A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Not all the stops on the tour were under the aegis of religion. At a government-arranged visit to a lightbulb and appliance factory, Graham accepted a souvenir lightbulb with the promise that it would shine in his home in North Carolina as a bright reminder of one of the most unforgettable experiences in his life. He then noted that “I have also brought a souvenir to you, my dear friends, something that shineth much brighter than this lightbulb. I have brought to you the light of the world, Jesus Christ.” According to Haraszti, many of the workers began to weep openly and unashamedly, aware that “this was the very first time in Communist Hungary that any minister would preach about Jesus Christ in a state-owned factory.”

  The high point of the ten-day visit came when Graham addressed a large open-air meeting at a Baptist youth camp in Tahi, in the mountains along the Danube. The most conservative estimates of the size of the crowd placed it between 5,000 and 15,000. Haraszti noted that reliable informants, using automobiles parked along the river as an index, estimated the number to be closer to 30,000. Whether one accepts the low or high figure, it was apparently the largest religious meeting in Hungary’s history. Like all the other meetings, there was no advance notice in either the secular or religious media, but word-of-mouth advertising, much by long-distance telephone, brought Evangelical Christians streaming into the camp from all over Hungary and from at least six other Eastern bloc countries as well. A decade after this notable event, Haraszti is careful to point out that Graham had not been invited to address a large public gathering. Hungarian Baptist youth meet at the camp every year. Graham was present “to watch how the Baptist youth camp hold their closing service. . . . I hope you hear clearly what I said. It was not an evangelization rally; it was a closing service. Now, of course, some people might say, ‘If this is the closing service, how does an evangelization [rally] look?’ I don’t know the difference between the two.” No one, of course, was fooled by this semantic ploy. Ambassador Kaiser and his wife sat in the front row alongside ranking officials from the French embassy, and the thousands of people who traveled hundreds of miles and sat on blankets throughout the night just to have a good view of the closing services were not surprised when Billy Graham was asked to make a few remarks. At the same time, the government was not forced either to grant or to deny permission for him to address the crowd.

  Prior to the visit, Haraszti impressed upon Graham the critical importance of telling the truth about what he found in Hungary. It would be simple, sensational, and gratifying to his American supporters to make a whirlwind tour, then return to decry the lack of religious freedom behind the iron curtain. If he expected to be invited back, however, it would be wiser to acknowledge the degree of religious freedom that in fact existed in Hungary. Graham understood the point. In his public statements and in interviews with Western reporters, he steadfastly refused to criticize the Hungarian government or even to comment on East-West relations, except to urge greater effort to achieve world peace. Instead, aware that the government was permitting the Council of Free Churches to sell tapes and transcripts of his sermons, he noted that “things are far more open than I had supposed. There is religious liberty in Hungary. . . . The church is alive in Hungary.” To reporters aware of his early anti-Communist tirades he explained, “I have not joined the Communist Party since coming to Hungary, nor have I been asked to. But I think the world is changing and on both sides we’re beginning to understand each other more.” He added that key leaders of the Communist party were calling for and practicing greater cooperation between Church and State.

  This approach paid rapid dividends. In a conversation near the end of the tour, Imre Miklos warned Graham that he would be accused of having been brainwashed by the Communists but consoled him by saying, “I shall also be accused of having joined the Christian church.” He indicated clearly, however, that he was prepared to take the heat and that Graham’s gracious tact would be rewarded. This visit, he assured the evangelist, would be only the beginning of his ministry to the Socialist countries of Eastern Europe. He also made it clear that another visit to Hungary would be welcomed. “For friends,” he said, “it is not enough to meet only once.” The friendship was doubtless sealed more strongly when, not long after Graham returned home and stopped by the White House to give his report, the Crown of St. Stephen was returned to its homeland and the United States welcomed Hungary to most-favored-nation status. Graham makes no claim that his was the sole or even the pivotal role in the return of the crown, but does acknowledge that he discussed the matter with “the proper authorities.” Politically, it was not a cost-free gesture; expatriate Hungarians in America, who tended to be staunchly anti-Communist, bitterly resented the return of the crown to a Communist government and subjected Haraszti to a torrent of criticism for collaborating with the enemy.

