EUROPE'S LIFE-LINE
By CECIL NORTHCOTT The Christian plan of action in Europe is based on pastor and people, a scheme as old as Constantine but still resilient whether the church allegiance is Reformed, Lutheran or Orthodox. Its leaders are here, and behind them move the thousands of ill-clad pastors through the peasant lands and the great cities. Most of them have only one suit and one pair of shoes ; they are bookless and Bible-less and without paper to write on. It is estimated that 4,000 pastors in Europe are tuberculous owing to post-war condi- tions ; an untold number need a holiday and see no likelihood of getting one. In France they are being forced to take up outside jobs for four days a week owing to the inflated costs of living ; in Hungary the salaries are so meagre that it was astonishing to hear from a Budapest pastor that the theological seminaries are crowded with young men preparing for the ministry.
To re-equip the Christian pastor in Europe spiritually, mentally and physically is one of the daily concerns of the Geneva Office of Christian Reconstruction. At Locarno a holiday house takes the tired and depressed, and where no payment can be offered (it is as low as eight francs a day) the movement provides travelling expenses and keep. Many hundreds of pastors have been given bicycles (three hundred of them British), and the bishops who cover dioceses four times the size of English counties are given cars—a luxurious note for a British ear, but an essential one in Europe's pastoral work. A German reported that on one Sunday morning he ate a breakfast provided from New England, his bicycle came from Britain, the Communion set from California, the wine fican Switzerland, the service books were printed on Swedish paper. This ecumenical offering to the stricken Christian forces of Europe is the most remarkable example in our time of the ability of the Christian Church to gird itself into action. The American dollar, of course, is the giant power in it all. - But the dollar is offered in .rare humility and without conditions. Plans on paper call for forty million dollars up to 1951, a Marshall Plan in miniature unhedged by restrictions. America has become aware of the strategic place of Christianity in Europe's life, and this is especially true of the Lutheran Church, which now has its own GLeva office, through which pass many millions of dollars to the Lutheran lands of Europe. One of the most striking instances reported was the collection of grain in the mid-west farming communities, and the arrival of ten million pounds of it at Bremen, where the German Hilf swerke is using it through its feeding centres. Britain's share is minute in comparison—£55,000 last year and L40,000 this year, eked out in raw materials, bicycles, grants for salaries and the training of prisoners of war in Britain for the Christian ministry.
In Germany itself the central fact in Christian reconstruction and relief work is Hilfswerk—the spontaneous organisation which came into life in 1945 to help the millions of refugees and displaced persons who poured through Germany from the East. Directed now with German thoroughness, Hilfswerk is a magnificent example of German self-help. Its schemes are myriad. The latest is the making of bricks out of compressed rubble by the rank and file of Christian congregations. As the walls go up a wooden roof arrives from Switzerland. Another is the training of ten thousand lay people to assist in rural education, in order to fill the gap left by the absence of teachers who are prohibited from teaching owing to Nazi connections. With raw wool and cotton from America Hilfswerk has performed miracles of production in women's clothes. Each of those ten thousand gallant women, the German deaconesses, has been given a fresh cotton dress for the coming summer, and Hilfswerk recently distributed thirty thousand shoes from the churches of New Zealand.
This traffic along the life-line of Europe has certain specific responsibilities. One of them is the variegated range of institutions such as orphanages, homes for the aged and mental asylums, which are in the care of the churches. Some forty of them are to be re-equipped with linen and domestic utensils at a cost of £roo,000, and another £400,000 will be needed to make these institutions reasonably efficient. Youth camps this summer in Czechoslovakia and Hungary are to be supplied with marquees and small tents at a cost of £ro,000, and there is to be an investment of £roo,000 in student scholarships. While America as the land of abundant prosperity draws the imagination of Europe's youth, there is an eagerness to study in Britain, and especially to see the inside working of Britain's democratic institutions. "The fact that Britain is there solid and sensible," said an Eastern European to me, " is an assurance to us all." He wondered whether these few sunlit days were the last he would have beyond the frontiers of his own land.
As fact after fact was piled up at this conference, as the dollars rolled endlessly off the belt, and as Swiss debated with Pole, German with Czech and Hungarian with French, there was revealed some- thing of the glory and the misery of the Christian Church. No one here believes that it has the strength to darn the rising tide of Easternism, but it has the stamina to resist within the flood. Divided and riven within, still dominated by conservative leadership, and moving too often in the rutted grooves of the centuries, the Christian Church is still to be reckoned with in the life of Europe. Can it be a life-line ? Undoubtedly weak in men and resources, the churches of Europe are in danger of sitting merely as receivers of outside help instead of digging new channels for themselves. They cannot do this without a lot more physical relief and a lot more skilled attention to the machine. The apparatus is there, in every hamlet of Europe, rusty and creaking in many places but not smashed by the hammer blows of the twentieth century.
A few miles below this mountain ridge in the pleasant pastoral lands by the lake a lively experiment in Christian reconstruction is happening. In a château presented by Mr. Rockefeller a new institute, under the direction of Dr. Kraemer of Leyden University, is training chosen groups of Europe's youth in the basic truth and basic action of the Christian faith. I looked down the lists of recent students—yOung Communists, lawyers, business-men, social workers. The plan is to strengthen the strong points of the life-line by fresh recruits drawn from the lay professions. Unless the Christian Church in Europe can leap beyond its professional masters and manipulators into the common life of the people its day of effective witness is probably a short one in Europe. Its walls are still too high, and the doors are heavy and frequently bolted by day and night to new ideas and methods. As the homeward plane circled over Geneva I wondered whether the hour was too late for once- Christian Europe or whether there is still a chance.
Previous page
