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APPENDIX

OU HAVE TO PUT ten lire in the elevator to make it work. Grumbling, it heaves you up six floors to the top of a nineteenth-century palazzo on the Vatican side of the Tiber. A door is opened by a smiling, fresh-faced girl with a lot of fair hair, who looks as if she should be selling butter and eggs in Holland, and you step, slightly startled, into a clean and sparkling set of rooms that also seems to have been imported from the North. White curtains, blowing in the breeze, white walls and paintwork, clinical modern furniture, and behind a desk buried in papers, a big man in abundant, dazzling white robes.

The Re-Christianizers

Father Werenfried van Straaten looks a bit like an ex-boxer: heavy shoulders, a solid jaw, a little trouble around the midriff, which he slaps, heartily. "Nothing to be done! No time for exercise!" He is a Dutchman and the head of a remarkable organization which has been called "the Vatican CIA" and is in fact the Catholic Church's "Iron Curtain Relief Service." Its immediate task is to help the persecuted church of Eastern Europe, and its ultimate aim is nothing less than the re-Christianization of the countries now under Communist domination.

Father van Straaten admits to being a boxer in his youth; but as for running a spy center-"my spies only interest themselves in charity and religion."

"But it's true," he adds, "that in Czechoslovakia, for example, where the Church is dying and the 1,400 priests are prevented in so many ways from carrying out their ministry, they call us spies. Once I entered Czechoslovakia clandestinely with a tourist party. In a Prague square I saw five big photographs exhibited-the five biggest religious enemies of the regime. The Pope, Cardinal Mindszenty, Cardinal Spellman, Cardinal Frings -and me. Under my picture the cap

tion read: "This is the man who calls himself chief of the army of God. He takes money and jewels from the faithful to turn priests into spies."

Father van Straaten rummaged among the papers on the desk and found a document which he recently took to Pope Paul VI at a private audience: his annual budget. The total income-which equaled expenditure was more than $5 million.

There were items for aid to churches and priests who work in secret, for the families of priests in prison, for food, clothes, books. I queried "motorization."

"Those are our chapel trucks" Father van Straaten explained: “We have converted hundreds of lorries. You open the side and there's the altar. Priests drive them around the villages in areas which have no churches."

Part of the money goes on preparations for the day when the Communist regimes will crumble. More than twenty seminaries and monasteries are training priests and close to a thousand refugees have already been ordained. The target is 3,000, and if, by some means, all restrictions were to be lifted on the Church in satellite countries tomorrow, Father van Straaten's priests would be ready to cross the frontiers the same day in chapel trucks, bearing supplies of food and fuel. "We've even recorded messages of hope and greeting to be broadcast when the day of freedom comes," he says.

To raise money, the head of Iron Curtain Church Relief goes on speaking tours. His dusty black Mercedes clocked up 100,000 miles last year. He sleeps in the back seat, to be woken at frontiers and towns where people are waiting to hear him preach. He has made twelve speeches a day in different towns and villages. When we met in Rome he was just preparing for another tour in East Germany. He asks for money, or for gifts. This means that ICCR's ware

houses are crammed with 2,000 tons of offerings, from socks to smoked sausages, double beds and diamond brooches. He begs addresses from business organizations, and to these he sends copies of his twice monthly Mirror periodical, which has a printing of 50 million.

"I'm sorry I cannot tell you the means we use to send aid behind the Curtain," he said. "But one way or another we keep the supplies going. Money, food parcela, typewriters,

cars..

"Transport is vital. In one way or another we've provided thousands of motorcycles and cars for priests in Communist lands and to refugee areas."

Priests for Sale

Father van Straaten has traveled often in Communist countries. He risks his life but seems also to enjoy it.

"I adopt a false name and leave my habit behind. I go as a farmer, say, or tourist and I grow a how-do-you-say...?" His fingers twirled at the ends of an invisible moustache. In this way he has visited the bishops of the Catholic Church in six Peoples' Republica, and personally spoken to scores of secret priests-men who wear no robes and who are, in outward appearance, ordinary factory workers or farm laborers. These men evade state control by being ordained in brief ceremonies in some secret place. Some are betrayed by informers, but many thousands are at work, baptizing, hearing confessions, celebrating Mass among the 65 million Catholics of Eastern Europe.

Many Communist officials turn a blind eye to the work of secret priests, ather because they wish to insure themselves against a possible collapse of the regime; or because they are themselves secretly Christians. It is known that some very high-up Soviet leaders are believers; they may even, like Svetlana Stalin, be members of the Russian Church.

