ARTICLES

More Than a Pinko

Dale Vree's Journey from Communism to Christ

By Christopher Zehnder

A few years ago, in 1996, Father Richard Neuhaus wrote in his magazine, First Things: "Around here we rather like [New Oxford Review] ... because editor Dale Vree is an engaging fellow, despite his lefty background. When he comes across the word 'compassion' in the Church's social teaching, he tends to translate it 'socialism.' But of late he seems to be getting that ideological twitch under control."

Dale Vree a lefty? Over the years, I have seen New Oxford Review and Vree called all sorts of unpleasant things (mean-spirited, unloving, un-Christ-like, etc.), but never lefty. Granted, over a decade ago, the magazine took a strong stand against nuclear weaponry, and Vree does live in Berkeley -- yet lefty? If anything, most readers would think the magazine and Vree quite right-wing, or even reactionary.

Yet, such a judgment would be rash, as I discovered in August when I interviewed Vree about his conversion to the Catholic faith. In some ways, Neuhaus' lefty is closer to the truth than one might think, though the epithet does not come close to doing Vree justice.

Dale Vree was born into a Dutch family. His grandparents had settled in the Midwest in the early part of the last century. Vree's paternal grandfather moved his family to Los Angeles after the crash of 1929. There Vree's parents met and were married, and there, in 1944, Vree himself was born.

The Vree family was Dutch Reformed. Religion in the Vree family seemed a more-or-less strong influence, though, Vree said, his paternal grandfather "wore it lightly." His father was "probably more serious about it," but his mother's father was a "very ardent Calvinist." Vree's maternal grandmother, he said, "was a very sweet Christian. She didn't know theology, but she was close to being saintly."

The Dutch Reformed, as Vree described it, was then a serious religion. "In those days you went to church three times every Sunday: morning, afternoon, and evening. There was virtually nothing you could do on Sunday except go to church, eat, take a nap. After the morning sermon, you would go to somebody's house, where all the women would be in the kitchen cooking the meal, and the men would sit in the living room, smoking their cigars and debating the fine points of the pastor's sermon." Later, Vree's parents left the Dutch Reformed church "because of some dispute" and became Presbyterians. Though the differences between the groups doctrinally were not great (both were Calvinist), "if you left the Dutch Reformed community," said Vree, "it was very serious."

Not only did the Vree family depart from the Dutch Reformed religion, but on his father's side, they departed from Dutch-American politics. Most Dutch immigrants, said Vree, were Republicans, but his paternal grandfather had become a Democrat. Vree said his father "continued the tradition of being for the working man." Vree himself would take this family tradition once step further.

His family's Presbyterian church, said Vree, "had a tremendous Sunday school. We were really taught well about the basics of Christianity; we had intense Bible study." Yet, despite all this, Vree said he "noticed things that weren't being picked up on. For example, Matthew 25 -- 'whatever you've done to the least of these my brethren, you've done to me' -- that seemed to glide right past them. And at that time -- the late '50s and very early '60s -- there was segregation in the South and in the rest of the country there was often de-facto segregation. And there were a good number of black people in Los Angeles and there was a civil rights movement going on, and our Presbyterian church was totally white and totally unconcerned about what was going on."

Vree attended Dorsey High School in Los Angeles, a racially mixed school; there, he became "quite aware of the race issue. It seemed to me," he said, "that the black people were not being given a fair chance; they were being discriminated against, on the basis of their color, not on the basis of their character. I became involved in racial reconciliation in my high school and also in civil rights activities outside the high school. At my church, this was never addressed officially; and, unofficially, it was always discussed in hostile terms. That was troubling."

After graduating from high school in 1961, Vree attended UCLA. Still troubled by what seemed his church's neglect of social issues, he discovered the university's Episcopal center, which held a meeting on the issues of socialized medicine, civil rights, and disarmament. "I thought, 'my goodness, here we have Christians addressing some of these issues,'" Vree remembered. "So I went and loved it. I started attending the Episcopal Church -- and, of course, it's very different from a Dutch Reformed or a Presbyterian church -- and I loved it, as well." Vree said that Protestant church buildings he had known looked more like auditoriums than houses of God. An Episcopal church was different -- "it really looks like the house of God. You kneel -- that was very important to me. We're in God's house, we kneel in God's house. It elicited in me a sense of worship that I was, probably, inchoately yearning for."

