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Nihil Obstat
Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-Central Europe and Russia
By Sabrina P. Ramet Duke University Press
Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7773-3
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Communist Legacy and the New Religious Landscape
Nihil obstat—nothing stands in the way. These words, signed by the Catholic diocesan censor, once were inscribed on the reverse of a book's title page, thereby signifying, to the faithful, that the volume in question contained no doctrinal or moral errors. This inscription was followed by the word, imprimatur—let it be printed—which was signed by the archbishop or bishop.
In affixing nihil obstat as the title of this book, I do not imply any guarantee that its contents are "doctrinally without error." Rather, the words are employed to suggest that, with the collapse of the communist power monopoly throughout what used to be called the Soviet-East European region, literally nothing stands in the way of new religious movements, groups, and associations, including many previously illegal.
In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s the religious landscape throughout the region gave the striking impression that traditional religions, generally organized on a hierarchical basis, clearly predominated. Here, one found the Roman Catholic Church of Poland, headed by the primate and supported by archbishops and bishops, the Romanian Orthodox Church, headed by a patriarch and supported by metropolitans and archimandrites, the Lutheran Church of Hungary headed by its bishop, and so forth. The processes of secularization and religious innovation which had spread throughout North America and Western Europe seemed unable to penetrate the communist domain, while traditional religions seemed to flourish. Communism in its own brutal way ultimately protected the religions of which it approved, crushing rival religious associations that failed to obtain its sanction.
A comparison with the precommunist era is revealing. In Russia, for example, the communists should be credited for eradicating the Flagellants (the Khlysty) as well as the so-called Sect of the Castrated (the Skoptsy), which split off from the Flagellants in the late eighteenth century in the province of Oryol. The Sect of the Flagellants, centered in the city of Kostroma, was created in the mid-seventeenth century by Danilo Filippovich, a Russian peasant who claimed to be an incarnation of God. At first, the sect displayed marked tendencies toward political protest, but these evaporated in the course of the nineteenth century. The Castrates, also known as the "White Doves," broke away from the Flagellants in the 1770s. They were largely inspired by Andrei Ivanov Blokhin, a runaway serf, and Kondratii Ivanovich Selivanov, a peasant from the village of Stolbov—Selivanov claiming to be the reincarnation of both Jesus Christ and the murdered Tsar Peter III of Russia. The Bolsheviks did not object to the sect's practice of self-mutilation, but they abominated its members' antiestablishment attitudes; after 1929 the Sect of the Castrated was subjected to stiff repression. In its abomination of radical, antihierarchical sectarian movements, the Bolshevik regime displayed attitudes that paralleled and underpinned those of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Bolsheviks were especially suspicious of mystical and occult groups, and as early as February 1918 they issued an order to local Theosophists, Anthroposophists, and other unorthodox societies to terminate their activities by year's end. Although the Bolshevik government disbanded Moscow's Free Academy of Spiritual Culture, closed presses that had been publishing occult and mystical materials, confiscated occult books from libraries, and exiled almost all of the leading intellectual figures associated with these currents, accompanying these actions with a barrage of volleys in the party press, occult societies continued their work in Russia until 1929, when a dramatic escalation of antireligious campaigns (including the arrests of members) wiped out almost all traces of them. The Bolsheviks also were responsible for the suppression of the Old Believers, the True Orthodox Church, the Belorussian Orthodox Church, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and they erected formidable barriers to the continued work of various Protestant groups, not to mention the Sufi (Islamic) orders, while some believers, such as the Mennonites, fled Russia at that time. Some pockets of sectarianism remained (e.g., small groups of priguni (jumpers), nostoiannie (insisters), and maksimisti (maximalists) in Armenia in the late 1970s), but most Soviet-era writers on religion expressed confidence that the general trend was toward the eventual extinction of these groups.
In Romania, Baptists, Pentecostals, and other evangelical Christian groups enjoyed relative freedom from 1928 until 1937 before being repressed under Marshal Antonescu. But after the communists seized power, these groups were seen as "posing very serious internal security problems, and great vacillation and perplexity always have existed among state authorities regarding the wisest ways to deal with them."
