Legend has it that Pope Sylvester II in the year 1001 sent an emissary with a jeweled crown to proclaim Stephen, a ruler of the Magyars, as king of Hungary. Stephen—baptized a Roman Catholic at age ten—had delivered his tribal people into the realm of Western Christianity from pagan religion and inroads of the Byzantine East. In restructuring his state, the king promulgated a code of laws based on Christian concepts, and he firmly established the Roman Catholic Church throughout his kingdom. Thus Stephen became enshrined in Hungarian history as the sainted father of his country (he was canonized in 1083, forty-five years after his death), and his crown—passed down through generations of successors to the throne—became the symbol of Hungary’s nationhood.
Some modern scholars dispute the role attributed to Pope Sylvester, and they say that the crown really was fashioned in the 1200s, possibly from bits and pieces that included a remnant or two of Stephen’s original crown. It contained rubies and other jewels, along with enameled miniature religious scenes. The last coronation at which it was worn was in 1916, when it was placed precariously on the several-sizes-too-large head of Charles IV.
The crown and other royal relics—an orb, scepter, sword, and coronation robe—were preserved as national treasures in the following years, surviving the perils of World War II. During fighting between the Soviets and Nazis near Budapest in 1944, security guards hid the crown. In 1945, when Soviet control became certain, the guards gave the royal treasures to American troops in Austria for safekeeping. The valuables were kept in U.S. custody in Germany until the early 1950s, when they were shipped to a special storage vault at Fort Knox in Kentucky. Early this month, amid much controversy, the crown and the other relics were returned to Hungary.
The Hungarians had long wanted the crown back, but Communist repression and the pervasive Soviet presence in the late 1940s and 1950s made the Americans unwilling to budge. This position was bolstered by the views of refugees from the ill-fated “freedom-fighter” revolt of 1956. To them the crown was a symbol of hope: it could be returned only when the people of Hungary were again in control of their affairs, and only when atheism was no longer the official ideology of the land.
Relations between Hungary and the United States began to thaw in the mid-1960s. Ambassadors were exchanged, travel restrictions were eased, cultural and scientific exchange agreements were enacted, and the Hungarian government gradually allowed greater measures of religious, speech, and economic freedom. Cardinal Josef Mindszenty, a fervent anti-Communist who had been granted asylum in the American embassy in 1956, left the country in 1971. His departure further eliminated friction between the two governments.
Last spring, according to press reports, U.S. officials began studying the crown issue, and in the summer a presidential policy-review committee recommended the crown’s return. Evangelist Billy Graham, who preached in Hungary in September (see September 23, 1977, and October 7, 1977, issues), reportedly endorsed the idea in private reports to U.S. ambassador Philip Kaiser and State Department officials. Hungarian church leaders had raised the crown issue in discussions with the evangelist. At his final press conference in Budapest, Graham skirted a question regarding his position, but he hinted that he was in favor of the crown’s return and said that he would talk about it “with some of my friends in Washington.”
Soviet Scene
More than 6,000 persons in the Soviet Union, including many young people, were “won for Christ” last year and baptized publicly into the membership of local churches affiliated with the All Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB), according to an official report of the church body. The report also said that more than 120 new pastors were elected or ordained by the AUCECB’s churches. “Many” congregations in Khazakhstan, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia reconstructed their church buildings or erected new structures, the report stated. It named some of the new congregations and church buildings of the Mennonites, Pentecostals, and Baptists affiliated with the AUCECB.
By early October, according to press accounts, President Carter agreed to return the crown, and he set the diplomatic wheels in motion. A State Department spokesman denied that Graham’s recommendation figured in the decision. The outcome would have been the same without Graham’s involvement, he said, but he did acknowledge that Hungary’s willingness to permit Graham to preach there carried weight with the Administration.