  Haraszti stayed on in Budapest a few days to tie up loose ends. Curious to learn if the visit made any impact on “the everyday man,” he asked a waiter at the Grand Hotel, “Do you know who is Billy Graham?” The man snapped to attention—“straight, strict, stiff”—and said, “Yes, sir. He is second only to the Pope.” Haraszti neither smiled nor offered a correction. “Thank you for your answer,” he said. “I know now you know who he is.”

  Imre Miklos was correct in predicting that Graham’s visit to Hungary was only the beginning of a ministry in Eastern Europe. In 1978 the long-delayed visit to Poland finally became a reality. Once again, Alexander Haraszti played a decisive role. The Hungarian experience had convinced Graham and his colleagues both that Haraszti knew what he was doing and that a man from the United States who had contacts within a Communist country’s government could often accomplish more than Evangelical brethren within that country. Perhaps still not certain Haraszti could be equally effective outside his native Hungary, Walter Smyth authorized him to submit his expenses for reimbursement but still held back from giving him the right to act as Billy Graham’s official representative.

  Haraszti’s visit to Warsaw in January 1978 went smoothly. Graham’s tactful behavior in Hungary had calmed any misgivings the free churches or state officials might have, and an official invitation for an October visit was arranged with minimal difficulty, but Roman Catholic authorities, far more powerful in Poland than in any other Eastern bloc country and far more antagonistic toward the government than the Hungarian Catholic Church, had strong reservations about the American evangelist. During the spring of 1978, an envoy of the Polish primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, traveled to Atlanta to inform Haraszti that the cardinal resented his having started negotiations with the government before coming to the head of the Church. With an arch show of surprise, Haraszti indicated that the cardinal had not invited him to be in contact and that, in any case, the cardinal’s record on influencing his government was not superb. “He did invite the pope, but he never got him. But I did get Dr. Graham to Hungary, and the cardinal did not get anybody of importance to Poland.”

  Recognizing that Haraszti could not be bullied, the envoy warned that Graham’s visit would be an embarrassment, since Catholics would not attend his meetings and the small number of Protestants in Poland would not make much of an audience. Haraszti called the bluff. Handing the man a copy of a new BGEA publication, Billy Graham in Hungary, he pointed out that wherever Billy Graham went, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, Time, Life, AP, UPI, Reuters, U.S. television networks, the BBC, West German television, and Graham’s own television crew followed. Hundreds of thousands would see pictures of the trip in a book like the one he was now holding. Millions would watch a television program like the one about the Hungary tour, which had just aired on 326 stations in prime time. If the envoy’s prediction was accurate, Haraszti said, “then the world will see that under the wise leadership of Cardinal Wyszynski, Roman Catholicism has been wiped out in Poland, because not even a cathedral remained—not one. Because on our films, which we will present to the Canadian and American public,
there will be only Jews—not many, unfortunately—a large number of communists, a few Baptists and other Protestants, but not a single Roman Catholic church or priest or professing Catholic. So the world will see that Roman Catholicism has disappeared from the face of Poland.” The envoy, gaining appreciation for the surgical precision with which Haraszti had dissected his threat, said in German, “Sie sind schlau” (“You are shrewd”). The physician demurred: “I am not shrewd, and this is not even a threat. This is a promise. If the cardinal wants this, I cannot help. This is not my doing, not my making; this is his making. And if you are honestly the representative of the cardinal, you will report this to him.”