Or again, in Czechoslovakia the Jehovah's Witnesses, who began their activity in the Czech lands in 1907, were a registered religious community from 1934 until 1939. Banned by the Nazis in 1939, they resumed their activity in 1945, only to be outlawed for a second time by the communists in 1949.
The most celebrated case of suppression involved the Greek-Rite Catholics, banned in Ukraine, Romania, and Czechoslovakia after World War II. But in one or more communist countries other groups also were denied legal registration—among them, Christian Science, the Christ Believer Nazarene Congregation, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon), and the Jehovah's Witnesses. Newer religious associations, such as the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the Krishna Society, likewise were denied legal registration—in most cases until 1988 or 1989.
But communism sometimes worked in the opposite direction, offering certain groups degrees of latitude and equality to which they had been unaccustomed. In Poland, for example, the Mariavites, a mystical sect founded by the Franciscan nun Maria Felicja Kozkowska in 1806, which allowed women as well as men to serve as priests and bishops, was able to function freely only after the communist takeover. The same applies to the Methodist Church, the Reformed Church, the Seventh-Day Adventists, and the Baptists in Poland, the Church of John in the German Democratic Republic, etc.
In general, communist authorities distinguished among three categories of religious associations: (1) legally recognized, co-opted associations; (2) legally recognized associations treated with distrust, kept at a distance, but "tolerated"; and (3) proscribed associations. To obtain "co-opted" status, religious associations often had to make adjustments. In the GDR the Evangelical Church was forced to sever its organizational ties with Evangelical dioceses in West Germany and to create an Evangelical Church Federation that coincided with state boundaries. In Bulgaria the Congregational Church was pressured to subordinate local parishes to a central authority, contrary to Congregational teachings, in order to simplify communist control. Muslims in Central Asia were required to set up a governing board that would simultaneously decide policies for Islamic communities and coordinate those policies with Soviet authorities. And in Romania a "board of electors" was established on communist instructions to assume responsibility for electing bishops—the board to include both party officials and Church representatives. More examples could be cited, but the point is clear: the communists wanted to control religious life and therefore "adjusted" religious organizations, where possible, to suit their needs. Religious associations such as the Karaites and the Bah'ai, which dispensed with clergy, or the Doukhobors (a pacifist sect of Russian Christians), who disdained any form of ecclesiastical organization or hierarchical institution-building, were unlikely to obtain the approval of communist authorities.
This overall form of control, however, was only one aspect of the communist program vis-à-vis religion. To complete the picture, it should be noted that the communists also aspired to control specific aspects of Church organization and to censor and repress religious life. The communists further controlled religion by reserving the right to approve or reject candidates for ecclesiastical office, seminary entrants, seminary curricula, the content of Church newspapers, church construction, and even in some countries the content of parish bulletins. They censored religion by determining which organizations would be allowed to function, and they often succeeded in reshaping the ideologies of the Churches (as in the case of Hungary, where both the Reformed and Lutheran churches subscribed to the so-called Theology of Diakonia, or Service to the State). Last, they repressed religion—selectively where more "moderate" communists were concerned or entirely (in due course) where hardliners held sway—because religion always remained a rival worldview.
Communist guarantees were often two-edged swords. For example, the assurance that religion was "the private affair of the individual" meant primarily that religious associations had no right to play any role in public life or to speak out on public issues. Or again, communist guarantees of the right of worship also pointedly excluded other activities (this exclusion varied considerably from country to country).
Communism, supposedly dedicated to the eradication of religion ("unutterable vileness" in Lenin's phrase), produced some interesting anomalies. In the GDR the Socialist Unity Party (SED) as late as 1956 enforced the legal obligation of citizens to pay a Church tax, and it allowed theological faculties to function within the state universities right up until the end. In Poland the state allowed a Catholic university to function in Lublin, and (after 1980) it increasingly treated the Church as a partner in policy. In Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria the communist state paid salaries to clergy. In Yugoslavia the communist party financed the reconstruction of a number of churches after the destruction of World War II. And in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s the communist party even organized pilgrimages to religious sites, compelling its cadres and others to take part (for reasons explained in chapter 5).
