The grim atrocities of repressive regimes have been increasingly inflicted on Christ’s body during the past months. Many Christians have of late been arrested, jailed, exiled, even martyred for acting as faithful disciples of Christ.
Consider this litany of recent incidents:
•The Philippines
Two Catholic priests have been deported, several hundred lay leaders have been arrested, and two Catholic radio stations and magazines have been suppressed in this country, which is 84% Catholic.
Father Edward Gerlock of Binghamton, N.Y., was one of the deported priests. He had been a missionary in the Philippines for 14 years, spending most of his time with the poor farmers of Mindanao and, more recently, in the slums of Manila. When he protested continued martial law in the Philippines and persecution in Korea, the Maryknoll priest was suddenly arrested and deported last November, “for having shown undue interest in the political process and affairs of the country.” Father Albert Booms of Harbor Beach, Michigan and Maryknoll Sister Jean O’Brien were also forced to leave.
In the area of Mindanao, the scene of rebel activity against the Marcos government, several hundred lay leaders have been charged with “subversive activity.” Most of them are principals and teachers in Catholic schools, parish team coordinators, announcers for Catholic radio stations, and other Church officials.
The two radio stations, one operated by the Jesuits and the other by Maryknoll, were seized by Marcos’ police in late November. Both stations had been critical of the regime. Two Catholic magazines, The Communicator, and Signs of the Times, were shut down in early December after featuring articles critical of social conditions and martial law.
All this is part of what the Marcos government and its controlled press describe as a crackdown against the “Christian Left.”
Meanwhile, in the last days of Kissinger’s term as Secretary of State, negotiations were proceeding which would grant to the Marcos regime between one and one and a half billion dollars from the U.S. in military and economic aid, in exchange for the right to keep American military bases in that country.
• South Africa
Police have dramatically intensified their repression against those church groups which are openly non-supportive of the government’s apartheid policies.
The headquarters of major religious organizations have been searched, and documents have been confiscated from such groups as the Christian Institute, the South African Council of Churches, the Anglican Diocese office, the Christian Academy, two branches of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and the Ecumenical Literature Distribution Trust.
Cedric Mayson, editor of a magazine published by the Christian Institute, was arrested while on his honeymoon last November. Among others, the evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan, has protested this action to South African Prime Minister John Vorster.
Bernadette Mosala and Barney Ngakane, both staff members of the Christian Institute, were likewise arrested late last year, along with Myrtle Wyngaard of the Christian Academy, and a staff member of the Ecumenical Literature Trust.
These recent arrests came in the wake of the rioting in Soweto and growing international pressures on South Africa’s policies of racial separation and oppression.
Among the materials confiscated by the government were thousands of Christmas posters produced by the South African Council of Churches. They reproduced a newspaper picture taken during the Soweto riots showing one black child holding the body of another, with the caption, “Is there room for Christ this Christmas?”
Meanwhile, the thrust of diplomatic efforts toward Namibia, Rhodesia and South Africa in the closing days of the Ford presidency, (policies which will likely be maintained under the new administration) is to encourage a settlement that will insure the survival of the South African regime, along with that of the vast Western investments entrenched there.
• Rhodesia
In neighboring Rhodesia, Catholic Bishop Donald Lamont, whose diocese includes frontier regions on the Mozambique border, was recently sentenced to 10 years of hard labor for failing to report on the activities of African nationalist guerrillas. During his trial Lamont, who is white and Irish, justified his order of pastoral and medical aid to Rhodesian guerrillas in his diocese.
Bishop Lamont’s sentence is currently under appeal and expected to be heard sometime this month. Christians throughout the world have pledged their prayers and support, creating world-wide visibility for his case.
Two black Catholic priests recently arrested unfortunately lack an international following to plead their cause. Father Patrick Mutume and Father Ignatius Mhonda were picked up by Rhodesian authorities late last year. Under Rhodesian law, no charges need be made against them for 30 days.
The violence of revolutionary forces opposed to the Rhodesian government has also taken its toll on the church. In what was apparently an ambush by guerrillas, a 71 year old German-born former bishop, Adolf G. Schmitt, was killed, along with two German colleagues, Father Weggarten, principal of a mission school, and Sister Maria van den Berg.
• South Korea
The 18 Christians arrested last March for calling for a restoration of democracy continue to languish in jail. Three of them, priests, began a hunger strike in December. During the same month the Korean National Council of Churches launched a week of prayer on behalf of persecuted Christians, protesting the violations of human rights in Korea and elsewhere.
On the last day of 1976, the Christian poet, Kim Chi Ha, long a critic of the Park regime and already in prison, was sentenced to another seven years for what he had written. While two of the 18 Christians were freed before the year’s end, four other Protestant ministers who protested Park’s one-man rule were given prison sentences of five and six years.
At an international ecumenical consultation held recently in Seoul, Korean Christians declared that “labor organizations were early brought under government control, the educational establishment has been undermined until it is virtually an instrument of official policy, the press has been completely subdued, business organizations are integrated into the government power structure, and now even the Christian Churches are subjected to a variety of pressures to prevent them from continuing as a social force independent of official control.”
Yet not even the revelations of bribery of U.S. members of Congress by the Korean government can loose the hold of the economic, political, and military ties binding the U.S. and Korean regimes together.