  As it happened, both parties were unsure of the other’s motives. Graham wanted an invitation from the Catholic hierarchy but did not want the Church to control the visit. Haraszti and Walter Smyth made it clear that although the evangelist fully understood that generally speaking “to be a Pole is to be a Roman Catholic,” he felt that Christ is also present in other churches, and he wanted to preach the gospel in those churches as well. Furthermore, the official sponsors of the visit would continue to be the Polish Baptist Union and the Polish Ecumenical Council, the inclusive Protestant body. For its part, the Church was willing to cooperate but did not want to be embarrassed by offering an invitation that might be refused. Cardinal Wyszynski also feared that as a Protestant on friendly terms with the Communist government, Graham might say things that would harm the Catholic Church’s relationship with the state. After a further bit of stalking and fencing when Haraszti returned to Poland in July, Graham’s and the cardinal’s representatives decided they could trust one another and reached an agreement that the evangelist would speak at four cathedrals (he was invited to seven) and visit the shrine of the Black Madonna at Czgstochowa. At each meeting, Smyth explained, the service would consist of a solo, a prayer, a Bible reading, another solo, and a sermon by Billy Graham. The cardinal’s men agreed, clearly aware that this format left no room for a Catholic mass. Haraszti assured the bishop (Dabrowski) serving as secretary of the Polish episcopate that Graham fully understood the status and problems of the Polish Church. From that point forward, Graham and his team enjoyed “the utmost cooperation of the Polish Church.”

  The Polish tour (October 6–16, 1978) went smoothly. The official state press accorded it little attention, but religious publications were permitted to provide extensive advance promotion and thorough coverage. In Warsaw Graham spoke to an overflow crowd of nearly 1,000 and led an evangelism workshop for more than 450 clergy and other religious workers, including several Catholic seminary professors and teaching nuns. From that beginning visible signs of ecumenical warmings, in a climate Protestant leaders typically described as unfriendly, accompanied Graham’s appearances. At Warsaw’s Catholic seminary, the dean of theology introduced Graham by recalling how, during a sojourn in Chicago a few years earlier, a black woman on a bus had asked him if he was saved. He had responded, “Can’t you see my collar?” The woman, a Baptist, had been unimpressed. “I don’t care about that,” she had said. “Have you been born again?” The dean related that, stunned by this challenge, he had gone back to his room, read the third chapter of John once again, and had a new experience of Christ that led him to rededicate his life. He was grateful to Baptists, he said, and he welcomed the most famous Baptist of all to Poland.

  Graham’s first sermon ever in a Catholic church occurred at Poznah in western Poland, where he prayed that the Holy Spirit would unite the hearts of the Roman Catholics and Protestants worshiping together on that occasion. In Krakow his host was to have been Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, but because the cardinal was, as a Graham staffer put it, “out of town getting elected pope,” the forging of that particular crucial ecumenical bond would have to wait awhile. In the Communist-dominated city of Katowice, where nearly 6,500—a high percentage of them young people—jammed into the cathedral, a corps of approximately 300 priests and nuns sitting together in a high balcony watched skeptically. As Graham rose to speak, a priest said to a colleague, “Now the show is to begin.” When the evangelist finished his sermon on Galatians 6:14 (“Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”) and asked those who wished to recommit their lives to Christ to raise their hands, all three hundred priests and nuns did so.

  As part of what he later described as the busiest ten days of his entire ministry, Graham paid a visit to Auschwitz, where the sight of crematorium chimneys and baby shoes and hair shorn from Jewish prisoners bound for the gas chambers profoundly affected his tender conscience and, according to aides, played a major role in stiffening his growing resolve to work for peace and reconciliation. Warning that the mentality that had produced Auschwitz could resurface, he repeatedly urged his audiences to work for “unity, peace, and the spread of God’s love” and stressed his willingness to cooperate with church and government leaders in efforts to achieve world peace. By all the standard criteria, the tour was a smashing success. Protestant pastors soon began to report that Catholics continued to show warmth toward them after Graham left, and Graham’s standing with Catholics was epitomized when Bishop Herbert Bednorz asked him to autograph a stack of copies of the Polish translation of How to Be Born Again, offering the simple explanation, “I want to give them to my friends.”