Carter announced the decision publicly on November 4—the twenty-first anniversary of the unsuccessful 1956 attempt to overthrow the Communist regime. The timing was apparently coincidental, but it helped to fuel the protests and expressions of outrage that erupted in the Hungarian-American community. A hearing was conducted in Congress, and more than 2,000 Hungarian-Americans marched from the Washington Monument to the Capitol steps in late November to protest Carter’s decision. Fourteen sympathetic members of Congress were among those who addressed the crowd. Congresswoman Mary Rose Oakar, a Democrat whose district includes Hungarian-American neighborhoods in Cleveland, stated that Carter told her he considered the views of religious leaders in Hungary of “key importance.” But, said she, the religious leaders have no choice but to parrot government desires, and she asserted that the practice of religion in Hungary is “stigmatized” by the regime. Young people, she charged, are “coerced” into staying away from the church if they want to pursue certain careers.
Protest leader Tibor Bodi of Philadelphia declared that “as a Christian President, it is incomprehensible that President Carter hands over the holiest symbol of a nation to its Communist invaders.”
Several members of Congress filed lawsuits in attempts to prevent the crown’s return, but none—including one carried all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court by Republican Senator Robert Dole of Kansas—was successful.
The delay caused by litigation and the uproar in Congress enabled Administration officials to muster additional support within other sectors of the Hungarian-American community and among Roman Catholic leaders. Some Hungarian-Americans underscored Carter’s explanation that the crown was being returned to “the Hungarian people” and not to the ruling Communist party, and they suggested that its presence in Hungary might promote a greater degree of nationalism which would lead to increased independence from the Soviet Union.
Women At Work
Nearly 100 women were ordained to the Episcopal priesthood during 1977, the first year in which ordination of women was officially permitted, according to an Episcopal survey. About two-thirds of the women hold stipendiary positions in church work; twelve are in charge of congregations as vicar, rector, or interim minister.
A staff commission of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference said that the bishops would not oppose return of the crown, but it did call for the action to be used “as an instrument” to press for greater freedom of religion in Hungary.
Except for the stipulation that the crown must be available for viewing by the Hungarian public, the conditions and concessions attached to the crown’s return were kept confidential. One of the apparent conditions involved symbolism: the crown was to be presented formally to the president of Hungary’s National Assembly and not to Communist party chief Janos Kadar. The American government has some leverage in monitoring other long-range, more substantive agreements: Hungary is anxious to achieve and maintain favored-nation trade status with the United States.
Among the two dozen members of the American delegation that accompanied the crown to Budapest were three clergymen: Geno Baroni, a Catholic priest who is assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; research executive George G. Higgins, a priest representing the U.S. Catholic Conference; and Rabbi Arthur Schneier, the Budapest-born president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation.
A number of Hungarian Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish leaders were present at the ceremony marking the formal transfer of the crown. The event was held in a marbled room under the dome of the beautiful Gothic-style Parliament building on the banks of the Danube. U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance made the presentation. One of the most conspicuous figures in the reception party was Cardinal Laszlo Lekai, the Catholic primate of Hungary. (Lekai and Hungary’s bishops had sent word to the United States in December backing the crown’s return.)
A New York Times reporter wondered why the Communist party was so eager to get back an object that has so much religious significance attached to it. A high government official explained: “I am an atheist, and the crown holds no mystical significance for me. Yet it has a deep meaning for all of us. When King Stephen introduced Christianity, he intended progress—and in those days it was progress. And when Pope Sylvester II sent the crown to our first king, he simply put the Hungarians on the world map.”
The Hungarian government has been sensitive to the religious-freedom issue in recent months, and the issue has been highlighted in a number of press accounts. Immediately following Graham’s visit to Hungary, two important American Catholic leaders received a warm welcome there: Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia and Archbishop Joseph L. Bernardin of Cincinnati. The pair joined Lekai in a concelebrated mass for a standing-room-only congregation of 3,000-plus in St. Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest. They also participated in baptizing sixty infants. Krol told the congregation: “Though we may be divided by time and space, by geographic, cultural, and language barriers, by vocation and profession, we are one, we are united in the Body of Christ.” (An estimated 60 per cent of Hungary’s 11 million population is nominally Catholic.)
