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COPYRIGHT 2005 East European Quarterly
This article explores the role of history as a predicting factor in the cases of the Polish Catholic Church, the Romanian Orthodox Church, and the East Germany Protestant churches. By examining the role of the Christian church in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, this research suggests that the historical role that the Polish Catholic Church and the Romanian Orthodox Church each played foreshadowed the role that each would play under their respective communist regimes and then in the fall of those regimes. The case of the East Germany Protestant churches however seems, on the surface, to offer a contradiction to historical precedent.
The Polish Catholic Church was in opposition to the imposed precommunist governments in Poland, opposed the communists when they were in power, and played a significant role in causing the downfall of the communist regime. The Romanian Orthodox Church submitted to the temporal authorities before World War II, while the communists were in power, and during the downfall of the communist regime. In contrast, the German Protestant churches, with their history of submission to secular regional authorities and submission to an all-German church under the Nazis seemed to alter their historical approach by standing in opposition to the East German communist regime and aiding in its downfall. This research postulates that the apparent divergent case of the East German Protestant churches was consistent with historical precedent: after WWII both the tradition of regionalism and submission to an all-German ecclesiastical authority converged but the communist authorities were outside both traditions, so the East German Protestant churches felt free to stand in opposition to this government.
History as a predicting factor for Church institutional behavior is useful in all three case studies, but the East German case illustrates the complexity that one can encounter when using past behavior to predict future behavior. There may be more than one historical pattern acting on the events of the present. Other possibly divergent factors, such as church organizational structure and influence of individual church leaders, in fact actually served to enhance the influence of historical patterns in all three cases.
It is well documented (see for example Echikson, 1990; Von Der Heydt, 1993; Ramet, 1991) that Christian institutions played a significant role in the East Central European revolutions of 1989. But the global Christian Church is not a monolithic institution and, just as the revolutions of 1989 were different for each of the former communist countries, so the role that the Christian Church played varied from state to state. This can be a substantial help to understanding the complex relations between church and state. Do an institution's historical patterns of behavior necessarily predict how that organization will act in the present and the future? Do organizations rich in historic traditions alter their behavior after decades or even centuries of behaving one way in society? This article will compare the seemingly historically consistent cases of the role of the Polish Roman Catholic (1) Church and the role of the Romanian Orthodox Church with the Protestant churches in Eastern Germany (united first under the Evangelical Church in Germany and then under the Kirchenbund). (2) What this research hopes to illumine is the nature of the East German case and the factors that cause the Protestant churches' behavior toward the state to appear to drastically change over time.
Research on this subject suggests two distinct roles that a church body can play with regard to a secular government. A church can become a collaborator with the regime (Ramet, 1998) or it can become an oppositional force in society (Levine, 1992). Although it can be extrapolated that each of the examined churches fit into both categories at various times, depending on the situation, there is generally one category that stands out for each.
Before proceeding, it needs to be noted that when discussing any organization's opposition to a communist regime it is not a matter of deciding whether or not there was compromise with the regime but to what degree. In the twentieth century, compromise with the government on the part of Christian ecclesiastical bodies did occur to some degree in all of the communist countries, in part as a necessity to protect their organizational existence. Scholars argue that a church cannot compromise those elements that are minimally essential to its "mission" and its survival as a distinct entity (Ramet, 2000). The purpose of this work is not to delineate degrees of compromise but to look at the overall relationship between the mentioned church organizations and their corresponding regimes.
While examining the history in each case, two major sub-factors drawn from previous research will also be examined to further enhance this study and discover what makes the East German case appear so unique. These include the organizational structure of the church and the role of influential church leaders. Each of the three predominant churches examined here showed that the church's structural factors could be significant in influencing the impact of that church and the potential for that church to be independent (or not) from the communist government. These structural factors define variation in the overall church structure: hierarchical or more confederal (Ramet, 1990). The history of an organization can also be enhanced by looking at the role of influential individuals who are able to unite members and hierarchy as well as have an impact on the greater community (Weigel, 1999).
