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Micah Coate

The Return of the Christmas Bells

Updated: May 21

“When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan.” Proverbs 29:2 ESV

While the coming of December once evoked warm sentiments for the upcoming celebration of the birth of Christ, it had been overshadowed by the harsh weather that was only going to get colder. “One of the season's jokes was that Dante had been wrong, and that hell was not hot at all, it was, in fact, as cold as a Romanian apartment in winter.” (1) But, even if the apartments were warm, Christmas was not celebrated, and even though ninety percent of Romanians belonged to the Christian Orthodox faith, church bells did not ring. By the 1980s, the most celebrated day in Romania was no longer the birth of Jesus the Christ but, under compulsion, the birth of its dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu - who was aptly nicknamed, the antichrist. (2) But as 1989 was coming to a close in mid-December, as we all know now, the people of Romania were unknowingly on the brink of not only openly celebrating the birth of their Christ, but the death of their antichrist. But what many don’t know was that this Romanian Revolution all started by the humble but powerful convictions of a Hungarian pastor named Laszlo Tokes.


Only Romanians forty-five years and older could remember the sweet sounds of church bells ringing! For under Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romanian Communist Party, they were no more. Romania had been in the grips of Communism for some time, but by the 1980s it had become intolerable. Despite the country being very fertile, like most Communist countries food was scarce and people were starving. Most of the nation’s raw materials were being exported to foreign creditors to pay off debts that Nicolae had accumulated. Because of this debt, Nicolae’s aim was to strengthen the work force, causing Romania to reach a population of 100 million. To do so, he outlawed abortion and contraceptives.


And in massive block apartments that housed the growing nation, hot water was only available one day of the week and the electricity only worked when the government wanted it to. Every winter, hundreds of people froze to death in their apartment or died from “asphyxiation as gas stoves were shut off, only to be then turned back on without warning, filling sleeping apartments with gas.” (3) Meanwhile, the secret police, the Securitate, had made Romania into a police state. It is believed that one in four citizens would alert the Securitate of anyone suspected of being un loyal to the Government. Actions, speech, and even opinions that did not approve Nicolae were strictly forbidden. Because of the overwhelming numbers of the police state, organizing dissent was nearly impossible, and “Even by Soviet Bloc standards, the Securitate was exceptionally brutal.” (4)


But on December 16th, in the western city of Timisoara a public protest was being held in response to the government’s crackdown against the Reformed church pastor, Laszlo Tokes. He had been critical of Nicolae’s government - mainly that the people of Romania not only could not exercise their God-given rights but did not even know what they were. The Romanian Communist Party charged the pastor with enticing ethnic hatred and sought to have him forcibly removed. But his parishioners, (who just two years before only numbered a few dozen had now grown to nearly five thousand), protected their pastor and his pregnant wife Edith by surrounding their church with a human shield. Tokes knew of the plan for his capture so he encouraged his church a few days beforehand stating, “I have been issued a summons of eviction. I will not accept it, so I will be taken from you by force…They want to do this in secret because they have no right to do it. Please, come… and be witnesses of what will happen. Come, be peaceful, but be witnesses.” (5)


And the church came in numbers, so much so that their collective resistance rendered the Securitate unable to remove the pastor. And as the hours past into nightfall, more and more people from other churches joined the protest into the next day. By now many other supportive spectators had joined the cause and began to take the message further. Within a day the demonstration for the pastor sparked a protest in the city. And within a few more days the protest in the city would in turn spark a wild fire of dissent among a brutalized nation.


Pro Romanian chants and songs that had long been outlawed broke out among the people. The crowd grew so large and cantankerous around the church that a large portion decided to take their protest to the central square of Timisoara. This was when the Securitate made their move. In the pre-dawn hours of December 17th, the secret police burst through the crowd, broke the church door, and captured Tokes and his wife. Just as fast as they came, the secret police then disappeared into the darkness from where they emerged.


But as the sun began to rise the public outcry was only beginning.


By early morning the central square of Timisoara was filled with protestors confronting the Securitate with candles of unity and songs proclaiming freedom - but others objectors were not as peaceful. Having heard the uprising was becoming too much for the local police, the military was called in with armored carriers and tanks. At the command of Nicolae’s wife, Elena, the military then opened fire into the protestors killing men, women, and children.


By the next few days, the uprising in Timisoara was nearly squashed by military force. But the cries for freedom and justice from those who perished had been heard throughout the whole nation. Having been in Iran, Nicolae quickly returned to his palace in Bucharest on the evening of December 20th to publicly condemn the unrest in Timisoara the following morning. Nicolae addressed a gathering of approximately 100,000 people packed upon the door steps of his nearly four-million-square-foot palace on December 21st. (6) But it was too late.


