“……I have been for years in prison with thieves and murderers. Even before having been put in prison I have been chaplain of a prison. A thief after he has stolen is a gentleman. He gives to the waiters the greatest tips and he invites girls and he invites you and he orders the best wines. He has not worked for his money. And such thieves are the communists. They have stolen half of Europe, they have stolen Russia, too. They have stolen a great part of Asia. And now they have what they have stolen and they are gentlemen and they expect the next occasion to steal again.

In this sense there is a relaxation with us, but it is not an essential one. We continue to have the avowed dictatorship of an atheistic party. We have one party. There can be no religious freedom where there is one party. We have elections. Now a joke is made with us that when God created Adam, He created only one woman, Eve, and He said to Adam, “You are free to choose for wife whomsoever you wish.” But there was only Eve. And so are the elections with us. (my emphasis)

Our Government doesn’t mind old women coming to church, but our childhood, our youth is poisoned with atheism. We are not allowed to counteract, and what bitter fruits will come out of this seed nobody can know.

Now you have asked another question, do we have open churches in Rumania? If somebody comes to Rumania – it is another situation in Russia – if somebody comes to Rumania, he is really impressed.

The Orthodox liturgy is something very beautiful. It is grand. And if you come in Rumania you see thousands of churches open, liturgies, sermons, many people in the church. And I have spoken with Americans who have been there and have told me, “I was very impressed.” And now there is really a certain religious liberty. In Rumania you are allowed to say as much as you like that God is good. You are not allowed to say that the Devil is bad. St. John the Baptist could have saved his life if he had said: “Repent because the kingdom of heaven is near.” Nobody would have touched him. He was touched when he said, “You, Herod, are bad.”

If Christ would have delivered a thousand “Sermons on the Mount” they would not have crucified Him. They crucified Him when He said, “You vipers,” then He was crucified.….”

Comment

One of the heroes of modern evangelical Christianity, Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, on the state’s use of religion as propaganda, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1966.

Wurmbrand, a Lutheran pastor of Jewish origin who died in 2001, isn’t easily dismissed: he spoke 14 languages, was a professor of the Old Testament and suffered over a dozen years of torture in Romanian prisons, several in solitary confinement underground.

He’s worth reading again today for anyone inclined to romanticize communism in the last century. And for anyone concerned about the direction in which the west is heading today.

More on what Wurmbrand suffered (his wife, Sabina, lost her entire family and herself worked as a slave laborer):

“His captors dumped him at Calea Rahova, a spanking new prison for dissidents, enemies of the people and criminals of various stripes. The warders there gave him a new identity (Vasile Georgescu), and set about erasing his old one. The 39-year-old Wurmbrand was 6 feet, 3 inches tall, with a medium build, and enjoyed relatively hale health before his abduction. But after being subjected to physical and psychological depredations and humiliations during his first year in the gulag, he nearly expired, kept just this side of living by the facility’s doctors. Dead, of course, he would be incapable of divulging information.

In clear, straightforward, occasionally stomach-churning prose, Wurmbrand recounts his horrific tortures: sleep deprivation; starvation diet; made to race around his four-steps-by-two-steps cell for hours until he collapsed; beatings with truncheons and boots; water funneled down his throat until it filled his stomach, which was then violently kicked; the bastinado, a relic of the Spanish Inquisition in which the bare soles of the feet are flogged; guards urinating and spitting into his open mouth; drugged into delirium; terrorized by dogs kept inches from his throat; solitary confinement–speaking to no one except inquisitors–for nearly three years in a three-paces-by-three-paces cell, this one located 30 feet underground; tossed into the “carcer,” a constricting, closet-sized enclosure with metal-spiked walls. In short, he experienced his own personal Passion.

“It was an image of hell,” Wurmbrand reported, “in which the torment is eternal and you cannot die.” He confessed to any false charges concerning himself–adultery, homosexuality–but steadfastly refused to implicate other believers, irrespective of denomination.

Transforming solitary confinement into his crucible, Wurmbrand affirmed his faith and tried to keep sane by mentally composing approximately 350 sermons and 300 devotional poems, which he later claimed to have memorized by employing condensed rhyme schemes and mnemonic devices. (He published 22 of the former in 1969’s Sermons in Solitary Confinement.) Additionally, he “talked” with and “preached” to inmates in adjacent cells by tapping on the walls using Morse code, which the prisoners learned from each other; devised chess matches with himself, substituting bread crumbs for pieces; and held imaginary conversations with his wife Sabina and young son Mihai.

More than three years into his ordeal, Wurmbrand was hauled before a faceless quartet of judges for a 10-minute trial, found guilty of subversive activities and sentenced to 20 years’ hard labor. Wracked by tuberculosis, he spent four years rotting in a prison TB ward in the Carpathian foothills. With no medicine, many died. While there he learned that his wife had been arrested in 1950 and pressed into slave labor digging and carting dirt for the Danube-Black Sea canal, a project eventually abandoned as infeasible. Held for three years, she ate grass when necessary.

A member of the secret police whom Wurmbrand had earlier converted to Christianity helped secure his release in June 1956, and he rejoined Sabina and Mihai in Bucharest, where he resumed preaching. “I knew, of course,” he wrote, “that sooner or later I would be rearrested.” In January 1959 he was re-imprisoned during a renewed crackdown on the clergy, his old sentence–plus five years–reimposed. Plunged back into the black hole of the gulag, he endured extensive brainwashing designed to eradicate religious beliefs. Five and a half years later he walked away, his faith intact…..”

More in an obituary in 2001 in the New York Press.

On the other hand, the Independent in its obituary took a more reserved view of Wurmbrand’s experiences and testimony.

The Guardian also noted some criticisms of him.