CONSCIENCE AND CAPTIVITY
Religion in Eastern Europe
Janice Broun, with Grazyna Sikorska
Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1989
376 pp., $19.95
In the summer of 1981, six young communicants at a Catholic parish in Medjugorje, Yugoslavia, revealed that the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to them daily. Speaking in their native Croatian, she entrusted them with messages that revolve around the interrelated themes of repentance, conversion, reconciliation, and peace. At first their local priest, Fr. Jozo Zovko, expressed a disbelief that turned to resentment as parishioners ignored his admonishments and followed the young people up a nearby hill where the apparitions occurred. When police arrived to investigate the rapturous reports, however, Father Zovko heard a voice directing him to "go and protect the children."
As pilgrims flocked to the village, a shaken but radiant Father Zovko spoke out boldly in defense of the miracle's authenticity. Indeed, so intrepid did he become that in one sermon he made reference to his listeners' "forty year" enslavement. Feeling the sting, the state authorities moved quickly to arrest and sentence him to three and a half (reduced to one and a half) years for maligning Yugoslavia's communist era. To make matters worse, Bishop Pavao Zanic, who took a jaundiced view of the Franciscan order to which Father Zovko belongs, did not attempt to hide his skepticism concerning the children's testimony.
The story of Medjugorje illuminates some of the complexities that shape life in a region in which both religion and nationality are emotionally-charged and divisive forces.
Social Disintegration
Today, communism is crumbling. Mikhail Gorbachev is confronting long-suppressed nationality problems that threaten the USSR's very existence. In Poland, Lech Walesa has negotiated Solidarity back into legal existence. In Hungary, Imre Pozsgay and other "communist" leaders openly declare that they intend to transform the country into what already begins to look like a liberal democracy on the Western model. Gorbachev has all but conceded that "communist economics" is an oxymoron, and the Poles and Hungarians are commiting themselves to reforms that no longer pretend to be socialist in character. By the same token, where the idea of reform has not taken hold, disaster results. Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu and Albania's Ramiz Alia, unenlightened despots ignorant of market realities, have condemned their desperately poor countries to an ever-declining standard of living.
Communism has not only failed politically and economically. As a worldview, it has proved incapable of giving meaning and purpose to individual lives or providing a reliable guide to moral conduct. One would have to look long and hard to find a single person in the eastern bloc countries who believes in Marxism-Leninism, either as a secular religion or a system of ethics. As a result, civil society is rapidly disintegrating. After forty or fifty years of antireligious propaganda, communist regimes find themselves responsible for millions who have lost the will to believe in anything. Increasingly, these rudderless citizens surrender
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