a noncanonical synod of terrorized Ukrainian Catholic clergy and laity (no bishops) was convened at the behest of the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB...

...Gorbachev's stance on minority issues such as the religious rights of Ukrainian Catholics and the national aspirations of a few million Baits are a revealing gauge of his vision and intentions...

...Under the supervision of state authorities and the presidency of two bishops of the Russian Orthodox church, the Ukrainian Catholic church was unanimously declared "self-liquidated" and "reunited" with the Russian Orthodox church...

...Following last December's revolution, one of the first acts of the newly formed National Salvation Front was to annul the decree outlawing the church...

...Incapable of shaking off the Communist past of its most powerful members, the Front did not grant immediate legal recognition to the church...

...Now, however, he told me, with Christians in government, "It won't be as simple as it was before...

...As Cornea foresaw, the machinations of the former regime continue to foment disunity within the nation...

...For the last two years of the Ceausescu regime, Cornea lived under house arrest...

...Unlike the Lutheran churches, which set up their own GDR federation in 1969 and split with the West German churches, the Catholic church never recognized the East German state...

...In a recently published book reproducing Stasi files for the period of January to November 1989, there is a revealing entry for Sunday, May 7, a local election polling day: "At the majority of Sunday services, the sermon didn't refer to the elections...

...They were allowed to retain their Orthodox ritual and married priesthood...

...The bishop has his own vision of the challenge ahead: "The church must be for the disadvantaged and the weak and this is going to involve different groups than before...

...It is no small wonder that the Ukrainian Catholic church has survived this systematic campaign of annihilation...

...Mikhail Gorbachev promised Pope John Paul II that the status of the Catholic church in the Soviet Union would be "normalized...

...Petro Zeleniukh were dragged from their car and severely beaten...

...Subsequently, however, the president of the Ukrainian Republic, Shevchenko, declared the Lviv city council's resolution null and void, apparently with direct authorization from Gorbachev, who was using his new presidential powers...

...Later, many of these converts reverted to Orthodoxy...

...To many observers and policymakers it seemed that finally the life of Ukrainian Catholic bishops, clergy, religious, and faithful would in fact be normalized...

...She explained that she felt the revolution was being betrayed, not least by the Front's decision to compete in May's elections as a political party instead of serving as an all-party interim government...

...Having taken the narrow path, it is an authoritative moral and spiritual force in Ukrainian society...

...One was the fortieth anniversary of the GDR, with foreign Communist leaders, including Mikhail Gorbachev, in attendance...

...The church's bishops emerged from the catacombs to participate in the first episcopal conference in Romania in forty years, representing a church of about two-and-a-half-million persons with six hundred priests...

...On April 6, the newly elected city council of Lviv, dominated by members of the Ukrainian democratic front called Rukh ("the movement"), had voted 124 to 6 that St...

...He stressed that the people should resist their dependence on the state, that they are not free to speak and to check out the accuracy of government statements...

...Americans will be well advised to analyze and question the shaky foundation being laid for the restructured Soviet Union...

...Pastors have the trust of the people and are accustomed to public speaking," he told me...

...Without state recognition a church cannot legally hold property, have employees, publish books and periodicals, or represent itself in the law courts...

...Marianne Birthler, a member of parliament and a teacher/cat-echist employed by the Lutheran church, told me that the legacy of the church being forced to take up social questions was to politicize it...

...Romania's struggle is far from over...

...violence and harassment continue...

...For a time, relations on a grassroots level between the Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholics were excellent...

...A German Jesuit who in 1978 met the former underground bishop of Maramures, Ion Dragomir, reports that in that diocese alone there were 450 priests working secretly, 146 of them ordained by Dragomir...

...But how are the churches to build on this credibility, on the fact that, as Bishop Forck put it to me, "the church's voice is listened to much more here than it is in the federal republic...

...Monsignor Ducke agrees...

...Carol Ordnung predicts that "attendance at normal church services will decrease because the churches no longer play a political role...

...Registration of Ukrainian Catholic parishes has been a sham...

...With its control of the media, its funding, and its ability to pressure voters through local workers' councils, the Front was in a singular position in Romania to carry out a large-scale election campaign...

...For Carl Ordnung, a Methodist lay preacher and head of the Christian Democratic Union's (CDU) peace and security department, what the church offered was its insistence on nonviolent methods of protest...

...Today it emerges from the underground with a hierarchy, new generations of priests educated in clandestine seminaries, and an energetic laity...

...The bishop's stand had also invited attention from state security, the dreaded Stasi...

...And yet, President Gorbachev's solemn promise of December to normalize the status of Ukrainian Catholics remains unfulfilled...

...Another result of this ecumenical process was the emergence of leaders, some of whom have now achieved national prominence...

...A lecturer at the University of Cluj, she was dismissed in 1983 for "corrupting" the students...

...Tens of thousands, including all but one of the bishops, did not survive the ordeal...

