Code name Pecsi

His code name as an agent for the secret police in Communist-run Hungary beginning in the late 1950s was "Pecsi." He also was a Lutheran bishop, the one who replaced revered Bishop Lajos Ordass in southern Hungary in 1958, after the Communist regime forced Ordass to resign. (Ordass, who earlier had spent time in both Nazi and Communist prisons, also had served as a vice president of the Lutheran World Federation, an alliance with church bodies in 78 countries that represent 66 million of the world's estimated 70 million Lutherans; he died in 1978.)

Who was "Pecsi"? Last month scholars revealed that the Communist agent was prominent Hungarian Lutheran bishop and ecumenist Zoltan Kaldy, who went on to become LWF president in 1984, serving until his death in 1987.

Norwegian Lutheran theology professor Tormod Engelsviken made the announcement after he and a fellow priest spent three years studying church records and the secret police archives in Budapest. The professor said Kaldy's file has 1,200 pages of reports about personnel, church matters, and trips he made abroad. He met regularly with his handler at undercover addresses in Budapest, as did his colleague in northern Hungary, Bishop Gyula Nagy, the theologian said.

The full story is in a book to be published early next year. But Ecumenical News International, jointly sponsored by the World Council of Churches, the LWF, and other groups, broke the story last month-in time for the 50th anniversary of the anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary.

Pastors in Hungary and elsewhere in the Soviet bloc told this reporter in visits during the Communist era it was not unusual for church leaders to file reports with authorities-as the price for keeping their churches open. But if the reports went beyond the innocuous and resulted in further repression, that would be crossing the line into enemy territory, they said.

Kaldy had crossed that line, several Hungarian pastors alleged.

Bulletin Board

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