Soviet Ghosts Haunt the World Council of Churches

By Mark D. Tooley.

As one of his formative spiritual experiences, a top official in the World Council of Churches (WCC) fondly recalls attending a Soviet-front group’s conference in the old Czechoslovakia. In a recent official WCC news report, the Swiss-based ecumenical council interviews Rev. Walter Altmann, a Brazilian Lutheran theologian, former head of the Latin American Council of Churches, and the new moderator the WCC's totalitarian-sounding "central committee." Currently, he also heads the 700,000 member Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil.

Much of the ecumenical movement came to see socialism rather than free market democracy as the desirable alternative to military dictatorship in Latin America. Groups like the WCC actively supported Marxist liberation movement and even now refuse to criticize the Castro dictatorship, because it is "socialist." Those churches that abandoned traditional Gospel work in favor of leftist "social justice" have paid a price. Denominations like Altman’s Lutherans hardly have a bright future in Latin America, where there are at least 40 million evangelicals, many if not most of them Pentecostal.

In the 1990’s, Altmann wrote to both President Clinton and Fidel Castro, criticizing both for their supposedly equal extremism. He expressed special alarm about the Helms-Burton Act, which allows U.S. citizens to sue foreign companies that are profiting from U.S. assets in Cuba that Castro’s regime had seized.

Altmann had a four hour dinner with Castro in 1999, during which he explained how Martin Luther had challenged the Catholic Church. Of course, Castro responded that he could identify with the Protestant Reformer in that regard. The Cuban tyrant also hailed Jesus as a "great social revolutionary."

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