• Latin America
The escalation of the anti-clerical campaign in Latin America is described in Don Goertzen’s “Tightening the Vise,” page 8. The rites of repression are most grim in these countries.
The most common characteristic of followers of Christ who undergo repression, imprisonment, and exile is that they have identified themselves with the poor and oppressed for the sake of the gospel. They are living in simple obedience to the biblical imperatives to seek justice. They view governments’ social and political systems from the vantage point of their victims. This sacrificial witness to Christ’s kingdom is regarded by the rulers of the age as threatening to their assertion of power.
Of course, evangelism and church life which fails to embody the gospel’s call to the poor and to justice goes on uninhibited in all these lands. In fact, on the list of Christians persecuted by governments of the so-called “free world”, evangelicals are conspicuous by their total absence. To my mind, that reflects, not the mercy of God, but the frequently innocuous nature of the message which they proclaim.
Those regimes which repress the gospel whenever its implications become incompatible with their own are found on the left as well as the right.
• Poland
Church-state relations have come to a new head in Poland. The plight of workers, supposedly ruled by their own party, has been so miserable that Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski has urged workers to insist on adequate wages when they are being underpaid. The violence in 1956, 1970 and June of last year would not have occurred, Wyszynski said, if there had been social justice in Poland.
In a pastoral letter sent a few weeks before Christmas, Cardinal Wyszynski warned 30 million Polish Catholics about “an intense atheistic campaign…delays in granting permission for the construction of new churches and chapels in the new suburbs of many cities, religious discrimination, curbing of the rights of workers to worship, and intense anti-religious propaganda in the mass media.”
• East Germany
The pattern of discrimination against Christian young people in East Germany caused a 47 year old Lutheran pastor, Oskar Brusewitz, to set himself on fire in the marketplace of Zeitz. Propped beside his dying body was a sign reading, “The churches accuse communism of oppressing Christian young people.”
• China
While the revolutionary efforts made in China to provide for the basic needs of humanity seem incontestable, one observes how thoroughly Maoist ideology dominates its people, and its effect on the church. A recent news article about one of the very few Catholic priests in China, Father Fu Tin-shan, was hardly encouraging. Father Fu stated that he loved Mao more that God, declaring, “We love the motherland and that is why our spirits will go to heaven.”
Echoing countless Western Christians when asked their position on war, Father Fu stated that the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” “means killing your own countrymen. The fourth commandment says to love your motherland. When the country is threatened by the enemy, you must defend it.”
• Soviet Union
The mother of imprisoned Baptist pastor Georgi Vins claims that 110 other Baptists (the classification for almost all evangelicals in the Soviet Union) are currently incarcerated.
I want to draw the attention of concerned Christians in America particularly to repression in those nations in which the United States helps weave its web through protective economic, military, and diplomatic relationships. These ties are necessary to the survival of regimes such as those in the Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, and numerous Latin American countries.
When Hitler was committing atrocities in Germany, the small band of confessing Christians began resisting only as the Nazi repression began to touch fellow believers. Yet that stand was taken against only an isolated portion of the barbarity visited upon all those who dissented, either out of conscience or because of their Jewish identity, from the Nazi vision.
Likewise, the contemporary repression of Christians here documented reveals only the tips of gargantuan icebergs of brutality, holding whole societies in fear and crushing thousands of unnamed victims.
In the Philippines between 6,000 and 16,000 still are imprisoned under the martial law of the Marcos regime. An authoritative report by Amnesty International, based upon extensive research there, found that 70% of the prisoners whom they interviewed had been tortured.
A defector from the South African army, Bill Anderson, recently substantiated reports of widespread, indiscriminate torture used by South African troops fighting in Namibia, where they are also attempting to create a free- fire zone along the border with Angola.
The brazen moves against the prophetic elements of the church in Latin American are only widening the circle of persecution by regimes who stifle any voices raised against them.
And Victor Bukovsky, the Soviet activist for human rights recently released in a prisoner exchange, said that prison life became harsher in the Soviet Union after the signing of the Helsinki accords.
This is, admittedly, a depressing note on which to begin the new year. But there is always hope when the truth begins to be unveiled, despite the deep distress it causes us.
The biblical guidelines for the life of the church are a manifesto for how believers are to live with boundless love in a world in which they exist as a subculture. Such a view is not conditioned by the New Testament culture in ways that negate its relevance for believers in 1977. Rather, this minority status, the typical biblical image of the church, is derived from the ultimate allegiance of Christians to a Lord who reigns over all other lords, and has initiated a new order which establishes justice.
The litany of the church’s contemporary persecution underscores biblical truths about the life of those who follow Christ. Historical contexts do change; at points, persecutions may be as harsh as the instances noted in recent months. In other times, an apparent peace between the church and society will invite alliance with the powers of the age. But in guaranteeing itself against persecution, the church loses its ultimate allegiance to the King of kings in order to protect its temporal security.
When Christ calls us to follow, we know that his way is the way of the cross. There is never any immunity promised from the suffering which his sacrificial love entailed. But he does promise to be with us, and he does offer us the only true life--life rooted in his resurrected power.
So let us in this new year make fast our common bonds with sisters and brothers around the globe who suffer this day for the sake of the gospel, asking for the strength for all of us to be faithful, and knowing that God’s power saves and redeems, giving the final Victory.
Wes Michaelson was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.
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