The World Council of Churches has long been under attack, and many may remember a scathing 1993 article by Joseph Harriss published in Readers Digest, “The Gospel According to Marx”, which alleged that the WCC was under the thrall of the KGB. Though dismissed at the time as a “rehashing of old issues”, subsequent data shows that he was correct. The WCC has been recently exposed as being heavily penetrated by the KGB during the 1970s and 80s, according to a book based on now public Bulgarian secret police archives. In 2009 historian Momchil Metodiev detailed the relationship between Bulgaria’s communist government and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. His work has been summarized in a review by the Bulgarian Institute for the Study of Recent Past.

Relying upon now declassified archives from the Bulgarian secret police, his book Between Faith and Compromise” details decades-long efforts to destroy and control the Church as a force in Bulgarian society. Of interest to me is the cynical manipulation of the World Council of Churches by this and other atheist Communust governments that sought to infiltrate and control ecumenical councils. Depressingly, they appear to have succeeded.

Participation of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in ecumenical organisations (the World Council of Churches, Christian Peace Conference and Conference of European Churches) was initiated, implemented and guided by the communist state, mainly by State Security.
…participation of the Bulgarian church in ecumenical organisations was not inspired by the idea of interdenominational dialogue and co-operation. Rather it was inspired by the communist state, which wanted to infiltrate the World Council of Churches and push it into the ranks of international organisations that could be used for communist propaganda, especially in the so-called Third World.
Churches from the socialist countries (with the exception of Roman Catholic churches) joined the World Council of Churches in 1961. In the late 1950s, the WCC already had become an “object for penetration” of the Bulgarian State Security services. They also selected the first Bulgarian participants to attend ecumenical training courses in the early 1960s.

This led to an “alternative power center” within the church in Bulgaria. A lay leadership emerged that was in sync with the Bulgarian (Communist) secret police.

The loyalties of this group were also well-known in the World Council of Churches. Despite this, the WCC, manipulated by the representatives of the socialist countries, regularly criticised the policies of the US and Western European countries regarding the Third World countries. Only once, at the Assembly in Nairobi in 1975, was there an unsuccessful attempt to criticise the violation of religious freedoms in the Soviet Union.

Much can be said about these organizations, but I’ll leave it at this. As Mark Tooley, director of the anti-communist Institute on Religion and Democracy writes: “Books like Metodiev’s, based on research in communist archives, increasingly are confirming that the WCC and other religious groups did follow the KGB’s script during much of the Cold War.  The question is, as the WCC continues his far-left advocacy, whose script does it follow now?” (FrontPageMag.com).