What follows is a section dedicated to each case study with the cases of Poland and Romania preceding the East German case in order to show examples of churches with clear historically consistent behavior toward the state apparatus. Within each section is a discussion of the role of the church over time, the potential effect of the structure of the institution, and the presence or absence of influential individuals.
HISTORICAL POLAND
From 966 A.D. when the Polish people converted to Christianity, the Catholic Church has been a dominant and unifying force in Poland (Byrnes, 2001; Nielsen, 1991). As far back as the twelfth century the Poles had a tradition that the Roman Catholic Primate would serve in the place of the monarch between reigns or when there was debate over who should be king (Szajkowski, 1983). Even as the Catholic hierarchy began to lose their political clout in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Pole's faith in and loyalty to the Catholic Church remained strong and even grew (Davies, 1984). The partitioning of Poland in the late eighteenth century served not only to strengthen Polish Catholicism but also to wed the Polish Catholic faith to Polish nationalism (Jelenski, 1982; Wolff, 1993). For nineteenth century Poles living in divided Poland, the Catholic Church became a refuge from Orthodox Russia's pressure to Russify the nation and from Protestant Prussia's pressure to Germanize it (Michnik, 1993).
Throughout the centuries, the Polish Catholic Church had been loyal to the Polish people over and above any state government imposed from the outside (3) (Szajkowski, 1983). Historically the Polish Catholic Church became the guardian and preserver of all that was Polish including the culture, history, language, and traditions. The time of partitions also led to the rise of a Polish "culture of dissent" that would be revived under the communist regime. For Poles, it became easy to see the world as "us against them," with "them" meaning first the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians, then later the Nazis, and finally the communists (Byrnes, 2001; Raina, 1978).
When the communists took over Poland after WWII, they faced two Polish cultural traditions: (1) the "authentic traditions" of the Catholic Church and (2) the culture of dissent, both of which were in opposition to the communist regime. This corresponded with a period in Poland's history where, due to expulsion and murder of Jews and the movement of peoples and boundaries under Stalin in the 1940s, the population became more homogenously Catholic and Polish (Paltrow, 1986). Also, because of the systemic destruction of the bourgeoisie, land-holding class and intelligentsia under the Nazi/Soviet occupation during WWII, only the Church remained to infringe on the communist's ideological monopoly after the war (Buchowski, Conte, and Ziotkowski, 2001).
The communists inherited a people who felt that patriotic intensity was a divine sanction (Davies, 1984) and a national church that had been "purified" by the Nazi persecution (Curtis, 1994; Diskin, 2001). This was a country where "underground universities" taught uncensored history and ethics lessons (Echikson, 1985), an entire intellectual tradition centered on "reading between the lines" of the Marxists' own propaganda (MacShane, 1981), and simply attending church was a legitimate form of protest against the government (Broun, 1988; Diskin, 2001). The Catholic Church also played a crucial role in translating the Solidarity movement across social boundaries by providing symbols, the Black Madonna, the suffering Christ, etc., that would speak to all Poles lending a spiritual, traditional, and historical depth to the struggle against communism (Osa, 1997). As one University of Warsaw student put it in 1982, "For us the Church signifies patriotism, tradition, continuity, and stability" (Weschler, 1982, 20).
Organizational Structure of the Church
The Catholic Church is hierarchical in its structure with its highest office being held by the Pope in Rome, Italy. Under the Pope the highest position in Poland was and is the Primate who, along with the lower level cardinals, bishops, and the rest of the hierarchy is chosen by the Catholic Church. What this means for this study is that the Polish Catholic Church historically and through the communist regime had a natural ally outside of the communist authority structure. Its hierarchical nature also means that directives could come from outside and be relatively consistently implemented down through the ranks of the church. History shows us that the Polish Catholic authorities were generally not loyal to government policies pre-communist and communist when they contradicted Church policy. Thus their hierarchical structure and its extra-state loyalties aided them in opposition to the government before the communists took over Poland and after (Hanson, 1987).
All this would seem to suggest that the Polish people and the Polish Catholic Church were wholly unified in their opposition to the communist regime but the reality is more complicated; historically as...
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