Purple praise
Sir: Mervyn Stockwood's efforts on behalf of Rumanian priests were, as Roland Rudd guessed (Letters, 27 January), unknown to me. As Mr Rudd says, it may have been difficult for Dr Stockwood to criticise the Ceausescu regime in public. But does that really explain why he went out of his way to praise the regime in public?
The tribute to which I referred was a long article in the Times (12 June 1978), entitled 'The Big Improvements'. Devoted mainly to an exculpation of Ceausescu's record on human rights , it combined childish nalvety with tortuous evasiveness:
'What about human rights and religion? That's a question I'm often asked. . . A Rumanian thinks twice before going into active opposition. However, the country has no long tradition of unfettered free- dom. The present communist govern- ment is not the first to use methods which are repugnant to us in Britain but which we ourselves have used in the past. Even in Gloucestershire in the early days of my ministry the farm labourers kept away from Labour Party meetings for fear of earning the displeasure of the owners of the estate, while Sir Stafford Cripps, an ardent churchman, was forbidden to read the Scriptures at Morning Prayer!'
While the reader was still reeling under the impact of that exclamation remark, Dr Stockwood considered two other human rights. One was the right to travel, against which he reproduced the official Rumanian objection that 'we spend money to train skilled men to serve our country, not the US'. The other, oddly enough, was the right to hooliganism — not something high on the agenda of Western cities, but a favourite topic among Rumanian prop- agandists, who liked to identify all human rights arguments with degenerate indi- vidualism: 'So what is a human right when it comes to smashing, or taking stern action in the interests of the majority to prevent smashing? Of course there is no simple answer. It depends upon where the line is drawn.'
He ended with the question of religious freedom: 'Although the Government is officially opposed to all religions . . . it is, by British standards, exceedingly generous to the Church and indeed to all faiths. . .
Two days later the Times redeemed itself with a detailed article by Bernard Levin on the plight of Christians of all denomina- tions in Rumania: the harassment, the dismissals and evictions, the incarceration in mental hospitals and so on. A family of Pentecostalists, whose story of suffering he threatened to tell in his next article, was promptly released by the Rumanian au- thorities. They at least must have been grateful that he allowed himself what Roland Rudd calls 'the self-indulgence of criticising the Ceausescu regime in public'.
Noel Malcolm 6A Huntingdon Street, London Ni
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