The Bishop and the Quisling

(See Cover)

The free peoples of the world gather this week to proclaim again the gospel of peace on earth. In a log hut deep in a forest north of Oslo, Norway, a man who has done as much as any other to keep Christian hope alight in the darkness of occupied Europe will celebrate Christmas, as he has for two years past, a solitary prisoner. Eivind Josef Berggrav resigned his title and position as Bishop of Oslo and Primate of Norway's State Lutheran Church, on Feb. 24, 1942. Arrested two months later by Puppet Dictator Vidkun Quisling, he has ever since been confined by barbed wire to an area 500 meters long by 200 wide. For company he has only the pines, a far-off view of the icy blue waters of Oslo Fjord, and the dozen Hirdmen (quisling Storm Troopers) who guard him.

Bishop Berggrav's warders are constantly changed, lest his persuasive Christianity corrupt them. Once a month they bring him a few heavily censored books and once a week a letter from his wife. Once a week they take away an answering letter, which his wife must read in Gestapo headquarters. Beyond that, Bishop Berggrav sees no one, talks to no one. Energetic, broad-shouldered and tireless, he spends his days translating the New Testament into modern Norwegian, chopping wood, cleaning his cabin, cooking his meals.

Yet Eivind Berggrav, alone with his keepers on Christmas Day, may have much to comfort him. The Christian faith renewed by his fervent words and unyielding courage is on the march in Norway, and his occupied but unconquered country echoes the ringing words of Sweden's Bishop Aulen: "Berggrav's spirit has gone free through closed doors and has witnessed that God's words bear no chains."

Bishop of the Arctic. Born Oct. 25, 1884 in the town of Stavanger, tall, blue-eyed, straw-blond young Eivind Berggrav, the son of a bishop, graduated from the University of Oslo in 1908. In 1909 he married Kathrine Seip (they have five sons) and launched himself on a dual career as editor and high-school teacher. After ten years of teaching he finally entered the service of the Church as pastor of the little parish of Hurdalen, 40 miles from Oslo. Six years later he became chaplain of Botsfengslet Prison in Oslo.

In 1929 he was ordained Bishop of Haalogaland. High in the Arctic, at the northern tip of Norway, Bishop Berggrav's first diocese was a vast tract of scattered parishes, his parishioners rugged trappers, seamen and fishermen whose lives were an unceasing struggle for subsistence. Traveling among them, the Bishop learned to endure with the best their hardships and long loneliness in the Arctic night. Gay and friendly, an expert hunter and fisherman, he won and returned the love of his people. As his work in the state prison had given him compassion and insight, so his life in the north added toughness to his body and fiber to a character already intelligent and alert.

In 1937 Eivind Berggrav was elevated to the diocese of Oslo, the primacy of Norway. Already widely known at home as editor of the magazine Kirke og Kultur (Church and Culture) and writer of a number of religious books in addition to the best-selling Spenningens Land (an account of his life in the Arctic), he soon achieved world fame in the Universal Church movement. In 1938 he was elected president of the World Alliance for International Friendship through the Churches.

Hollow and False Church? His work in this cause was vigorous but fruitless. In 1939 there was little friendship even among the churches themselves.

In 1933 Adolf Hitler had said: "I promise you ... I could destroy the Church in a few years. It is hollow and false and rotten through and through." In the years between wars the churches did less than they might have to disprove this slander. Like many of Europe's churches, the Lutheran Church of Norway was a state establishment. Pastors living comfortably on state-provided farms and holdings were often held suspect by their poorer neighbors. Many of the common people thought them complacent and bourgeois; young intellectuals scoffed at both the Church and its God.

Ordeal and Rebirth. Yet when the war came, the legends of resistance seeping out of occupied countries were starred with names of heroic men of God. Niemoeller, Faulhaber and Galen in Germany itself, Hlond in Poland, De Jong in Holland, Damaskinos* in Greece and the aged Patriarch Gavrilo Dozich in Yugoslavia, all stood firm against the Nazis. With them stood a host of unnamed churchmen, like the 1,300 priests slaughtered in Poland, the priest and the pastor in Czechoslovakia who together faced a firing squad avenging the death of Heydrich the Hangman, and the French priest active in the underground who, warned of the Gestapo's coming, said, "I shall let myself be taken because I want the people of France to know there are priests too who are willing to give their lives. I ask only all your prayers that I may have the strength necessary to resist torture." Though the Gestapo tore off his ears, his comrades' prayers were answered; he betrayed no secrets.