If Vree's religion was becoming more "traditional," his politics were growing more radical. By his sophomore year, he was a socialist. For his junior year, Vree transferred to the University of California at Berkeley. "Of course, Berkeley, when it comes to radical politics, has a whole lot more to offer than UCLA," said Vree. "I threw myself into that and I was one of those arrested in the Free Speech Movement, which was the beginning of the so-called student movement in America. That was before the Vietnam War got anyone's attention. So then I became more than a socialist; I became a Marxist-Leninist -- and an Episcopalian."

Wanting to get his religion and politics "into sync," Vree read Honest to God, by John Robinson, the theme of which, said Vree, "was that, somehow, the hope for heaven had to be translated to earth. Somehow we needed to build the kingdom of God on earth. Of course, this became very central, and when you are involved in this, you tend to forget about heaven itself and sin, and so forth. Somehow I was able to transform these classical Christian themes into what is today called liberation theology."

But Vree began to sour on the radical movement in the United States. "There were things going on that were disturbing to me," said Vree. "For example, drugs were starting to be introduced: marijuana, LSD ... I never did any of that. I saw what it did to people; it was pathetic. Kids were shacking up at that time. Homosexuality wasn't quite out of the closet then, but there were things that kind of made me wonder, 'what is this?' Feminism hadn't really gotten a hold, but there was talk about abortion and how we needed abortion. I could see that the radical movement was being undermined by all this cultural garbage."

This "cultural garbage," Vree said, was anathema to real Communists. "If you were a member of the Communist Party (I never was), you did not do drugs," Vree said. "And if it was found out you were homosexual, you were expelled. I think they were right. Free sex, free love, birth control -- Lenin was highly dismissive of all that and thought it was bourgeois, individualistic, self-centered, and would undermine the collective struggle. The old-line radicals were not into what I would call 'bourgeois morality,' but I saw it sneaking into the movement via the new left -- the Abby Hoffmans, the Jerry Rubins, Haight-Ashbury, and all that garbage. That's how I looked at it; it was just self-indulgence. It had nothing to do with overthrowing capitalism and inaugurating socialism." Vree and his wife (they had married in 1965) were "very disturbed" about the course of the American radical movement and decided that it was "undermining itself and would never succeed.

"So," Vree said, "we decided to move to East Berlin."

Vree had visited East Berlin before. He had also visited Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Prague, and Warsaw. He and his wife had thought of expatriating to Cuba, but the Cuban government wanted people with skills, not intellectuals; so the Vrees first went to West Berlin, while awaiting admittance to East Berlin. In the meantime, the Vrees worked in the intelligence unit of the British occupying army. "The British," said Vree, "were so lax when it came to security; they had no idea who we were." Though he was in contact with East German officials, Vree said "the East Germans were not that interested in what I was doing there. They never asked me to do anything. They had real spies, professionals; they didn't need me."

Finally, the Vrees were admitted into East Berlin as students. "The business of being students was kind of a fiction, I think," Vree said. "They [the East German officials] were kind of interested in us; we also found out much later that the Soviets were kind of interested in us; we were befriended by an East German couple who, we were told later, were actually Soviet agents. I don't know what in the world they were interested in."

"Being Americans in East Germany, we were novelties," Vree continued. "We were invited out all the time -- people wanted to practice their English on us, learn about the West, tell us their stories. We learned a lot of what life is like in a Communist country. It wasn't what we were expecting. It wasn't that great. It wasn't that bad, either. For example, you didn't have any slums. You didn't have any unemployment. Of course, some of the employment you did have was sort of make-work, but everyone was employed who needed to be employed. People didn't go hungry. There was no pornography, there was no prostitution, there were no drugs. There was no homosexuality. It was a pretty straitlaced place. Berlin shut down when the sun went down; you didn't have night life. There was opera and things like that, but you didn't have clubs and strip shows and x-rated movies."

East German society, said Vree, was a society with a sense of purpose. "The people were pretty serious people," he said. "If you were against the system, you were serious; if you were for the system, you tended to be serious. In East Germany, they took ideas seriously, and if you had the wrong idea, you might be persecuted -- but at least they took you seriously. In the West, everything is about me, me, me! Entertainment, fun, games, sex, parties; not in East Germany. I could see it seeping in, but there was a definite difference. There was virtually no crime in East Germany."

