General Secretary defends WCC’s Cold War record

GENEVA (ENI) – The general secretary of the World Council of Churches has strongly affirmed and defended the role played by the WCC during the Cold War.

 In an interview by ENI, Konrad Raiser, a prominent Lutheran theologian from Germany, responded to recent suggestions that the WCC had not done enough to support dissident groups within the churches of Eastern Europe under communism and that the WCC needed to exercise a "self-critical" examination of its actions during the Cold War.

Canon Paul Oestreicher of Coventry Cathedral, England, an expert on eastern Europe, and a leading ecumenist, recently told a German magazine, Publik-Forum, that the WCC was duty-bound to examine its own past. Oestreicher said he believed in retrospect that the WCC, like himself, had sometimes stressed the importance of dialogue with eastern Europe at the expense of giving support to Christians who opposed the communist authorities.

Raiser told ENI that "self-critical" assessment was necessary for the WCC, but he would not "want to make a generalized statement" about the organization.

There were areas where the WCC could have done more to maintain contacts with dissident groups, he said, but he stressed that the WCC had been involved in considerable work with these groups outside the glare of publicity. He was involved, as a WCC staff member from 1973 to 1983, in such activities, he said. However, he added, "in retrospect we might have done more publicly."

"But we would continue to defend without apology what we did to draw the churches of eastern Europe into the ecumenical movement, in full recognition of the limitations of their position, to draw them out of isolation ... accepting that this could only be done within certain narrowly defined limits, but within these limits to do as much as possible," Raiser said.

"Reservations" about new research

The WCC was sharing in plans to organize a meeting in the near future – in cooperation with various research institutes in Germany – to assess the WCC’s activities in eastern Europe, Raiser said. "We do not want to control, influence or mastermind this," he told ENI. "I think it is much more important to have an open discussion."

Media interest in Germany in the issue of the WCC’s activities in eastern Europe has been generated in recent months following the announcement that the German Interior Ministry is to finance a half-million Deutschmark research program by a prominent church historian, Professor Gerhard Besier, into these activities. Raiser told ENI that he had "considerable reservations" about the research on the basis of previous books published by Besier on the issue of church and state in East Germany.

Besier, of Heidelberg University, is well known for his controversial, three-volume history of the Protestant Churches in East Germany. Some have praised the thoroughness with which Besier investigated the archives of the East German secret service, the Stasi. But others have claimed that Besier’s works paint a one-sided picture of the churches in East Germany in suggesting that the churches cooperated too uncritically with the communist authorities.