Born of hope in oppression, grown to greatness in suffering, the Christian Church found new strength and new unity in its new ordeal. In Holland, where Catholics and Protestants had been at odds since the Reformation, old differences were forgotten in a common defiance of the Nazis, a common defense of the Jews. The Church in occupied Europe has taken a new lease on life because it has fought not only for its own preservation but for all freedom. Churches grown listless and smug under state support turned suddenly about in the state's default and themselves assumed the responsibility of leadership.

In Belgium King Leopold surrendered, but Cardinal van Roey, heroic successor to heroic Cardinal Mercier, publicly forswore Catholic collaboration with "an oppressive regime" and forbade his priests to give the sacrament to anyone wearing the German uniform. Rather than let the Nazis prostitute the educational system, he closed the schools and universities. Throughout Europe, when the universities and the press and the writers and philosophers were silenced, "only the churches"--in the words of Albert Einstein--"stood squarely across the path of Hitler. .

Said Bishop Berggrav: "God's peace ... is not something finished and done with . . . not ours to keep forever. The peace is won by accompanying God into the battle, It is then it grows, becomes new and real. It is in battle we feel the peace."

Dream and Awakening. Bishop Berggrav had not always seen so clearly. Once he thought that peace could be won without battle. In the first seven days of the German invasion, a state of chaos existed in Norway under the dictatorship of Vidkun Quisling, head of the Nasjonal Samling, the Norwegian Nazi organization. To calm the tumult, Reichskommissar Josef Terboven sought the aid of Norway's Primate in forming a provisional government under King and Storting (Parliament). Quisling was quietly shoved into the background and Eivind Berggrav, man of God and man of peace, took to the radio to appeal for order. "The civil population must refrain from any interference," he said. "Civilians who forcibly mix themselves up in the war by sabotage or in any other way, commit the greatest crime against their own countrymen."

Terboven purred with pleasure and circulated the slogan: "Let us follow our leaders, Quisling, Hamsun,* and Berggrav." The people of Norway muttered "pacifist" at mention of their Bishop's name. But Berggrav held fast. Adolf Hitler had promised Norway religious freedom and a legally constituted government. In the interests of peace and order, the Bishop proposed to do his part.

But Hitler's word proved as worthless in Norway as elsewhere. After five months, Terboven abruptly dismissed the King, dissolved the Storting, and decreed a "New Era" of Nazi government for Norway. Berggrav and his Church awoke from their dream of peace. Rallying to the defense of Norwegian liberty, representatives of all branches and factions of the Church met to form the Christian Council for Joint Deliberation, and Eivind Berggrav cried: "God made us Norwegian. He will not put you in uniform and destroy your individuality. He will save you and liberate you. All Christians in this land are now facing in the same direction."

But the people of Norway were still skeptical. They wanted proof that all Norwegian Christians were facing in the same direction. Thanks to the Nazis, they soon got it. The puppet government ordered the Church to alter its Common Prayer, omitting the King's name and substituting those of the quisling authorities. Bishop Berggrav flatly refused.

"The Great Forest." His defiance loosed an organized campaign of persecution, beginning with the arrest of Ronald Fangen, Christian leader and author, for an article published in Berggrav's magazine. Churchmen protested vigorously, and the people of Norway, whose lives are lived among the tall pines that point toward heaven, began to talk of their clergy as "The Great Forest."

As, one by one, the quislings attempted to thrust Norway's police, schools and courts into the Nazi mold, the voice of the Church was lifted again & again in protest. Then, shortly before Christmas 1940, the quisling Ministry of Police issued an order revoking the clergy's oath of silence. This oath, guaranteeing the Lutheran clergy's right to preserve their parishioners' confidences, as Catholic priests preserve the secrets of the confessional, was Norway's "Magna Carta" of conscience. The seven bishops of Norway prepared to act. In a letter addressed to Minister of Church and Education Ragnar Skancke, they denounced the reign of terror by the Storm Troopers, the attack on schools and students, the forced resignation of the Supreme Court, and demanded to know whether the Norwegian State was still Christian.