These activities were complemented by activities of a different nature—the bugging of Catholic confessionals and the apartments of Protestant ministers, the enlisting of priests and pastors in the service of the secret police, and, at the height of Stalinism, the trials and imprisonment of bishops and metropolitans on various pretexts, in some cases including treason.
Communism defined democracy in terms of strict adherence to approved content; liberalism defines democracy in terms of strict adherence to approved procedures. Although the systems that have replaced communism in the Russian-East European region have had a mixed record in moving toward liberal democracy, most of them have adopted at least some elements of liberal proceduralism. In the process, the rights and possibilities of religious associations have expanded enormously—not merely among religious denominations that have been functioning in the region, but among new entrants to the local religious competition.
The postcommunist transition has not been smooth in strictly political areas—or as it applies to religious associations. In several countries, including Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania, serious disputes have occurred over restitution of Church properties confiscated by the communists. In Bulgaria and Ukraine, communism had such a subversive effect on local Orthodox churches that rival patriarchs have appeared, mobilizing rival congregations that have not refrained from force in their quest for aggrandizement and facilities. Albania's Orthodox community has faced a rather unusual difficulty with the ecumenical patriarch insisting on the presence of a Greek patriarch to head the Albanian Church. In Poland, theocratic impulses have polarized the country and caused many citizens to worry about excessive clerical influence. And in Belarus, Slovakia, Croatia, and Serbia, authoritarian systems remain in place, with the result that local Churches (at least in all but Belarus) have found themselves replaying the oppositionist roles to which they became accustomed under communism.
This book is concerned primarily, but not exclusively, with the politics of religion in the twentieth century. Certain chapters delve more deeply into the past, while some focus exclusively on the postcommunist period.
Chapter 2 sets forth a theory about policy change in communist systems, taking the Soviet Union, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and Poland as case studies. It outlines a kind of ideal type of revolutionary political development and argues that communist systems tended to progress through stages of one or another variation of this ideal type, with parallel processes affecting all policy spheres, including the religious.
Chapter 3 surveys the wide spectrum of Christian experience in the German Democratic Republic (1949–90), focusing particularly on the activities of the Evangelical Church. Chapters 4, 6, and 8 take a long view, tracing the development of patterns of religio-political interaction over centuries in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Albania. Chapter 5 takes up the convoluted history of the Catholic Church's relations with the communist and postcommunist governments of Czechoslovakia (1948–92) and with the governments of the Czech and Slovak successor states. The emphasis in chapter 5 is on the concept of communist culture as an artifact of systematic policy construction and programmatic design. Chapter 7 examines the ways in which the Romanian Orthodox Church has become infected with intolerance, taking up the story in 1878.
Chapters 9 and 10 deal with post-Soviet religious affairs, examining the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian religious scene. Chapter 9 includes a retrospective survey of the years 1927–89 and then pursues the story in more detail. In chapter 10 the plight of three rival Orthodox Churches and of the Greek-Rite Catholic Church is discussed.
The book's final section examines the new evangelism sweeping the region (chapter 11) and the contrast between the Bulgarian Orthodox and Polish Catholic Churches (chapter 12). New cults and sects making their appearance in the area are discussed in chapter 13. Chapters 11 and 13 reveal a proliferation of new religious organizations and movements, including fringe groups ranging from the Church of Witchcraft to Satanism to UFO cults, while chapter 12 examines how the contrasting histories of the Bulgarian and Polish Churches have led to virtually opposite results. In the conclusion some points about the politics of religion are summarized.
"Under communism," Jakub Karpinski has noted, "it was easier for the Church to determine what was moral and immoral. Everything linked to communism was immoral. Now it is not so clear." Where once there was one big demon and one big champion, now there are a multitude of little demons and little champions; what is more, far more actors are situated within a gray zone of moral ambiguity or ambivalence. A big demon can appear without a big champion, but a big champion must have a big demon. This is one reason why, as Karpinski has observed, "Communism was paradoxically a time of tremendous influence for the Church."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Nihil Obstat by Sabrina P. Ramet. Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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