De-Estrangement?

The leaders of the ecumenical movement--the central committee of the World Council of Churches--met last week for the first time in Communist territory. In Hungary's resort town of GalyatetOe, 85 miles northeast of Budapest, the 90 committeemen, plus 300-odd "fraternal delegates," observers and assorted bureaucrats of the 162-church World Council gathered for their annual meeting. Before an assembly including delegates from Communist China, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Poland, the council's Dutch General Secretary W. A. Visser 't Hooft said: "The World Council lives its own life in complete independence from any particular political system or economic system or ideology." To people who believe that the conflict between Communism and Christianity is not merely political, economic or ideological, but a crucial matter of faith, some of the proceedings in Hungary must have sounded puzzling and perhaps alarming.

Bishop Albert Bereczky of Hungary's Reformed Church proudly announced that Hungarian Protestants had contributed some $17,000 in a single Sunday to help finance the gathering, and called on the council "to do everything it could toward obtaining a ban on arms of massive destruction and toward throwing a bridge between different countries." Dr. O. Frederick Nolde of Philadelphia, director of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, told the meeting that "experimental tests of nuclear weapons should be discontinued, limited or controlled." His plea was solidly backed by Sir Kenneth Grubb of London, Bishop Otto Dibelius of Berlin and Dr. Martin Niemoeller, president of Germany's Evangelical Church of Hesse-Nassau. "As early as 1954," said Niemoeller, "the Pope pointed to the dangers to mankind in the genetic effects of radiation. The churches want to know what the World Council has to say on this question."

One of the most experienced Protestant collaborators with a Communist regime, Czech Theologian Joseph L. Hromadka of Prague, called upon the World Council "to combat the petrified notions, prejudices, self-isolation and inner estrangement that prevail in both East and West." De-estrangement is already well under way: United Lutheran Franklin Clark Fry of New York announced that the Russian Orthodox Moscow Patriarchate was ready to arrange a conference some time next winter with representatives of the World Council.

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