  30

  The Preacher and the Bear

  Billy Graham returned briefly to Hungary and Poland in 1981 to receive honorary doctorates from the Debrecen Theological Academy (the oldest Protestant theological seminary in the world) and the Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw. It was clear, however, that Protestants were not the only ones who approved of him. In Hungary János Kádár gave him the use of his private train, and after the visit to Poland, the cardinal who had been “out of town” in 1978, now His Holiness John Paul II, welcomed him to the Vatican for a half-hour visit, the first time any pope had received him. Noting that they had talked of “inter-church relations, the emergence of Evangelicalism, evangelization, and Christian responsibility towards modern moral issues” (an indication it had been a full half-hour), Graham told a press conference that “we had a spiritual time. He is so down-to-earth and human, I almost forgot he was the pope.”

  The next major visit to a Communist land, however, was the one Billy Graham had been seeking for at least twenty-five years. In 1982 he finally gained entrance to Russia as more than a tourist. Preliminary negotations for the visit began during the 1977 Hungarian visit, when Soviet Baptist leader Alexei Bychkov came to the closing service at Tahi and assured Graham he would work to arrange an invitation. Higher-level inquiry began in October 1978, when PepsiCo CEO Don Kendall, a personal friend of Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev’s, arranged a meeting in Washington between Graham and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The appointment came through with only a few hours’ notice, and at Graham’s importunate urging, Haraszti began a scheduled hysterectomy a few minutes early, then left the finishing touches to assistants so he could grab a plane that would get him to Washington in time for a four o’clock meeting. During the ride between the hotel and the embassy, Graham introduced Haraszti to Kendall. “Alex is a very remarkable man,” he said. “I think nobody else understands world politics on a global basis as much as he does. Henry Kissinger may be an exception, but as far as Eastern Europe is concerned, even Henry does not know that much.” Perhaps familiar with Graham’s penchant for overstatement, Kendall asked, “And what does Henry say about this?” Graham did not back off: “I don’t know what Henry says, but he is not my adviser. He never took me to any Communist country, and Alex did. And I think Alex knows things which Henry does not. And I think he has a much [better grasp] of Communist lands, and particularly State-Church relations, than Henry will ever have.”

  The compliment pleased Haraszti—“I felt Dr. Graham meant it.” A few minutes later, he received an even greater show of confidence. After an exchange of polite greetings at the embassy, Dobrynin asked Graham point-blank, “Why do you want to
come?” Without prior warning, Graham replied, “Mr. Ambassador, I’d like to ask Dr. Haraszti to make a statement on my behalf. He is my adviser in Eastern European matters, and he could put it in words better than I can. With your kind permission, he will express my feelings about a visit to an Eastern European country, and also my policies.”

  Haraszti, a man whose deserved self-confidence—“I admit the truth,” he likes to say, “even when it favors me”—and humble deference to Billy Graham ricochet incongruously through every conversation, recalled the occasion with pleasure: “Of course, this is an honor. This means that he somehow remembers me.” He also smiled at the memory of Graham’s ploy. “He is wise. If my answer is good, I did it under his instructions. If it is bad, then I did not actually represent his thoughts.” Haraszti was not tongue-tied by the responsibility. After pointing out that Graham’s calling obliged him to preach the gospel of Christ to the entire world, Communist and non-Communist alike, Haraszti astonished the ambassador by stating that Graham wanted to go to Russia to express his gratitude to Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov Lenin for what he had accomplished in the great Socialist revolution of 1917. By breaking the back of the Orthodox Church, whose intimate ties with the state enabled it to suppress all competitors, the revolution had made possible the development of Evangelical movements throughout the Soviet Union, with the result that Evangelical Christianity had never been stronger, as the existence of perhaps three million Soviet Baptists and other Evangelicals proved. Haraszti admitted this had not been Lenin’s aim, but suggested that if the revolutionary leader were alive today, he would change his opinion. He would see that the problem lay with the political nature of the Church, not with Christians themselves, and that even though the government discriminated against them in many ways, Christians were nevertheless the best workers and citizens, people who gave their testimony not only in words but also in deeds.