Courtesy towards god: Religion and change in Eastern Europe

Abstract

On the night of 15 December 1989 agents of Ceausescu's hated Securitate came to evict a Reformed minister from his church in Timisoara. Unusually, at least for Romania, pastor Uiszl6 T6kes' congregation chose to resist and were soon joined by several thousand townsfolk. The crowd was later dispersed by gunfire with many killed on the street, but within ten dramatic days the regime had fallen and the dictator was dead. In this way a religious figure provided the spark which led to the downfall of a system, one of whose philosophical principles insofar as Ceausescu had principles apart from self-aggrandisement and self-preservation was scientific atheism. Of course, the Romanian revolution was not simply a product of the defiance of a single pastor. Popular resentment of the dynastic rule of the Ceausescus with its consequent economic impoverishment of the country had been building up over a number of years and was fuelled by the failure of the regime to move with the rest of Eastern Europe. Yet in the person of T6kes we see symbolised a number of factors contributing towards change in the region: individual resistance, the struggle against religious persecution, and the role Of religion in 'Iprotecting the values of a particular nationality in this case ethnic Hungarians. If religion was once ignored in discussions of East European politics, the election of a Polish Pope in 1978 and the key role of the Catholic Church in Polish politics since the Solidarity period reminded observers that religion remains a vital force in much of the region. More recently, reported appearan~es of the Virgin Mary in Yugoslavia and Ukraine have brought home the fact that tens of