...The Romanian Eastern Rite church originated in 1698 among poverty-stricken Orthodox peasants who were pressured by their new ruler, the proselytizing Austrian Emperor Leopold, to become Catholics...

...George is closed and a decision taken to return it was rescinded on orders from Moscow...

...People came to call her the Transylvanian Joan of Arc...

...This would be given only after the bishops had presented a charter testifying to the validity of their ecclesiastical standing...

...However, with their own national identity under attack in the last two years, most Hungarian parishes stopped this practice, causing some resentment...

...The government is now trying to frame the issue in terms of interconfessional rivalry, claiming that Ukrainian Catholics should settle the matter of church buildings with the Orthodox...

...the other was the anniversary of local elections in which, according to citizens' groups, the government had issued fraudulent returns...

...One example he mentioned is former Stasi members, now subject to public hostility...

...Monsignor Ducke listed nine pastors who sat at the Round Table as representatives of political parties, but thought the involvement of the clergy in politics was a bad thing...

...Among the outstanding issues brought up by the pope was the case of the Ukrainian Catholic church...

...These regulations applied wherever there was no Western Rite church within six miles...

...Cornea complained early on that the National Liberal party and the National Peasants party, two independent parties which had played a key role in the movement for liberation, were being marginalized...

...Since the early 1980s, Lutheran churches (of which some half of the GDR's 16 million people are members) had been providing the only meeting places where people could gather to discuss the social issues that troubled them...

...she had addressed petition after petition to President Nicolae Ceausescu denouncing his policies, particularly his plan for the "systematization" of Romania's villages (see Thomas Swick, "Romania, Romania," Commonweal, May 5,1989...

...Bishop Forck revealed that he had four times refused to allow the former leader to reside on church property but when Honecker's lawyers said his life couldn't be guaranteed, the bishop relented...

...according to Soviet law there is no guarantee of fundamental liberties of expression and conscience as they have come to be understood in the Judeo-Christian world...

...In the persons of the world's two most influential Slavs, different and opposing ideological, cultural, religious, and ethnic worlds encountered each other...

...To give a chance of building a new society, we have to tell people to remember the past but not to be vengeful...

...Despite physical assaults, constant surveillance, fines and/or imprisonment, the underground bishops, priests, and religious continued to minister clandestinely to their flock...

...Bishop Forck was asked to provide independent moderators from the church...

...All but one of the bishops, Julius Hossu, died there...

...For those Romanians for whom communism has been such a devastating experience, the thought of its continuance on Romanian soil is abhorrent...

...A practical expression of this new cooperation came following the autumn revolution when permanent Round Table discussions between representatives of all political parties were established...

...The time has not passed for the advocacy of fundamental human principles which must be the building blocks of any just and productive society...

...If the Lutheran church played a crucial role in bringing about change in East German society, the same cannot be said about the Catholic church...

...Many who praised the Lutherans' role (and I heard nothing but praise for it) were critical of the Catholic leadership for standing aloof, though it is acknowledged that many lay Catholics were active...

...for a church of four to five million, seven parishes have been registered...

...Priests' homes were periodically searched, religious books and liturgical vestments were confiscated...

...Against all odds, the resolve of the Ukrainian Catholics was sustained throughout the half-century saga of suffering...

...In East Berlin, Bishop Forck had attended protest prayer services in the Gethsemane Church and, addressing police chiefs present, had urged them not to incite the demonstrators...

...The meeting was heralded as the beginning of a new age in Soviet-Catholic relations...

...The best-known internationally is Rainer Epplemann, head of the small Democratic Awakening party...

...He is also a Ph.D...

...Though the Eastern Rite bishops have now taken over the struggle to maintain their church's identity, Cornea's work as a dissident is by no means over...

...When local government officials have made decisions addressing injustices of the past, they have been rescinded by central authorities...

...All this serves to underline the challenges now facing the churches...

...While the harassment and violence continue, almost nothing is being done to address the consequences of the injustices of 1946...

...Thus almost all its dioceses straddle the border and it has only two bishops resident in the GDR, in Dresden and Berlin...

...He pointed out that some of these are Poles and Czechs, giving the Catholic church an interest "in the European role of the GDR and not just in relations with the federal republic...

...By the late '80s other issues, such as environmental destruction and human rights abuses by the regime, were also being addressed...

...On the seventh day of each subsequent month, protests had taken place against this alleged fraud, protests which the security forces clamped down on with severity...

...Soon after the emergence of modern Romania in 1918, the Romanian Catholic church was honored in the new constitution as "Romania's second church...

...Cornea is a member of the Romanian Eastern Rite Catholic church, a church whose forty-year suppression under communism has many parallels with that of the Ukrainian Catholic church...

...But it continued to resort to other maneuvers to undermine resistance, encouraging Eastern Rite Catholics to attend Western Rite churches and to demand Mass in Romanian...

...Those active in politics have taken leaves of absence from their church duties and will have to choose one or the other, he said...

...In January, she resigned from the Front, a step followed by other leading dissidents...