Overall, Krol and Berhardin were favorably impressed by what they found, but Bernardin did suggest that there is room for much improvement. He told reporters later that there are “limitations placed on the freedom of the people,” especially their religious freedom.
The issue is not a stagnant one. Kadar visited Pope Paul last spring, and the pope’s envoy has conferred with church and government officials in Budapest.
Hungary’s government points with pride to its record on Jewish rights—probably the best of any Soviet-bloc nation. Hungary’s chief rabbi, Laszlo Salgo, has been telling American Jewish leaders in effect that the 100,000-member Jewish community in Hungary has never had it so good, and he invited them to come and see for themselves. Rabbi Schneier, who accompanied the crown on its return, had what was described as an emotional homecoming at a Budapest synagogue, where he preached to a congregation of 500.
The Hungarian press spoke glowingly of the crown’s return, and one party paper commented that President Carter deserved special praise for holding out against “considerable opposition.”
That opposition has not ceased. On the eve of the crown’s return, a number of Hungarian-American community leaders representing various groups, including religious ones, called a press conference in New York to accuse Carter of “deceiving” and “betraying” the American people on the issue of human rights. Carter, said one angry spokesman, “did all this to Hungary and to us. We shall not forget it, and he will forever remember it.” The group pledged political reprisals against the President and suggested that a slogan will be heard in future election campaigns: “Remember the crown!”
Indicted
Guido “Father John” Carcich is a Roman Catholic priest who knows how to raise money—lots of it—for poor and starving children overseas and for the work of dedicated missionaries struggling to get by with only meager resources. He was able to raise as much as $20 million in one eighteen-month period for his missionary order, the Society of the Catholic Apostolate, better known as the Pallottine Fathers. Not much of the money went to the starving children or struggling missionaries overseas, though. Only 2.5 cents or so of each dollar went where the donors intended, a 1976 special audit showed. Most of the money somehow ended up in real estate deals, loans to businessmen with political connections, and other questionable ventures. Some of it allegedly was pocketed by Carcich for himself and friends. This month a grand jury in Baltimore indicted Carcich on sixty counts of misappropriating funds and one count of obstructing justice.
Among other things, the forty-three-page indictment charged that Carcich:
• Embezzled $540,000 from Pallottine bank accounts for his own use.
• Embezzled another $1.4 million and hid the money in secret accounts.
• Funneled more than $15 million through concealed accounts and refused to hand over records to investigators or tell what happened to the money.
• Used $52,000 to build a house for a niece in New Jersey, and siphoned off tens of thousands of dollars to give to friends, including between $25,000 and $40,000 to a South Carolina woman who once was one of his parishioners.
Carcich, in his mid-fifties, theoretically could face up to 303 years in prison and thousands of dollars of fines if he is convicted on all counts. Maryland attorney general Francis B. Burch indicated that another grand jury will continue the investigation of Carcich, leaving the door open for more indictments.
The priest told reporters at a press conference that he would “work hard” to prove his innocence, and he called on Catholics to pray for him. “There is another side to this story,” he said, and he suggested that he had been denied due process in the way the indictment was developed.
Donald E. Webster, the late accountant for the Pallottines, was also named prominently in the indictment. It alleged that he had “aided and abetted” Carcich in the misappropriation of funds. Webster was linked in earlier revelations to a $54,000 loan to help finance the 1974 divorce of former Maryland governor Marvin Mandel. Last month the accountant was found shot to death at his beachfront condominium. The death was ruled a suicide by police and a medical examiner.
Carcich came to Baltimore as an assistant pastor in 1946. Eight years later he established a Pallottine center across the street from the church he served, and he became its chief fund-raiser, mailing out millions of emotionally worded appeals yearly.
In 1976 the Baltimore Sun looked into Carcich’s operations. The newspaper uncovered many of the Pallottines’ questionable business dealings, noted the web of political and business alliances, and showed how Carcich lived it up while in Las Vegas purportedly on Pallottine business. Prayer requests from the elderly and poor were “callously” discarded at the Pallottine warehouse, the paper reported. It said that Carcich received $100,000 in “consultant fees” from the firm hired by the order to conduct its direct-mail program—a firm partially owned by the Pallottines and from which Carcich is accused of embezzling more than $50,000 in the indictment.
