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January 2, 2007

Ecumenical activist Robert Bilheimer dies at 89

by David E. Anderson
Religion News Service

WASHINGTON — The Rev. Robert Bilheimer, a Presbyterian minister who helped organize the first meeting of the World Council of Churches and led opposition to the Vietnam war and apartheid in South Africa, died Dec. 17 at age 89.
   
     Bilheimer died in Canandaigua, NY, of complications from a hip fracture suffered after a fall and the late stages of Alzheimer's disease.
   
     “Dad had a finely developed social conscience and he found a way to merge it with his Christianity and his vision of solidarity with the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed” his son, documentary filmmaker Robert E. Bilheimer, told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.
   
     Bilheimer was among the organizers of the first meeting in 1948 of the World Council of Churches, the international ecumenical organization that emerged out of World War II. The council, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, currently counts as members 340 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox church bodies and denominations in more than 100 countries.
   
     He became an associate general secretary of the council in 1960 and was a leader in the effort by the WCC to declare apartheid — South Africa's system of racial separation — a sin that could not be justified by any religious or theological arguments.
   
     In 1963, Bilheimer became senior minister at Central Presbyterian Church in Rochester but returned to the ecumenical movement in 1966 to become international affairs director of the National Council of Churches. In 1971, he helped organize conferences of Christian and Jewish leaders against the war in Vietnam.
   
     In 1974, Bilheimer became executive director of the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research in Collegeville, MN, and remained there until his retirement in 1984.