07069
February 5, 2007

Tributes flow to Czech Protestant who championed justice  

by Stephen Brown
Ecumenical News International   

GENEVA — The Rev. Milan Opocensky, a Protestant theologian from the Czech Republic who led the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) during the decade that followed the collapse of communism in eastern Europe, has died aged 75.  
 
     ”Milan will go down in the history of the Alliance as a very committed leader and scholar who placed economic justice squarely on the agenda of WARC member churches,” said WARC general secretary, the Rev. Setri Nyomi. His predecessor died in Prague on Jan. 31 after a brief illness.   
 
Opocensky took up his post at WARC on Oct. 1, 1989. “Six weeks later the Berlin Wall fell,” he later recalled. At the same time, communism in his home country of Czechoslovakia was swept away by the “velvet revolution.”  
 
     He admitted that, like many experts, he had not foreseen the dramatic changes that would take place in Eastern Europe. He described his appointment as “in a way ... providential,” saying he hoped it had helped the alliance and its member Reformed churches deal with the changes resulting from the collapse of communism.   
 
     The Geneva-based WARC brings together 75 million Reformed Christians in 214 churches in 107 countries. Its current president is the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, General Assembly stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  
 
     Opocensky was born on July 5, 1931, in Hradec Kralove, about 100 kilometers from the Czech capital, Prague. He was the son of a Protestant pastor, and his mother was the first woman to study Protestant theology in Czechoslovakia.   
 
     He was ordained into the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren in 1955. Opocensky was deeply influenced by the Czech Protestant theologian Josef L. Hromodka, who believed in being in “critical solidarity” with the post-Second World War communist government.

      This meant neither totally accepting nor totally opposing the communist system, but trying to work within it to protect the people and the faith, and argue for change.  
 
     From 1967 to 1973, Opocensky worked in Geneva as a staff member of the World Student Christian Federation. He was outside his homeland in 1968, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to crush a brief period of liberalization, known as the “Prague Spring.”  
 
     In 1973, he became a professor of social ethics at the Comenius Faculty of Protestant Theology in Prague. In 1989, Opocensky returned to Geneva as general secretary of WARC, a post he held until March 2000.   
 
     Here, Opocensky stressed the need for churches to see issues of economic injustice and ecological devastation as central to the Christian faith. He said the challenges posed by these issues posed might well be “more complicated, more dangerous” than those raised by communism.   
 
     Under communism, he said, “the borderline between State and Church was clear. But now the forces of seduction of the spirit are even stronger, and the Church is called to be vocal and prophetic in its resistance against them.”   
 
     Opocensky said his commitment to dealing with such issues was inspired by the leaders of the Protestant Reformation such as John Calvin, as well as by earlier reformers such as Jan Hus in the Czech lands. “Political responsibility and having responsibility for all realms of societal life is the special charisma [gift] of the Reformed tradition,” Opocensky asserted.  
 
     Still, he also found himself at the center of the argument that raged — and is still up for discussion — about the attitude adopted by churches in central and eastern Europe towards their communist governments. A Prague court ruled in 1992 that allegations he had collaborated with the communist-era secret police were unfounded.   
 
     Opocensky counted among his achievements at WARC, making the organization more representative of its member churches in the Southern Hemisphere. “Before it was still a bit North Atlantic,” he said, noting the role of churches from Europe and North America during WARC’s history.  
 
     He is survived by his wife, Jana, also an ordained pastor, their three children and several grandchildren.