Christians explore roots of faith, enmity: Hungary meeting seeks peace amid division

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 15, 1995 by Arthur Jones

WASHINGTON -- The title of the Kecskemet, Hungary, ecumenical conference was unsparing: "Christian Faith and Human Enmity." Directed at Eastern and Central European Christians with their deep divisions and suspicions, the Protestant-Catholic-Orthodox gathering sought to examine the causes of their wounds and separation -- not least in Bosnia.

Said Catholic Archbishop Istvan Seregely of the Hungarian bishops' conference in his welcome, "We are all fully aware of the fact that the evil unresolved so far by efforts of the U.N. and the big powers of Europe, which they perhaps do not realize in its entirety, can hardly be remedied by our modest discussion."

He said to the more than 150 bishops, metropolitans, laypeople and priests that "we know that although the Christian faith is incompatible with human enmity, our modest conference will hardly be able to convince everyone of this fact."

Yet, as Gerald Shenk, one of many Americans present, later told NCR, the meeting provided those attending the opportunity "to talk about very painful and divisive issues despite the shadow of media manipulation and propaganda mills (in their home countries) making it difficult to think together as Christians."

Shenk, a professor at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Harrisonburg, Va., who lived for nine years in former Yugoslavia and the Balkans during the 1980s and '90s, provided the conference with an anatomy of the Bosnia conflict:

* "What made Bosnia Bosnia was not the simple sum of its various parts but the often tense interaction at the conjunction of two major religious worlds -- Christian and Islamic -- and three connecting faith communities, Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic, none in an overall majority and each with its own region of predominance."

* "This is not one war but several. Slovenia was playing with matches, the Serbs and Croats with dynamite and in Bosnia the world was toying with atomic weaponry."

* "Within Bosnia and outside, the worst-case scenario was that the conflict would spill over into a complex three-way struggle for control over Bosnia -- which is exactly what happened."

There was both a failure to prepare for the eventuality of open warfare and a failure to prevent it, Shenk said. Further, he said, when the various maps suggesting subdivisions of Bosnia were drawn, no provision was ever made for the fact that of 23 million inhabitants of Yugoslavia before the warfare, nearly one in three, about 7 million, were children or grandchildren of ethnically mixed marriages.

"The simplistic divisions into cantons or reservations for each ethnic group," said Shenk, "left this large group without an obvious region to belong to."

Meanwhile, he said, the credibility of the international agencies has sunk to an all-time low.

U.S. representatives included Servite Fr. John Pawlikowski of Chicago's Catholic Theological Union, and Jerry Powers of the U.S. bishops' conference Department of Social Development and World Peace. After the conference, Powers described some of the broader issues affecting the regions the conference represented.

In Romania, said Powers, a continuing issue is the return of Eastern Catholic church property which, after World War II, the Romanian communist government incorporated into the Romanian Orthodox church.

Questions also are raised when the dominant church in the region is given constitutional status as the preeminent church. That has occurred in Bulgaria with the Orthodox, said Powers.

"And there are a whole range of issues related to ethnicity and nationality," he said, "for almost everyone in the region has been a minority at one point or another. And because religious affiliation often corresponds to ethnic or national identity, religion is very, very much tied up in how to resolve ethnic and national questions."

The large numbers of Hungarians who live in Slovakia and the Transylvania portion of Romania and northern part of Serbia, he said, want to keep the Hungarian language alive as part of their liturgical services and religious education. But with Hungarian national extremists calling for a "Greater Hungary," said Powers, Romanians view local Hungarians who desire some form of cultural autonomy "as a threat -- that any bid to retain some sort of cultural autonomy is the camel's nose in the tent and next will come a greater Hungary."

"How you view the Bosnian conflict," continued Powers, who is the Catholic bishops' point man for that region, "depends to some extent on what your religious tradition is. I think the Serbian Orthodox would see it in terms of preserving Christianity in Europe against an Islamic state in Europe. Whereas, I think the Muslims and Catholics see it more as a conflict over political and economic issues."

The closing statement of the Aug. 21-27 gathering spoke of "the tragic warfare in the Balkans" as "a vivid warning to us about the destructiveness of uncontrolled conflicts and the tragedy that is inevitable when ethnic, religious, social and political rivalries are allowed to explode."