In the middle of his speech which praised his communist country and condemned the protestors at Timisoara as being “Fascists,” panic broke out among the crowd. It was the first time that Nicolae had ever been booed by a crowd - and it would be his last. There were 3.5 minutes of confusion that interrupted the speech as the cameras stopped visually recording. Whatever the mysterious disturbance was, it clearly signaled the end of Nicolae’s reign. Confusion and violent protests continued throughout the night in Bucharest. The House of the Republic was being overrun.


Around noon on December 22nd Nicolae, his wife, and four others were rushed into a helicopter and extracted from their stately home. As a revolution was evident and now unstoppable, the military soon defected. The Ceausescus were forced to land and were arrested only three and a half hours later. While all this was taking place a new Government Council was being formed, and a military tribunal placed the couple in court martial. They were charged with the genocide of 60 thousand Romanians and other fiscal crimes.


The trial, which was largely a spectacle, was held on December 25th. It lasted for about two hours and delivered death sentences to the dictator and his wife. Because the Ceausescus didn’t recognize the court’s authority, they declined to have any legal aid. Throughout the trial Nicolae kept looking at his wrist watch as if waiting to be rescued. It never came. From the make-shift courtroom, the couple was then handcuffed and shuffled outside. Nicolae was complacent, while Elena was quite bitter and kept commanding the guards to be gentle with her lest they break her wrists. While many military personal offered to execute them, only three paratroopers were selected. With their service rifles in hand, the three opened fire on the elderly couple just outside the courtroom. Nineteen bullets were fired in total. Although the trial and executed bodies were televised, the actual execution was not caught on camera since the paratroopers didn’t wait for the command to shoot, causing the cameraman to miss the moment.


By midday on December 25th, the antichrist and his wife were dead. And for the first time in 40 years, the streets of Romania were filled with people crying in sincere celebration! Make-shift Christmas trees were being erected, and throughout the country a familiar carol played as the church bells were once again ringing. But now they pealed more loud and deep, as if to say, “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; The wrong shall fail, The right prevail, With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

Pastor Tokes and his wife were soon released from where they were taken. Laszlo would go on to serve in the Reformed Church and extend his influence within Romania’s European Parliament. He received numerous awards and was even honored in Washington D.C. in 2009 being awarded the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom for his role in helping to overthrow Romanian communism. He is 69 years old and continues to live in Romania today.


In the immediate wake of the Revolution, a large bronze statue of a Soviet soldier that domineered a public square was taken down, melted, and recast into church bells. (7) And their continued sound has inspired more to be cast even today. In just 2017 Romania's Redemption Cathedral dedicated one of the biggest church bells in the world weighing in at 25 tons. Half of Bucharest’s nearly 2 million free citizens can hear it when rung. (8)


And hearing bells when they ring is much more than just something we sense with our ears but something we can sense and comprehend with our hearts. In was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1863, that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow heard the church bells ring on Christmas. Hearing them stirred his depressed heart and revived a belief in a promise that he had stopped believing. He put pen to paper and wrote the now famous poem, “Christmas Bells”. He authored it in an extremely painful time of his life and the nation’s as it was in the very middle of a bloody Civil War. The war mixed with personal loss made the grace and love of God hard to see. Although it was written 126 years before the Romanian Revolution, it was and remains an appropriate message that even in the darkest hours, God is not dead nor is He asleep. For at the very heart of Longfellow’s poem (and the reason I believe it endures) is the angelic promise - that with the arrival of Jesus, God in the flesh, true peace on earth and goodwill toward men can be had. (Luke 2:13-14) And this message was made for all mankind for all times! If we want peace on earth and goodwill extended to all people, Christ must no longer lie in a manger within our minds but sit upon the throne of our hearts.


Micah Coate, President and Host of Salvation and Stuff

Works Cited: 1. https://www.rferl.org/a/Finally_We_Called_It_Christmas_Again_My_Role_In_Romanias_Revolution__/1908965.html 2. https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-revolution-then-and-now/29660285.html 3. https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-revolution-then-and-now/29660285.html 4. Smith, Craig S (12 December 2006), "Eastern Europe Struggles to purge Security Services", The New York Times 5. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/how-a-reformed-church-overthrew-communism-in-romania/ 6. As of 2020, the Palace of the Parliament is valued at €4 billion, making it the most expensive administrative building in the world. The cost of heating, electricity, and lighting alone exceeds $6 million per year, comparable to the total cost of powering a medium-sized city. (Wikipedia) 7. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/capitalism-take-its-toll-1.109402 8. (https://www.romania-insider.com/romanias-redemption-cathedral-will-have-25-ton-bell-with-the-patriarchs-portrait-on-it/) 9. Photograph of Bell https://www.romania-insider.com/romanias-redemption-cathedral-will-have-25-ton-bell-with-the-patriarchs-portrait-on-it/

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