Certain Communist regimes sell priests, along with Jews and other "undesirables," to the West. The practice has provided useful support for the Rumanian economy over the past six years. But, perhaps because Catholicism is the most stringently persecuted of all Christian creeds, Father van Straaten has been able to buy only seven priests over this period. Weren't things getting better for

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Van Straaten looked at me with questioning grey eyes. "On the contray, they are getting worse." he said, and brought out a thick folder stuffed with documents. "This is my radiograph of the persecuted Church, country by country. They cannot touch thousands of our bravest priests, because they are already dead. Some three thousand, however, are still in prison and more than ten thousand nuns have been driven from their convents to work in labor camps. Of the bishops, about two hundred have been exiled, imprisoned, killed or forced to renounce their ministry. There is a constant movement to replace a faithful priest with a 'state candidate'-a man who will obey whatever order the government may give him, however contrary to his faith.

Albanian Church Gone

"Take Poland. For 35 million Catholics there, no new church has been built since 1958. The authorities talk about the separation of church and state, but in fact the state controls every last detail. There's no religious instruction in the schools, and the few Catholic schools still open--five -are kept on simply to show to tourists from the West. All religious books have disappeared. They burn them at a farm in Jeziorno-people call it the breviary-grinder.

"Albania is worse still. The Church there has been annihilated, and the five bishops have just vanished. In Rumania there were ten bishops, of whom three have been killed, four have died in prison and the others are still confined. In Czechoslovakia the number of priests falls and falls. The limit is twenty new priests a year, against the sixty lost in the same period. All the seminaries are closed, and 764 convents are empty. Do you know that they offer a prize of 10,000 crowns to anyone who can induce a nun to renounce her faith?"

What was the ICCR doing in Soviet Russia? I asked.

"We have been there, even in Siberia; in the Ukraine there were five million Catholics, but many have been deported, the churches in the villages are ruined or used as grain stores, and of the eleven bishops, ten are dead and the last. Cardinal Slipy, has been allowed to come to the West after eighteen years of forced

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catechism and from the age of six, children are taught to hate the idea of God."

Father van Straaten, who is fiftyfive, studied languages as a young man at Utrecht University, and today he speaks seven. He founded the ICCR movement in 1947 when some twelve million German refugees were flowing into the West. He told his superior on Christmas morning that he had decided to leave the abbey where he worked to help the refugees by speaking for them and collecting aid on their behalf. He remembers - his first sermon:

"The church was crowded, and I knew everyone there had reasons, personal reasons, to hate the Germans. While I preached, explaining the sufferings of these refugees and asking for help, the crowd just stared at me coldly. It was the most difficult sermon of my life. At the end of Mass I stood at the church door with a hat in my hand; and one by one the whole congregation went by and not many of them looked at me, and not one put anything in the hat.

"I went back into the church in anguish and went down on my knees and prayed. Then I felt a touch on my shoulder. It was an old woman. 'My two sons were killed by the Germans,' she said. 'But what you said was just. Here are five francs for those poor people.' So I started with five francs to feed twelve million."

Later, touring factories, farms and towns, Father van Straaten found that people could learn to care for those whom they had so recently cursed. His work and fame grew. Ho recalls a day in 1949 when he was attempting to negotiate with a Red

general in behalf of refugees "We Russians are the picked troops of Satan!" he said, and laughed. 'Are you the best God can produce?' I thought: we shall see. I haven't looked back from that day."

God Helps the Helpers

ICCR is now expanding its activities to help the Church in many other countries where it is in danger or difficulty: in Brazil, Chile and Colombia; in the Congo and in India; in Vietnam, where over a million Catholic refugees have fled Hanoi to the South.

"It is presumptuous and unreasonable to expect that God will free the Church from Communism if we haven't done all we can to make that liberation productive and significant," said Father van Straaten. "We have already lost 20,000 priests in the countries of the Soviet empire. They died in prisons and camps, they fed or simply disappeared. We pray for the persecuted Church, and we pray for the conversion of all Communists, the dupers and the duped, Brezhnev, Gromyko, Tito, Mao-fer the persecutors are in greater need, spiritually, then the persecuted. But if we do not dare to make preparations, to work, our prayers will not have a very persuasive influence on God!"

Father van Straaten smiled. "You know, I wasn't altogether at home as a monk. I sang in the abbey choir, but my voice was loud and always slightly off key."

There is a certainty in his voice now that is, in itself, a solace. It is easy to understand why "Werenfried"

his monastic name, meaning "Champion for Peace"-has become for millions of people in East and West a syrabol of faith in the future.