Carcich was banned from functioning as a priest in the Baltimore area by Archbishop William D. Borders in 1976. The Pallottine fund-raising practices were “clearly wrong” and “immoral,” said the archbishop. A housecleaning was ordered by Pallottine headquarters in Rome, watchdog procedures were instituted by local Catholic officials, the nation’s Catholic bishops formulated guidelines for fund-raising, and Maryland enacted legislation requiring disclosure by charitable organizations. The state also set limits on how much can be spent on fund-raising and overhead.
Meanwhile, the Pallottines, under an agreement worked out with prosecutors, have been liquidating their investments and putting the money into missionary work.
White Collar Crime
The Pallottine Fathers (see preceding story) aren’t the only ones whose religion-related money troubles have been aired in the secular press in recent weeks. Here are some other cases:
• Former bank executive Alfred W. Hall, Jr., 43, was sentenced last month by a federal judge in Boston to four years in prison. Hall had pleaded guilty to a charge of embezzling nearly $1.4 million, $919,000 of it from a missions account administered by Walter J. Leach, a retired Roman Catholic priest. Leach’s own dealings in connection with the account are under investigation. Hall returned more than $500,000 of the stolen funds before leaving for jail.
• St. Teresa’s nursing home, a facility run by Catholic Carmelite nuns in Middletown, New York, was accused of fraud in the use of Medicaid funds. A state agency which audited the home’s operations alleged that more than $200,000 is involved. It said the money had been spent for such things as a gift for a bishop, medicine and grooming for pet dogs kept by the nuns, meals for nuns who lived at the convent but who did not care for patients at the home, and educational course fees unrelated to nursing-home operation. State investigators also charged that the nursing home hired some of its board members as attorneys and auditors, paying them “exorbitant” legal and bookkeeping fees. The nuns declined to comment, but a lawyer hired by them called the charges “unfair.” The home received $3.8 million in Medicaid reimbursement funds over a recent three-year period.
• Two Church of Christ ministers in Texas are facing charges of misappropriating for personal use “several hundred thousand dollars” of a foundation established primarily for the benefit of Preston Road Church of Christ in Dallas. The ministers—Burns Vinson, Jr., of Dallas, and his brother Foy W. Vinson of Allen—were trustees of the fund set up by their oilman father to benefit Churches of Christ.
Relief From Payne
Bible professor Donald Lake of Wheaton College survived an attempt to expel him from membership in the 1,000-member Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) at its twenty-ninth annual meeting last month. Nearly 100 persons attended the meeting, which was held at Simpson College in San Francisco. Their principal activity was the reading and discussion of about three dozen scholarly papers.
J. Barton Payne of Covenant Seminary had taken exception to a paper that Lake had delivered to a regional meeting of the society in 1976. In addition, one of the few papers delivered to the entire ETS assembly in San Francisco (most were presented to small groups in special-interest sessions) was a response to Lake’s paper by Elliott Johnson of Dallas Seminary. Johnson charged that Lake, despite good intentions, had undermined the ETS position on biblical inerrancy.
The society, in order to attract scholars from various evangelical traditions (Baptist, Reformed, Wesleyan, dispensational, and others) has always had only one point in its doctrinal statement—an affirmation of the inerrancy of the Bible. In his controversial paper, Lake had said that “to speak of an absolutely trustworthy, inspired Bible which does not teach error is the point of departure for a soundly consistent evangelical theology.” But he also said that an article on “cosmogony” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible was “descriptive of the way the ancient biblical writers conceived of the universe.”
Lake saw no contradiction between these assertions, and the membership committee in effect ruled that his views were within bounds. In a poll of its members, the committee voted 4 to 1 to uphold his right to membership. Two members were non-commital.
