Reader's Digest Launches Another Attack on World Council of Churches
Episcopal News Service. February 2, 1993 [93019]
The February issue of Reader's Digest has launched a new attack on the World Council of Churches (WCC), alleging that the international ecumenical organization with 322 members in a hundred countries has "drifted from its original goal of Christian unity" and embraced a political agenda with Marxist overtones.
In an article titled "The Gospel According to Marx," the magazine alleges that some of the WCC leaders were agents of the KGB, the former Soviet spy agency. "The KGB had a plan to penetrate and manipulate the WCC," claims author Joseph Harriss, senior editor in the magazine's European bureau. Harriss wrote a similar article, "Karl Marx or Jesus Christ?" in 1982.
"Orthodox priests who were WCC delegates were often KGB agents acting on Communist party orders," Harriss alleged. Although he does not name any of the delegates, Harriss does single out a layman of the church's Moscow Patriarchate Foreign Relations Department, Alexei Buevsky, who has been identified through "careful study of KGB documents, coordinated with examination of records of the Russian Orthodox Church and other public reports.
Much of the information for the article comes from Gleb Yakunin, a well-known Orthodox priest and dissident during the Communist years who, according to Harriss, now has access to top-secret reports from the KGB that clearly outline attempts by the KGB to influence the WCC. The WCC has worked on behalf of Soviet religious dissenters, including Yakunin himself, according to officials.
Dr. Konrad Raiser of Germany, elected general secretary at a recent WCC Central Committee meeting, said in a letter to members that the article "offers an extremely distorted and one-sidedly negative view" of the WCC.
Raiser said that charges of KGB influence "includes nothing which has not been published by many European media during the last year. He and others questioned the selective release of KGB files and possible motivations. The WCC said that the Reader's Digest article provides no evidence that any WCC statement was influenced by a foreign government.
WCC leaders have always been aware that delegations from countries with repressive governments were allowed to attend meetings only with permission -- and under the scrutiny -- of their governments.
The WCC's Programme to Combat Racism was also cited in the article as an example of the influence of third world "pressure groups," as was the WCC's alleged financing of terrorist Marxist revolutionary movements. The article cited the African National Congress in South Africa and the Patriotic Front, which helped transform colonial Rhodesia into independent Zimbabwe, as examples of movements that the WCC has aided.
The WCC was also criticized for some elements of its 1991 assembly in Australia, and even its advocates are pushing for some changes. Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey said in response to the article, "The WCC's heart is in the right place, but it needs to be reformed -- fast."
The Rev. Joan Campbell, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, issued a strong endorsement of the work of the WCC and said that she was particularly disturbed and saddened by "the contempt that the article shows for people of color and for indigenous people." The WCC "provides a hospitable climate" in which Christians can work out their "yearning for spiritual wholeness and unity." She added, "While ecumenical groups acknowledge their flaws and failings as human organizations, their very reason for being is to express the unity that churches have already achieved and to search diligently for even greater common ground with each other and with all people."
"The choice has rarely been set out so clearly as it is in the contrast between the divisive character of the Reader's Digest article and the core values of the ecumenical movement -- which embrace justice, peace, unity and the sacred character of our environment," Campbell asserted.