The extraordinary events of 1989 are half-forgotten as clerics look elsewhere
THIRTY
YEARS AGO, amazing events were unfolding on the eastern side of the
Iron Curtain.
A liberal government came to power in Poland. Hungary’s border with Austria opened, allowing people across the region to taste life in the West. Finally, in November, the Berlin wall came down, and a month later, Romania’s nasty regime was toppled. Even the Soviet Union held contested elections and the communist monopoly on power crumbled.
With less bloodshed than most people would have imagined, a form of governance based on atheistic Marxism lost its grip. Among the many happy consequences, freedom of religion, which had been repressed or circumscribed under communism, was restored. These days, Europe’s eastern half is the most devout part of the continent, in part because its Christian churches bear the laurels of persecution. At least some ordinary believers in that region appreciate the chance to practise faith without fear.
A liberal government came to power in Poland. Hungary’s border with Austria opened, allowing people across the region to taste life in the West. Finally, in November, the Berlin wall came down, and a month later, Romania’s nasty regime was toppled. Even the Soviet Union held contested elections and the communist monopoly on power crumbled.
With less bloodshed than most people would have imagined, a form of governance based on atheistic Marxism lost its grip. Among the many happy consequences, freedom of religion, which had been repressed or circumscribed under communism, was restored. These days, Europe’s eastern half is the most devout part of the continent, in part because its Christian churches bear the laurels of persecution. At least some ordinary believers in that region appreciate the chance to practise faith without fear.
Given
all that, one might imagine their leaders would be looking for ways to
commemorate and ponder the fall of communism. Whether through ceremonies
or formal speeches, one would expect them to be voicing gratitude for
the events of 1989, while offering some reflection on how the dark
communist night was allowed to descend. In fact, those clerics seem far
more preoccupied with what they regard as the terrible maladies of the
present day.
In different ways, two recent pronouncements
illustrate that point. In Krakow, the Polish city from which Pope John
Paul II emerged as a castigator of communism, the local prelate recently
made an attack on “LGBT ideology” which was vitriolic by the standards
of current Catholic debates.
Speaking on the 75th anniversary of
the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis, Archbishop Marek Jedraszewski
compared the promotion of gay rights with the totalitarian ideologies
which Poland had endured during the 20th century. “A red plague is not
gripping our land anymore [but] a new one…wants to control our souls,
hearts and minds,” he declared on August 1st. “"Not Marxist, Bolshevik,
but born of the same spirit, neo-Marxist.”
Feelings about LGBT
issues had been running high in Poland after a gay-pride march in
Bialystok on July 20th was attacked with rocks. As news of the prelate’s
speech spread round the Catholic world, it was denounced by James
Martin, a prominent American Jesuit who wants a softening of Catholic
attitudes to gay people, for “incendiary comparisons” which could “only
promote hatred and violence.”
Patriarch Kirill, the head of the
Russian Orthodox church (pictured above), has plenty to say on issues of
sexuality (he calls gay marriage an “apocalyptic” portent). But in a
recent, elaborate pronouncement he singled out a different aspect of the
modern world. His focus was on digital technology, virtual reality and
“transhumanism”, the idea that the species can and should be improved
through artificial intelligence.
Addressing atomic scientists in
the city of Sarov, he warmed to some familiar themes (the horrific chaos
of the 1990s, and the noble efforts of the church and the nuclear
establishment to preserve Russia’s nuclear arsenal),but also mapped out
some newish ones.
“We are living witnesses of the birth of a new
myth, the myth of transhumanism which reflects belief in scientific
progress as an end in itself. [It] is taking possession of an ever
greater number of human minds [and] spreading through all spheres of
culture, cinema, literature, computer games. The idea that through
technology alone we can overcome death and sickness, social injustice
and hunger, even spiritual disorder, proves all too attractive to
people, especially those with no faith in God. “
In a
wide-ranging and learned reflection, drawing on great Russian and early
Christian thinkers, there is one huge lacuna: any negative reference to
the communist regime which in 1923 closed Sarov’s once-magnificent
monastery and its nine churches. Kirill laments that modern relativism
makes it hard to preach the Gospel but fails to mention that worse
impediments existed in the past. He condemns over-ambitious efforts to
re-engineer the human species but has nothing to say about the Bolshevik
dream of “creating a new type of human being”, whatever the cost in
blood.
One might expect a clearer historical memory in Romania,
which endured a brutal communist regime but now has a pro-Western
orientation. But there, too, the leadership of the Orthodox church, to
which most people adhere, has surprisingly little to say about the
communist era. Among the country’s Eastern-rite Catholics (who worship
in an Orthodox way but accept Rome’s authority), things are a bit
different. In June, they welcomed Pope Francis to Romania where he
acknowledged as “blessed” (a step towards becoming saints) seven
Eastern-rite bishops who were killed by the communists.
But there
has been no equivalent gesture by the Orthodox leadership, although
plenty of their number endured terrible suffering or death under the
Marxists. According to Mihail Neamtu, a Romanian philosopher and
politician, “ordinary Orthodox folk revere the memory of those who died
for their faith, but the church leadership is more hesitant, because
such remembrance would raise awkward historical questions - including
the hierarchs’ collaboration with communism.”
For all the huge
differences between countries in the region, a similar point might be
made in many of them. Today’s clerical leaders, across central and
eastern Europe, form an unbroken chain with those who in one way or
another survived communism by establishing various kinds of modus
vivendi with the system. The Polish Catholic leaders maintained a
courageously independent voice, but even they had to pick their disputes
with the regime carefully. In Russia, as writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn
noted with regret, the clerical compromise with power was more abject
than in Poland: the Russian Orthodox church escaped near annihilation in
the early 1960s by agreeing to parrot Soviet foreign policy. In the
immediate aftermath of communism there was a flurry of revelations about
collaboration between Russian hierarchs and the KGB, but soon the files
snapped shut. In Romania, the files were never opened.
In Russia,
some special factors come into play. Vladimir Putin has drawn the
current Orthodox leadership into a close political partnership in which
both sides laud the need for a strong and geopolitically confident
Russian state. By that logic, the Soviet era is not remembered as a time
of religious persecution so much as a period when Russian power was
respected in the world. The church does commemorate the “martyrs’ killed
for their faith in the 1930s but its leaders seem to devote more energy
these days to the victory over the Nazis, a sentiment that easily
overlaps with Soviet nostalgia.
All this helps to explain why, 30
years on, the moral and spiritual analysis of the communist era is
still unfinished business. That is a troubling state of affairs, even if
one accepts, for the sake of argument, the claim that challenges no
less pressing beset mankind in the early 21st century. Understanding the
pathologies of the past is surely a prerequisite for negotiating a
route to the future.