Payne, however, did see an inconsistency, and on the first day distributed thirty copies of the dictionary article on cosmogony as evidence. But during the last business meeting, when the membership committee’s report regarding Lake was presented, Payne did not challenge it. A prominent theologian with impeccable inerrancy credentials, it was learned, had informed Payne that if the issue were brought to the floor he would speak in defense of Lake. (Both Payne and the anonymous theologian are among the sixteen members of the executive council of the newly formed International Council on Biblical Inerrancy.)
Stanley Gundry of Moody Bible Institute was elected president of the ETS for 1978, succeeding Walter Jauser, Jr., of Trinity seminary.
DONALD TINDER
Coral Ridge: ‘Count Us Out’
Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is best known around the evangelical world for its pioneering emphasis on lay witness known as Evangelism Explosion. The 4,400-member congregation took a step this month that may give it another distinction, that of leading a second exodus from the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (Southern). At a business meeting members voted 1,754 to 1 to seek dismissal from the PCUS and to affiliate with the four-year-old Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).
Coral Ridge was conspicuously absent in 1973 when the PCA was organized by evangelical churches leaving what many considered was an increasingly liberal PCUS. A number of those staying in the denomination cited the example of the Florida church as a reason for staying.
D. James Kennedy, senior pastor at Coral Ridge, disclaims any role as a leader of another large defection. He says simply that he is keeping a promise that he and other ministers made in a public declaration eight years ago (see October 24, 1969, issue, page 45, and January 2, 1970, issue, page 41.) “Should the basic theology or polity of the church be altered or diluted,” said the “Declaration of Commitment” signed by Kennedy and 500 other PCUS ministers, “we shall be prepared to take such actions as may be necessary to fulfill the obligation imposed by our ordination vows to maintain our Presbyterian faith.” Kennedy believes that the last PCUS General Assembly finally and officially altered that constitutional position (see July 29, 1977, issue, page 35). He cited the enactment of new ordination vows as the act that “cut the rope” binding the church to its historic positions on Scripture and faith.
The Coral Ridge pastor acknowledged that he has been concerned over a long period about the doctrinal drift of the denomintion. A 1972 PCUS assembly statement on Scripture was particularly troublesome to him, but it did not have constitutional authority. In 1977 a commission of the regional PCUS presbytery of which Coral Ridge was a member declared that the proposed ordination vows, if passed, would “commit one to no particular theological position.” Among those at the national level who tried to keep the vows from becoming part of the constitution were four former moderators of the assembly. They warned that the proposed vows would not commit ordinands to “hold to our Presbyterian heritage.” The denomination’s governing body nevertheless enacted the constitutional change last June, leaving Kennedy and others free to charge that the church had departed from its confessional position.
At the first fall meeting in 1977 of the Coral Ridge session (board of elders) a committee was appointed to start planning for the congregational vote. The meeting was announced a week in advance (as required by the constitution), letters were sent to all members, and a committee called all members to explain the issue. The presbytery was invited to send a speaker, and its moderator briefly addressed the meeting. The attendance, said Kennedy, was the largest for a business meeting in the congregation’s history.
In view of court rulings in some states, could the person who cast the lone vote against withdrawal pose a problem for the church? Kennedy discounts that possibility. He believes that the member simply was not prepared to vote to leave the PCUS but would not oppose the will of the majority. And the pastor does not expect the presbytery to try to make a “loyal minority” of that one member in order to claim the church’s property. The property includes a new physical plant that cost more than $5 million to build. In fact, he said, no problem from the denominational hierarchy is expected since every effort was made to “follow the book” in moving toward dismissal from the PCUS.
A practical consideration that would dissuade the hierarchy from trying to take over the Coral Ridge property would be its huge mortgage, said to require $4,000 per day. Presbyterian bodies have generally avoided attempts to control property with large debts. Coral Ridge raised $3.25 million for all causes, including its building debt, last year. In addition, the now-separate Evangelism Explosion (EE) organization operated on a budget of around $1 million. EE has now spread into every state, all Canadian provinces, and some fifty nations abroad. It has provided evangelistic training for ministers and laymen of a wide variety of denominations.