Heinrich Himmler was in town, and the weaseling Skancke, anxious to preserve an appearance of harmony, quietly shelved the letter. The bishops waited several weeks for an answer. Then three of them paid Skancke a call, armed with a document that forthrightly proclaimed, "The Church can never remain silent where God's word is ignored. . . ." Skancke replied that "thoughtless action now may result in serious consequences for the Church." Promptly the bishops wrote a pastoral letter to be read before every congregation in Norway. "When the government tolerates violence and injustice and brings pressure to bear on the souls of men," said they, "then the Church is the guardian of conscience. . . ."'

"The Great Forest" was afire with indignation, and its flames licked into every corner of the land. From pulpit after pulpit the letter was read, in defiance of police on hand to prevent it. Printing presses throughout Norway ran off copies by thousands. Said Bishop Berggrav: "When the truth becomes something sacred for us, it is then that it can create martyrs." Abashed by the Church's readiness for martyrdom and fearful of popular uprisings in its defense, the puppet government eased its campaign of terror and suppression.

In the summer of 1941. with the declaration of Hitler's holy war against the godless Bolsheviks, Minister Skancke looked hopefully to the Church for support. What he got instead was a cool remark from Berggrav that at the bishops' meeting "the war-political question . . . naturally was not among the matters discussed." The puppet press broke into a rash of vilification and Vidkun Quisling screamed: "Religion is outdated." The final break was near.

"To Fear We Need Not Yield." On Feb. 1, 1942, after two years in the background, Vidkun Quisling was reinstated as puppet dictator of Norway in a gaudy Wagnerian ceremony in Oslo's Akershus Castle. The people of Oslo stayed away from the ceremony. But in Trondheim Norwegians by the thousand gathered outside Nidaros Cathedral. Inside, preaching to a handful of quislingites, a puppet pastor was shouting the praises of his leader. The people in the street were waiting to hear Dean Arne Fjellbu. At 2 p.m., the hour scheduled for Fjellbu's afternoon service, police appeared with clubs to keep the crowd from entering. The huge throng stood patiently outside the Cathedral. Presently a single voice began the great Lutheran hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. Soon a multitude of voices were swelling the words the conquerors had learned to hate:

And were the world with devils filled

All watching to devour us,

Our souls to fear we need not yield,

They cannot overpower us.

Within the church Arne Fjellbu preached his last sermon to the few who had come in before the police arrived. His text: the words of Peter to Jesus, "We have forsaken all, and followed thee." For the churchmen of Norway, the words were prophetic.

Shortly after the service, the Dean was dismissed for anti-quisling activity. Three weeks later the seven bishops of Norway resigned their offices. On Easter Sunday all but 64 of the Church's 861 pastors mounted their pulpits to announce their own resignations. With this magnificent declaration of independence, the pastors at one stroke set their church free, cut off their state-provided livelihoods, left themselves facing concentration camp or death. (One of them, Arne Thu. vicar of Vestby and veteran Indian missionary, died in a concentration camp at Grini last June after being forced to crawl hundreds of yards with his hands behind his back and a latrine bucket in his teeth, for the amusement of his quisling guards.) But all made clear that they would continue to carry on their work accepting "no directions as to how God's Word should be preached. . . ."

The Peace of Heaven. On April 9, Fuehrer Quisling ordered the arrest of Bishop Berggrav and four other leaders of the Christian Council. The five were thrown into Grini concentration camp. A week later Berggrav was removed to solitary confinement in his forest hut.

As other European countries have been liberated, tale after tale has been told of churchmen's heroic resistance, of the people's renewed faith. Still-unliberated Norway has its heroic tales still to tell, when it is safe for free men to speak. But it is known that Norway's patriotic pastors, denied the use of their churches, living precariously on their parishioners' contributions, have increased their congregations tenfold. From Oslo last week came reports of fresh waves of sabotage by spiritually unvanquished patriots. And the 50-odd quisling pastors are preaching to empty benches.

To her brother, fighting with the British, a Norwegian girl wrote: ". . . there is a saying among the people of Norway today, 'So that the many may live, I must be prepared to sacrifice . . . even life itself.' As our own country and our own home are unsafe, the peace of heaven comes remarkably close."

These things, this Christmas Day in his log-cabin prison, Eivind Berggrav surely knows.

*For further news of Archbishop Damaskinos, see FOREIGN NEWS.

*Knut Hamsun. Nobel Prizewinning novelist (1920) now universally execrated in Norway, declared "The Germans are fighting for us and . . . crushing England's tyranny. . . ."

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