From the Easy Chair

Romania in 1989

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 55-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BB99

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BB99, Romania in 1989-90 period from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 209, January the fourth, 1990.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss with Gary Mose the editor of The Chalcedon Report his recent trip to the central European area, in particular Romania.

Romania has been very much in the news and it is an area where Gary has been three times, I believe. And he has close connections there with the pastors who have suffered as a result of the persecution.

Gary, would you like to give us a general introduction to the picture there in Romania?

[Mose] Well, it is difficult to talk about Romania right now because the condition are changing daily and whatever we say today may be outdated by the time this tape is heard. I discovered that when I wrote an article for the upcoming issue of The Chalcedon Report. And before it could get to print the article was out of date. But in general one must be positive and must ... a Christian must rejoice over much of what is happening there in terms of the increase in freedom, particularly in religious freedom. Nevertheless the country is... has had such along history of... of disaster and of chaos, of totalitarian rule that they fall of the... the recent government has left a tremendous vacuum in every way, socially, politically, economically, religiously so that it will take a great many years to rebuild that country in every way.

[Rushdoony] I think that is a very important point, because one of the things that people nowadays do not think about is the fact that when a country has been radically decapitalized as all the iron curtain countries have been, recovery is not something that occurs overnight. It is a slow, long difficult process. If I may comment a little further on that, the most remarkable recovery, of course, perhaps in history was of Germany after World War II under Gerhardt’s economic policies. But that was after a relatively short span of time under Nazi rule. And you still had the people with the basic character of their Christian past, whereas the character of the people in central Europe has in many instances been warped. They have gotten used to the state doing everything and it will be difficult for recapitalization to develop, especially when they start with next to nothing.

[Mose] That is clearly the case in Romania. There are some elements in society which hold promise for the reconstruction emphasis on that society. The Romanian people basically are a creative people. They are resilient, but they... the last 30 years of despotic rule have ... have so debilitated them... one man I talked to who was an engineer at a factory there part... that was his full time job, but he had another job, a more important one underground. When he told me in Romania there is no such thing as industry. The people.... one of the ways that they resisted was simply to ... to sandbag in all of their official capacities. They ... if they worked in a factory they just didn’t work. And they spent all of their time scheming ways to get around the system, living by their wits, moment by moment... And as to the Christians, rather than living by their wits I think I can say very clearly that many of them lived by the Spirit, whereas those who had no faith had to live by their wits and in many ways involved themselves in questionable and criminal activity because of it. Christians lived on a miraculous level. I think I may have mentioned that in a previous discussion. Clearly those with a... with a vibrant faith to around the system by depending totally on the... the Spirit of God.

[Rushdoony] Well, the production of food, the production of goods has not suddenly blossomed with the end of the old order. So I don't think things have changed that much probably from what you saw. Would you describe how you saw Romania when you were there?

[Mose] Well, each of the three times—the first time was in 1985, second time in 1987 and this third time just a few months ago in October of 89—the situation was much the same although it just continued to deteriorate each time. You... you have probably heard the reports on ... on radio and TV and in the newspapers that the people were starving and that is a very literal fact. People had no food. What little food was available was tightly rationed. Even the staples, bread, milk, oil, which is a very important element in their way of cooking, if they cook, had anything to cook, all of those staples were just simply non existent and the... and the people either had to raise things illegally in their backyards or on the sly which many people did or they just starved. And that does not mean that there wasn’t food available. As a matter of fact, since the revolution suddenly, according to reports, there is food in the stores. Much of what was being produced and what was there was being horded by a ... by the elite, particularly the secret police and the secure {?} forces, Ceausescu and his close henchmen. So there were... there were things there, but they were held close to the chest of those who considered themselves privileged, not only food, but all other kinds of material things. If you went into a tourist hotel you would find special shops there called dollar shops and they were loaded with things from... not only things produced domestically, even large ticket items like refrigerators and washing machines, but also with imported goods, Japanese electronic equipment and so on, clothes. It was all there. The problem was that nobody had access to it.

The stores that the... the masses had access to were empty, food stores, clothing stores, you name it. The few things they had... would have on display simply for display purposes, but there was nothing to buy.

[Scott] I saw today’s, I think... either today or a few days ago an article in the Wall Street Journal about Romania. And incidentally their business of being dependent upon the state go back about 55 years beginning about the middle of the 30s until today, which means that a man 60 years old would only be 15 at that time. So only the very elderly remember even the façade of a free market in any true sense of the word. Today the recent article in the Journal pointed out that a great deal of the food from Romania went to the Soviets. And this particular angle of the Soviet colony, the Soviet colonization of middle Europe has never really been brought up. Everyone seems to be looking away from the Soviet crimes, from the nature of the Soviet system, the caliber of the ... of the Russian people who have been living off the fruits of the labor of all these other people for all these years.

There is no comparison between the Soviets, for instance, and the Nazis. Nobody seems to have ever found a war criminal in the Soviet Union. They didn’t exist. It is a very strange kind of myopia.

But going back to the Romania, according to the article, one of the big problems is that practically everyone who has a skill was part of the establishment and the people who were not part of the establishment are unskilled, uneducated because in order to get an education or a skill you had to go along with the establishment.

You have here, I would say, something similar to what has occurred I the Soviet Union and other totalitarian countries. You have the deliberate corruption of the people, because in order to get ahead you have to sell your soul to the devil and that leaves the whole nation without leadership.

[Mose] Yes, that is clearly the case in Romania. If you did not cooperate you could not have a job. If children ... if they would go to school at all would be harassed terribly in the schools. You could not live where you wanted to live. You were assigned a place to live. You had to cooperate to survive which means that most of the people cooperated. And I would not say that in every case they sold their soul. They... they did so at least on the surface, but there was a... a deep down ... at least an inner resistance hanging on to their soul and particularly the case, I think, for... in some of the minority groups of the Hungarian, particularly.

[Scott] Hungarians in Romania.

[Mose] In Romania, yeah.

[Scott] There are other minority groups there, too, are there not?

[Mose] Oh, I imagine so.

[Rushdoony] There are some Armenians.

[Mose] Yes, definitely.

[Scott] There are Armenians.

[Rushdoony] A number.

[Mose] The Hungarian group is... is the largest minority and it was ... as such the most persecuted. It was the... the group that was chosen to be a scapegoat for all the ills of Romania and...

[Scott] Armenians?

[Mose] No, the ... the Hungarians.

[Scott] Oh, Hungarians.

[Mose] Yes. You have, you know, I understand many people cooperated in order just to survive. And these are the people who had the skills. And these, of course, are the people who are going to be carrying on. These are the ones who are ... those who have leadership skills are the ones who ... who rose through the ranks by cooperating with the best. But that does not bode well, because these are people who are trained in the system and even if they don’t now announce themselves as being Communist or even consider themselves to be Communist, it is all they know.

[Rushdoony] Well, I don’t think we can condemn the people who outwardly cooperated when you realize that this country through its state department rebuked our ambassador for telling the state department the truth of what was going on in Romania.

[Mose] This is what has really disturbed me about the... in just the recent news coverage and the... the reason... the recent release of information and the position of our government.

Everything that is now being reported as an astonishing revelation has just been brought to light. It wasn’t known. It has been known for...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Mose] ... a couple of decades. In 19... 1960 or 78 the ... the chief of the Romanian secret police colonel Ian {?} defected to the United States and... and told everything that we are seeing now.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I remember.

[Mose] ... to the CIA. And the CIA refused to believe him. Finally he went public just a few... in the last couple of years. A very sensational book called Red Horizons and everything that we are seeing revealed now is ... has already been know in that book.

[Scott] Well, George Shoates is the one who called in Thunderbird and rebuked him for reporting what the government as doing to the people. And Thunderbird told me this in Washington.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He said... I said, “What was his argument?” He said, “Well, his argument was that I was sent there to become... to maintain friendly relationships with that government and not to send back reports that were critical of it.”

[Rushdoony] We must remember, too, that Queen Elizabeth made Ceausescu an honorary knight of the British Empire. I believe the King of Norway and several other countries honored Ceausescu mightily.

[Mose] Including the United States. Of course, Romania was, I think, the only for a while, eastern block nation that was granted ... granted most favored nation trade status.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I think that is because the...

[Mose] That was withdrawn and then was put back in again.

[Scott] ...they broke with the Soviets officially, at least, regarding the Israel.

[Mose] Well, they broke with the Soviets on almost every front including the Olympic games. That, again, was revealed in {?} book as being a disinformation operation. Romania, in fact, was very closely tied to the Soviet Union during the whole period of time which it portrayed itself as being maverick in the block but this was calculated deliberately to ... to win western support. And Ceausescu was very skillful at this.

He spent most of his time traveling outside of the country and making himself good friends with people like Queen Elizabeth and U S presidents and virtually anybody who would receive him. And almost everybody did. I mean, he went out of his way to develop this image of being a progressive, independent thinker within the block for the... the very purpose of attracting western investment and interest and ... and establishing relations with western ties.

[Scott] It goes back a long way. Under Lyndon Johnson there was a proposal which went through the department and that was Dean Rusk at that time, to build a synthetic rubber plant in Romania because Romania is very rich in oil. It should be one of the richest countries in middle Europe because of the oil deposits it has, oil reserves. And there was a big {?} between Goodyear and Firestone on that occasion. Goodyear rejected this proposition. They said it... DeYoung said he didn't think it was in the best interest of the United States which put him at odds with the secretary of state and the president. Raymond DeYoung... Raymond Firestone went along with it and the Young Americans for Freedom decided to make an issue of it and it did become an issue. It got into the press, the right wing and the left wing press and so forth. I remember the New York Times ran an editorial saying that American citizens have no business interfering with foreign policy. And that is worth remembering. And the New York Daily News, of course, came out in favor of Goodyear and against Firestone.

Eventually the matter reached the sales kits of the salesmen and, believe it or not, Firestone began to lose tire sales to Goodyear, although there is really no difference in the quality of the tires, because of this. And it was a very interesting case, because eventually Firestone had to drop it. So therefore the Romanians did not get the advanced synthetic rubber plant that the Americans were supposed to construct for them.

And I remember asking Mr. DeYoung about two years after what happened as a result and he said, “Well, of course, government business is not the majority of our business.” He said, “We have about 15 percent governmental contracts.” But, he said, “It was very surprising, because,” he said, “after that they rolled out the red carpet for us in Washington and they were very conciliatory and worked with us on all kinds of levels.”

But he said, “How do you account for that?”

Well, I said, “A government that bends with every wind is bound to bend when you blow, too.”

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, without endangering the lives of anyone there, because the situation is so volatile, we don’t know what can happen tomorrow, tell us something about the Christians there and their lives and what they have endured.

[Mose] Ok, maybe what I can do is to ... switching here from analysis to maybe anecdotes...

[Rushdoony] Let’s do . And take your time.

[Mose] ...take... take you on a little trip as I took it, just in place by place. I began the trip in the Netherlands this time. The trip was under the auspices of a group called the Christian Foundation for Help to Prisoners of Conscience. That is a rough translation of the Dutch name. I happen to be a member of the board of directors on the American arm of that group, the International Ambassadors of Mercy.

I went to Holland and received a briefing for... on the situation in Hungary and Romania and also to load up my small rented car with as much relief supplies as I could carry. I took food which was badly needed and medicine which was even more badly needed and a very large carton, several hundred items of ... of prescription medicines. I had business to conduct in Sweden before going there so I carried all this with into Sweden.

I found out later that the Amsterdam to Stockholm run is the number one drug run right now and I found out after I had crossed the borders that they were stopping cars daily and almost hourly looking for drugs at the Swedish border and, I guess, the Lord was with us, because we were just waved around through the border and weren’t even stopped at all at customs.

And coming back out again on the way to the East we were just waved through the border. In fact, we were waved through every border crossing all the way through Europe. Never had to show a passport or anything all the way through.

Our first stop after leaving Sweden was at the United Nations Refugee Center in Lins, Austria. The reason I had gone there was to meet with a young Romanian refugee and his wife who... with whom I had been corresponding for several months. This is the son of a man I had met on my first trip, a believer. The father was a believer, a very high ranking official in the government who was fired from his job when he became a Christian and was unemployed for some six years. His family left him when he became a Christian including this son that I just mentioned. The son was now growth and had become married. And just before fleeing Romania had become a believer himself. This young man’s story is this. He was determined to come to freedom no matter what the cost. So he and his wife who was about five months pregnant at the time decided one day to disguise themselves as peasant field workers, took a position in a field near the Hungarian border and worked their way through the field during the day until nightfall and got themselves very close to the Danube River. And under the cover of darkness they decided to make a break for it, but as they were running through the underbrush they tripped some security wires which sent off flares and lit up the whole area with many brightly colored flares and, of course, the border guards discovered them as they were fleeing and as they were swimming thought the river and they were under very heavy gunfire as they were making their way through the river.

Miraculously, they did get through the river and to the Hungarian side, walked for about 30 kilometers and finally arrived in the city in Hungary by the name of Zeged. From there he wrote to me and told me what had happened to him and asked for my assistance in helping him to relocate in the United States.

He was told by the American embassy in Budapest that if he could get a letter of support from the United States he would be granted permission to emigrate as a political refugee.

I wrote such a letter as offering my personal sponsorship and talked to some other Christian friends who agreed that if and when he would be allowed to come they would help him become reestablished here. I got a rather strange and almost nasty letter back finally from the U. S. embassy in Budapest and said that this was impossible. This young man had been told this many times. There was no way possible that the could come to another country since he was safe and secure in Hungary, which was considered, by the United States at that time a secure country although it had not declared itself non communist even then. Apparently the United States considered it to be virtually a western nation and nation of refuge.

I wrote a number of other letters on this young man’s behalf to the state department and several more to the embassy, tried to explain the situation, told them his story once again, that he could not possibly go back to Romania, that he was in Hungary without papers and, as such, was not able to work. And so he was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, so to speak. He couldn’t even go back, nor go... nor go forward and, as a matter of fact, couldn’t even maintain himself in the status quo.

Again, just nothing but rejections. I finally committed this thing to very intensive prayer and just a few days after I began praying intensively about this, I received... suddenly I ... a letter from the young man saying that the situation had suddenly been reversed. The U. S. embassy gave him traveling papers. He was off to Austria. He was sent first to Vienna to a processing center there and then sent on to this United Nations holding center in Lins, Austria.

When I got there I felt that ... as I was representing a Christian human rights organization, I felt it was important to investigate the conditions there which I did. The people in there, probably five to 10,000 refugees from all over the world and at this place, basically were being warehoused. They were given very tiny rooms, probably no bigger than most of our kitchens and they were being fed very well. I must say that. We were invited to have a couple of meals there and the Austrians were doing a wonderful job of feeding them. But they were not allowed to work and so you had five to 10,000 people sitting around in idleness and you can imagine what kind of conditions that that breeds. And there is a great deal of grumbling. There is a great deal of crime, vandalism. As a matter of fact we were told that a large number of the people in the refugee center were, in fact, not bona fide refugees at all, but were criminals who had been kicked out of their country for one reason or another or were, in fact, spies who had been deliberately sent there by their governments to keep tabs on dissidents who had fled for one reason or another.

So you have a very volatile situation in ... in those camps. The authorities have ... in Austria... the Austrian authorities who were maintaining the camp, well, I guess the best word is resent the ... the people who are there, although they take care of them physically and they don’t appreciate them. We were told that this, you know, man and his wife and a number of other believers had a worship service in their small apartment one evening and were... were just quietly praying and there was suddenly a knock at the door and the nigh porter, the man in charge that evening of the whole center told them that they had to stop praying. It was against the rules, that there had been complaints about them paying.

Well, this young man was outraged. He said he had fled Romania to speak of that sort of thing and had come to the west in order to have freedom to pray and now he was suddenly being told that he could not pray. And so he told me this when I returned on the way back and I went to the manager and lodged a formal protest about this. The manager denied that it happened and told me that if it did the porter was wrong and that, in fact, the people had every right to engage in religious activities in their apartments. The young man said hat every... the non believers there were ... they would play their music loud at all hours of the night and party and drink and carry on and cause all kinds of disruptions with impunity, but believers praying could not.

The manager told me, of course, that they had a right, but I was told later that the manager was prone to say that sort of thing to people from the outside who complained and then as soon as they left things returned to normal. In fact, the conditions at this refugee center which is operated by the United Nations stood out in stark contrast to another approach to the refugee problem I saw in Hungary. An old pastor and his wife in a small village in a remote area of Hungary were single handedly running a refugee program. They had helped 125 families who had fled Romania and had come through the countryside into Hungary into their area, helped them buy houses, buy some animals if necessary to support themselves, get them jobs through the organization that I work with to have clothing and furnishing for the houses. And the refugees here were productive and happy and this contrast between a biblical approach to charity and to mercy was just remarkable as over against what I saw in Austria.

[Rushdoony] We hear a great deal about what the various countries and the U N are doing about the refugee problem, but next to nothing about what Christians are doing and the truly able work is by Christian groups, Catholic and Protestant. And very few people are aware of the fact hat it is Christian work the world over that is alleviating human distress in the name of Christ and is effective in so doing.

[Mose] That was ... that was really clearly the case in this ... in this incident I just mentioned. This old pastor... and he is an elderly man and his wife and they are really working single handedly. It is a small village of a couple of hundred of people, perhaps. He is buying up every house he can get in the village and going out into neighboring villages to find houses. He took us to several of the people that he has helped to resettle, families and single individuals and in ever case they were just so delighted and joyful in their new situation and it is hurting the Lord.

He told hem that had encouraged Romanians in Romania to stay there. This is a reformed church pastor and he told me that these people needed to stay in Romania as if... if every true believer and ever person with a vision for Reconstruction, if you will, for …to ... for capturing their society or reclaiming it for Christ and... left the situation there would... would deteriorate even further. So he always encouraged people to stay, to be a witness, to be a force where they were in their communities. But he said, well, if they come anyway, I have a duty before the Lord to provide of them and even though his heart was for them to stay. When they came he just poured out his heart, opened his home, both he and his wife.

It was interesting when we left Sweden my traveling companion came the morning we left with a large number of boxes full of clothes to take along.

[Scott] Tell us about your traveling companion.

[Mose] He is an American who lives in Sweden and his name is Rocky Schmidt, a very dear friend of mine and a very dear Christian.

Well, we could just go on with this little anecdote. Now what he brought along, he took all of these boxes of clothes which he loaded up and he also had a baby buggy, a large... one of these Swedish baby buggies. I mean, they are like Caddilacs. They are chrome and velvet and have all kinds of gadgets and things on them and I said, “Rocky, how in the world are we going to cross the Romanian border with a thing like this? You know, we are supposed to be just a couple of guys, tourists on a holiday going into Romania. What are we doing with baby buggy?”

And he said, “Well, I realized that could be a problem, but I just feel like the Lord wants me to bring this baby buggy along.” And he could not be dissuaded so we packed it up and took it along in the van with us and when we got to his Hungarian pastor, the reformed church pastor who was doing the refugee work we started to unload some of the things to give to him and the wife spied this baby buggy and she said, “Oh, the Lord has heard my prayers.” She said, “I have been praying since August for a baby buggy. In fact, I told one of the young mothers, Romanian refugee mothers that the Lord was sending a baby buggy which this lady needed. And she waited three months for it to come by the time we arrived. And she was just trilled how the Lord has arranged, you know, unbeknownst to us even why we should take such a thing.

So we didn’t have to take it across the Romanian border, but the Lord intended it for this lady in Hungary.

Before we came to this village in Hungary we stopped in Budapest after we left Austria we stopped in Budapest and I met there with pastor {?} who is a leading Hungarian reformed pastor in Budapest, has a large congregation there. It has been one of the more active churches in Hungary. Churches in Hungary tend not to be active at all. In fact, they tend to be very pietistic. They tend to be lethargic, frankly. You know, the Christians that come to church on Sunday and listen and leave and that is the end of it. So the is a... definitely a problem with the church in Hungary.

But this pastor is one who has been quite active in evangelism, in meeting physical needs not only of his congregation but of the population in general and particularly in serving the needs of Hungarian refugees and, I mean Romanian refugees and Hungarians living in Romania. His son and the young people of the Church regularly made trips into Romania to serve the needs of Hungarian Christians in Romania.

This pastor was the one who had warned me on our first trip that it was too dangerous to bring my family into Romania and provided a safe house for my family when I went in the first time. This time he was very eager to describe changes in Hungary. And as he described the situation for the Church right now the words he used were that the church is absolutely free. That is a quote. And he said the opportunity right now is extremely ripe. The field is wide open not only for church... the churches to work there, but for outsiders to come, the missionaries, if you will.

[Scott] Has the government in Hungary changed at that point?

[Mose] The day we came into Hungary was the day the Hungarian Communist part was holding its congress and declared itself to be a non Communist party and gave itself the Social Democratic name. So that was the official move, in fact, the day that we came, but...

[Rushdoony] Back in the 20s and 30s Hungary was one of the strong Christian areas of Europe with a very large Catholic and very large Calvinist population.

[Mose] Those two elements are still very strong.

[Rushdoony] And they are still faithful.

[Mose] Well, I can’t... I don’t know what is going on with the Catholic situation, but the... the reformed groups that I have... have met... the contacts I have head in the reformed church there I would say, “Yes, very much so they are faithful, not only faithful but really have a vision for ... for reconstruction.” He told me that the opportunity is... is open now for missionaries to come, for the establishment of Christian schools, for evangelism, for the establishment of ... of seminaries, Bible schools and he said the problem is that we are not trained for this and particularly in the situation that we are in right now. This is the first country to officially come out of Communism. They had been a Communist country. And ... but with 40 years or more of Communist rule, effectively the population has become a completely secular society, if not officially atheistic, at least atheistic in fact. The Christians are regarded by non Christians as weak kneed people, people who need crutches. This is always the criticism that is leveled against believers. And so to be a believer there is to be a second class citizen not only in terms of rights, but just in terms just of social attitudes.

[Scott] Do you think that will change?

[Mose] Well, it will change depending on what the church does with its opportunities right now. He asked me to... to tell western Christians to please send help, to take advantage of the opportunity now to hold conferences, to send trainers, to teach people this ... {?} and the churches and the leadership there in a new ... a new kind of evangelism. Well, what kind of evangelism do we need to reach this kind of a population?

[Scott] Maybe we should have Reconstruction conference.

[Mose] Well, immediately when he told me that, that was the first thing that came to my mind. And I think I am going to work on that.

[Scott] Right.

[Mose] I really would like to see that happen.

[Rushdoony] The charismatics have penetrated Hungary. How widespread is their influence there?

[Mose] I don’t know that situation in Hungary so much. In Romania I do. Many of my contacts in Romania were with charismatics and I would say they are probably the... again, combining with the reformed groups as is happening here in this country this combination has become very powerful. The Pentecostals and charismatics Romania are... are... are growing by leaps and bounds. Their churches are packed to the gills, standing room only small buildings. People are jammed in like sardines.

[Scott] Did the Hungary government destroy churches?

[Mose] No, not like the Romanian government did.

[Scott] They were terminated?

[Mose] They are neglected for the most part. I don’t know. You know, I am sure there were some that were turned into other things or just fell into disrepair. Congregations took it upon themselves in many cases to keep their churches in repair. And that has been made possible for a number of years in Hungary.

[Rushdoony] The Hungarians had the reputation of being more disobedient to their Communist regime than any other iron curtain country.

[Mose] Yeah. I think that is the case. There was always... well, you remember the revolt in ... in 56.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Mose] That... that attitude was ... was never lost in Hungary. Although they didn’t try it again, a violent revolution as they did in 56, the ... the mental attitude that produced that stayed and they just ate away at the Communist system bit by bit, each individual in his own sphere did what was necessary to resist it and they just never absorbed a Stalinist mentality. Resisted it all the way.

[Scott] Tell me how it was to have went across the border from Hungary to Romania.

[Mose] Yes, they did. The first two crossings that I made in 85 and 87 were very traumatic and I have described those previously. I don’t need to {?} in one case was detained at the border for 12 hours and the second case, I believe, something like five or six hours. The second time objected to a body search and harassment and, well, it is a very traumatic experience crossing the border into Romania, at least it as until very recently.

I was told this time in ... in Hungary, both in Budapest and by the old pastor up near the Czech border that the things had... had really gotten tight at the border that in many cases people were just being turned away with no reason, if there was any discrepancy whatsoever. Vehicles were being confiscated. People were being imprisoned and westerners, anybody.

[Scott] On the...

[Mose] ... on the Romanian border.

[Scott] On the Romanian side.

[Mose] Yes. They told me they didn’t expect me to get in this time, particularly with what I was carrying, this large amount of drugs, prescription drugs, medicine. People, let me make that clear. I was not...

[multiple voices]

[Mose] Although much of it ...

[Scott] Who trusts you?

[Mose] ...looked very suspicious. In fact, because it looked so suspicious I was... I was recall sweating it. I had more fear approaching the border than I had ever had any of the previous...

[Rushdoony] Our Chalcedon drug runner.

[Mose] Yeah. But before... just before I got there and when I left Sweden we had a very powerful prayer meeting about this trip, a commissioning service, if you will, and there were a number of prophecies regarding what would happen at the border, that every door would be open, prophecies which I almost had a hard time believing, because of my previous experiences at the border and knowing how the situation had gotten even tighter, because, you know, many of the surrounding countries had already started their liberalization booths, Ceausescu was in digging his heels in and just after I left, in fact, the borders were sealed. But already then things were really tightening up. So I really expected to face an even worse time this time, but because of the prayers of God’s people in Sweden and then a number of groups there in the United States including our Chalcedon group and some other churches here in {?} were praying intensely for us.

[Rushdoony] Yes, I was praying the day you crossed the border, believe me.

[Mose] Oh, {?} and there was no doubt about it that as we approached and crossed that border that there was a spectacular, supernatural in dimension. When we came to the border, even though supposedly conditions were much tighter in this case it was almost a joke. We were virtually waved through. We were stopped, of course, and told to take our suitcases out and open them up. I had scattered the medicines in all of the suitcases in packages we were carrying so they wouldn’t be all lumped together in one. And as the guards went through...and put their hands through the suitcases, very superficially they found only one item of medicine and when he picked it up and held it up and said, “What is this?” I simply said it was medicine and he said, “Ok, and he put it back in the suitcase.”

[Scott] In English?

[Mose] Yes, in English. And that was it. I was astonished. The situation... we were waiting to be inspected. We were, of course, tense based on our previous experiences. My son {?} who was along with us who was a violinist had a violin with him and for some reason he took his violin out while we were waiting and started play some light hearted folk music {?} it was astonishing what... how that changed the mood. Suddenly tensions just all seemed to disappear. The guards and soldiers there both started to clap their hands to the music and they were smiling and making jokes to each other and just desired, almost to compare to what I had experienced in the border crossing before. And, you know, a number of things happened that they... they helped us in... in declaring... we had to declare the violin because it was a valuable item. Even though it was a used one they put it down as a new one so we wouldn’t have to pay duty on it when we came out.

Now this is... it just didn’t happen. There were just a number of very bizarre things like that.

We crossed the border and without incident, came to a city called {?} in Transylvania which is a Hungarian city for the most part and met with a young man there who was an engineer in a factory. He was the one who told me that there is no such thing as industry in Romania. Although he worked as an engineer, what he really was, was a professor of ethics with an underground seminary operated by a small element within the large Hungarian Reformed Church.

The Church itself was somewhat compromised and the hierarchy was being controlled by Communist, but within that... the official church there was a small community of about 30 families which is operating an underground church, that underground group was operating a seminary. They were training about, I think he told me about 100 pastors.

[multiple voices]

[Scott] That is more than they do here.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Mose] Of course, they couldn’t meet together, but they training them in groups of three and four at a time in homes or out in the countryside and once a year they would go up into the Carpathian mountains and have a retreat. And this was the only time that they could get all of the students together with the various professors to exchange ideas and to pray together and consider the future of the Church and to get that far out in the mountains, apparently it is reasonably safe to do that.

They were doing that. This young man was... I will never forget him. He was ... he was just so tremendously impressive in his ...in his dedication to the Lord. He told me his house was a very dangerous house. He spoke in whispers the whole time we were there, because his house was constantly monitored. We had to be very careful what we said.

I will never forget one of the things he told me during the conversation. We were talking about the Church in the West and he... he remarked, “I understand that in the West you have set the Scripture to song.” And I said, “Yes, that is true.” Of course, Scripture songs were becoming quite popular in some American churches. He said, “Well, that is very nice.” To us the Bible is not a song. The Bible is not a book. The Bible is not words. The Bible is not wisdom. But it is life. And the sparkle in his eye and the way he raised his hands and the lilt in his voice when he said the Bible is life. To us the Scripture is in daily life. it just thrilled me. It send thrills up and own my spine and to this day when I picture him saying that it was... I was so impressed.

[Scott] Tell me. Did they all speak English or did you have ... was your companion able to translate?

[Mose] The contacts which I was given in Holland were English speaking people.

[Scott] They were all English speaking.

[Mose] Yes. Right. I met a number of people who were not, but and then in each case I had some Romanian contact in mind with me who did speak English so we were able to communicate. Not always well, but at least we could.

This young man is the son of a pastor who led a revival in Transylvania back in the late 40s and early 50s and for which he was thrown into prison, spent a number of years in prison. He ... this young man and his brothers and sisters and mother were put in a concentration camp while the father was in prison. While the father was in prison he was a cell mate of a very famous Romanian dissident, pastor Richard Wurmbrand.

[multiple voices]

[Scott] {?} That was his father.

[Mose] And so they are very close family friends. So this is a ... a very powerful family. In fact, all of the brothers and sisters now are engaged in some kind of kingdom activity full time either as pastors, as professors or as wives of pastors or professors. They are actively...

[Scott] Wurmbrand would like to know that... that you met them.

[Mose] I am sure he would. I don’t know if he is being contact... maintained contact with this ... the father of this young man who is still alive I believe now. I couldn’t say that for sure anymore, but the father... the mother has written a book about their experiences. He gave me the Romanian name and said there was an English translation, but he couldn’t remember the name of it. So I would pass it on to you if I could, but I don’t know the title. She used a pen name by the name of Julia Francis.

The young man is also writing a book, another book right now. He has written several. The book is based on the ... on the theme of the ... the... the dishes in the temple. He was telling me how the ... the children of Israel as they left Egypt left with the treasures of Egypt and eventually turned those treasures, the gold and so on into ... to some degree the dishes of the temple and the theme of this book is how Christians can take the resources of the world and sanctify them and dedicate them to the service of the Lord which struck me, again, as being very much a Reconstructionist idea. And I am hoping and praying that he will be able to get this book published now that conditions are freer there.

But the curriculum they are using in the system has been all hand copied and hand written. He showed me a number of their books and all of the ...

[Scott] The books are all hand written.

[Mose] ... the text books that they use are all hand written. Yes. He said they had managed to acquire a computer but they were unable to use it because they had no computer discs. So I have since my return to the United States acquired a number of computer discs by donation of a friend of mine and he has sent those on to Hungary to b smuggled in to Romania. Perhaps now they can be taken in freely.

I went on from that place to the city of {?} where I had been before and met with a number of my former contacts there. I had lost track of the very active and important pastor since my 1987 visit. I think I have told his story both on a tape and also in The Chalcedon Report. A young lay pastor who had been denied ordination in a large church in {?} and had kind of dropped out of view and I was not able to contact him in the interim. I feared... I had received, of course, that he had been sent into the army and that other reprisals had been taken against him. So I feared for his safety.

When I came there, I met with my main contact who knew this pastor and I asked about him and my contact seemed reluctant to talk about, in fact, would not tell me what had happened to him. He only told me that there has been a scandal. That is all he would tell me. A desperately wanted to meet this man, this young pastor to find out what had happened to him. So since I could not get any information any other way, I went walking and driving to thought e city to where I thought I remembered his house was to see if I could find it and could not identify it. As I was walking down the street, again, I committed this to prayer and immediately as I began to pray out from a doorway about 20 feet in front of me this young man emerged and got... was ready to get in his car with his wife and I was so astonished to see him so suddenly like that. I shouted his name and ran up to him. When he recognized me and we threw our arms around each and he took me back into his house and told me what had happened to him.

He, in fact, had been denied ordination and had been effectively thrown out of his church and actually he resigned his position within the church because they had sent in a Baptist authorities who, in fact, were Communist. They had sent in another pastor that he was supposed to work with. But he said the situation would have been one of constant conflict and he would not have been able to minister in a biblical way, so he resigned. And instead he went out into the countryside and organized some more churches and small villages and in the year before I had come there, one church that he was pastoring had grown from 60 to 120 members, had doubled its size in a year’s time. And he was ministering in a number of small villages. The Lord is mightily blessing his ministry there, because he has been a faithful believer. He has lost every privilege because of his resistance. He had a good job as an engineer. His wife is a doctor. She still practices in an unofficial capacity. But they have... they have suffered greatly because of his insistence on being a faithful pastor.

[Scott] Well, the circumstances will, I am sure, change now.

[Mose] Well I certainly hope so and pray so. Although there is much to be suspicious about and what is happening in Romania. You... you have to see the hand of the Lord in it all also. And I am convinced of that. The Lord has heard the cries of his people there and the cries of his people on behalf of Romania in the West as well.

As a matter of fact, the revolution that—if we can call it that and I believe it was—actually was instigated by Christians. The incident in {?} which touched off the revolution began with... at the home of pastor {?} whose name was given to me when I was in Budapest. I was asked to visit him and encourage him because just before I got there he had given his famous interview to Hungarian television about religious persecution in Romania. And because of this he was in grave danger for his life. In fact, his chief assistant was murdered right after the interview. His body was found in the woods nearby in {?}. This incident, when the secret police began to move in on him, as many as 400 or several thousand, according to some reports, believers surrounded his house and set up a physical barrier of bodies including children ringing around his house to prevent the security forces from arresting him.

The result was that that tanks moved in and as they rolled over the people, shot them and rolled over them and including children were massacred in this way. Tanks just ran them flat. And when this kind of brutality which the Romanian people finally decided they had had enough.

[Scott] That was the catalyst.

[Mose] And this is what sparked... sparked the revolution.

[Scott] Isn’t it interesting that so little of that aspect of the revolution is reported here?

[Mose] It was initially reported. In fact, a small item in the bottom of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, in fact, reported that angle, that it was believers who started it. But after that, the subject was dropped completely and never once did you hear any more about the role of believers. And as a matter of fact, there has never been, as far as I can tell, one more report about what the fate of this pastor {?} nobody knows. I don’t know what has happened to him.

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is up for this hour, but we will continue this discussion, Gary. Thank you very much and God bless you all. \

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.