As Coral Ridge members were voting, the congregation of the nearby 500-member First Presbyterian Church of Plantation unanimously took a similar action. After the votes were reported, the presbytery’s executive secretary, Roy B. Connor, resigned.
Another of the presbytery’s better-known churches voted last June to leave the PCUS and join the PCA. The presbytery released from membership its Key Biscayne church, where ex-President Richard Nixon often attended services. The synod of Florida, however, reversed the presbytery and instructed it to “follow the book” more carefully. Instead of dismissing Key Biscayne, which has about 500 members, to another body (such as the PCA) the presbytery had voted simply to “erase from the rolls” the names of its members and officers. The synod’s reversal leaves the situation unclear.
Elsewhere in Florida, the PCUS “loyal minority” of a church in Madison lost its fight to keep the church property. The Florida Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of a lower-court ruling that awarded the property to the majority.
Cases are still pending in other states where the PCUS has laid claim to the buildings of congregations that voted to join the PCA. Notable among them are the cases involving the larger churches in the Montgomery, Alabama, area. In a number of presbyteries majorities simply walked away from the property and left it to “loyal minorities” of less than 5 per cent rather than go to court.
ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS
Seminary Grant
Some Jewish scholars believe that college history courses have a gap of about 500 years that needs to be filled. The Jewish Theological Seminary of America is out to fill the gap—with $162,777 of federal money. The neglected period, from 332 B.C. to 200 A.D., straddles the birth of Christ, and seminary officials believe the omission might be related to prejudice. Their attempt to correct the oversight—financed by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities—is called the Institute for the Teaching of the Post-Biblical Foundations of Western Civilization.
The institute will invite twenty teachers of undergraduates to an eight-week course at the seminary’s New York City campus this summer and an equal number in the summer of 1979. Those chosen will be specialists in the humanities with a “promising future,” nominated by their own schools. Those schools must agree to add to the curriculum a new course or courses as a result of the seminary study by their faculty member. Teachers at the institute will come mostly from the seminary’s own faculty, including specialists in history, rabbinics, Bible, philosophy, and education. Rabbi Gordon Tucker of the seminary staff said in a telephone interview that other institutions in New York’s Morningside Heights area (such as Union Theological Seminary) may provide lecturers.
David Weiss Halivni, professor of rabbinics at the seminary, will direct the institute. He said he believes that the critical period had been overlooked in college courses because of prejudice against including religious history in the curricula of secular institutions and prejudice against “viewing Western tradition as having been nurtured by a Jewish parent.” The prejudice, he added, is “now outmoded.”
How did a Jewish institution get federal money for a Jewish faculty to teach about Jewish history and influence? In a day when inspectors from various federal agencies are demanding that some religious institutions rearrange their curricula or libraries and take down some symbols or signs on their buildings, is there no church-state problem here? Not for Rabbi Tucker. His quick answer to the question is that the seminary offers several programs in addition to rabbinical training, and its board is independent. (A number of Protestant seminaries, however, have similar qualifications, an observer points out.)
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is apparently one of the smaller federal agencies that has doled out funds to numerous religion-related projects while church-and-state watchdogs focused their attention on the larger treasuries, such as that of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. “Comparative religion” is one of the fields covered in the broad official definition of the humanities circulated by the NEH. In charge of overseeing the agency’s budget of over $100 million in the Carter administration is Joseph Duffey, a minister of the United Church of Christ. Duffey, ordained a Baptist preacher at the age of eighteen, formerly served as chief administrative officer of the American Association of University Professors. He has been a political liberal for years and was once national chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action. He was also on the faculty of the now-defunct Hartford Seminary.
A church-and-state observer at the headquarters of Americans United for Separation of Church and State shrugged when asked about the grant to the Jewish seminary. The situation might prompt a letter to Duffey, but it is one of many fires that need attention, and there are not enough firemen, he commented. The church-and-state group’s new lawyer, he explained, faces a backlog of at least a year’s work.
ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS
