Council of Churches defends guerrilla aid

Press, 19 August 1981, Page 9

Council of Churches defends guerrilla aid

NZPA-Reuter Dresden A leader of the World Council of Churches has defended the council's support for nationalist guerrillas in Africa against Western criticism.

The organisation's secre-tarv-general. Philip Potter, told the W.C.C. central committee that racism was intolerable. W.C.C. policy was to encourage oppressed people and to reform their oppressors. Critics in the United States and Britain have accused the W.C.C.. which groups all the main churches except Catholic, of abetting killers. The meeting in Dresden. East Germany, is the first by the committee in Eastern Europe since a session in Hungary in 1956. Dr Potter, who is a pastor in Jamaica, said that criticism was inconsistent.

He saicL "When we support

by a special fund or oy project money the efforts of people struggling for racial liberation . . . we receive fierce criticism.

“When we proposed nonviolent means such as withdrawal of investments, not giving loans, and other forms of economic sanctions ... we (were) told that the regimes should be allowed indefinite time to come to their senses."

The East German Communist Party daily “Neues Deutschland" published a telegram from the Head of State. Erich Honecker, welcoming the committee. It said that the work of the W.C.C. had drawn "attention and sympathy in East Germany" and added: "The organisation’s determined efforts towards'real progress in solving the burning issues of the oresent day have

found broad agreement here."

Dr Potter said the role of the Church and the W.C.C. was to be agents of healing. “This task is all the more urgent now that the great Powers are contemplating the possibility of what they call limited nuclear war." he said.

He said the committee would also hear a report on the relationship between men and women in the Church which would be "an expose of our broken relationships through institutionalised male domination not only in societies but in the Church." Women's demands for equal access to the priesthood have aroused controversy. notably in the Anglican ' Church." A Church of England synod voted by a narrow majority last year not to allow women to become priests.