East Germany, said Vree, "wasn't the kingdom of God on earth. It had its good points, it had its bad points. I could talk to you about the bad points, but most people know what those are."

One glaring bad point was the government's harassment of Christians. Being still "nominally Christian," the Vrees attended a Lutheran church in East Berlin. "It was like the scales fell from our eyes. You really had to be committed to be a Christian in East Germany because you were going to suffer harassment, persecution, discrimination. We made friends with the pastor. We got to meet his family and hear his story. He had been imprisoned by the Nazis, and now he was being persecuted by the Communists. Now, people weren't being murdered, but there were all kinds of hassles: there was job discrimination, and it was often very hard to get into a university if you were known to be a Christian. What we kind of discovered was the primitive Church -- the Church before Constantine, and it was a complete flip-flop from America, where, at that time, to be a Christian was respectable. In America, it was easy to be a Christian. Of course, it was easy to ignore a lot of things, if you were a Christian. You could ignore social justice issues and the 'least of these my brethren.' and just not pay any attention to it."

During his time in East Berlin, Vree said, he and his wife were visited every week by a Communist Party functionary -- "a nice guy," said Vree, "but he could tell we were kind of souring on Communism."

If his stay in East Berlin disillusioned Vree with Communism, it brought on a renewal of faith. "It was on Easter Sunday, 1966, when I went to the church with my wife and the preacher preached on the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ," he said. "That was something I wasn't sure was important, probably didn't believe it at that point. But as he preached very vehemently on the physical resurrection of Christ, I can't explain it, but I suddenly believed."

"By that time," he said, "the Communist people who were visiting us realized we were not really going to be of much use to them." The Vrees were allowed to be in East Germany for four and a half months, and then they left.

If belief in the Resurrection was anathema to the Communists, it proved a stumbling block to many American Episcopalians, as the Vrees discovered when they returned to the United States. "It became a problem," Vree said, "because there was all this de-mythologizing -- Christ didn't really rise from the dead and all supernatural things are metaphors for some this-worldly experience." The Vrees then "shopped around"; they attended a Lutheran church, as well as Christian and Missionary Alliance and Orthodox Presbyterian congregations. "We finally wound up in an Anglo-Catholic parish, which was then part of the Episcopal Church," Vree said. "That was it. They were orthodox and really believed, and they were still Episcopalian."

Being Anglo-Catholic was Vree's introduction to Catholic tradition. "When you become an Anglo-Catholic," Vree said, "you understand that the Bible just didn't appear out of the clouds; it was put together by the Church. So you understand that somehow tradition has a lot to do with the Bible, and we wouldn't have the Bible if we didn't have the tradition. The Church was instrumental in giving us the Bible and, of course, if the Church felt inspired by the Holy Spirit to make these immense decisions about what is canonical, and what isn't, then the Church must have the inspiration to determine what the Scripture actually teaches."

As an Anglo-Catholic, Vree helped found the New Oxford Review in 1977.

One change in the Episcopal Church made Vree uneasy: the decision in 1976 to ordain women to the priesthood. This was problematic for an Anglo-Catholic, who understands the Church to consist of three branches -- the Roman, the Orthodox, and the Anglican -- and holds that no changes in one branch were to occur without the concurrence of all three branches. If the Episcopal Church claimed to be Catholic, Vree reasoned, how can it ordain women? "It can't," he concluded. Other issues were reversible -- if "the church takes a permissive stand on abortion at one general convention, it can reverse it three years later. But if you are going to have priestesses and bishopettes, you pollute the whole apostolic succession, all of the sacraments. Anglo-Catholics believed that their sacraments were valid, but once you have women administering communion, have you received it? And if a woman bishop ordains a priest, is the priest really a priest? That was the crunch point."

The issue of women's ordination got Vree thinking more deeply about the relationship of scripture, tradition, and authority. If tradition interprets scripture, who is to interpret tradition? "The Roman, the Orthodox, the Anglican, actually don't share entirely the same tradition," said Vree. "There are many variations. And even within the Orthodox world there are many variations. So, how do we interpret the tradition? There must be some authoritative source who can tell us what the tradition is. Of course, you wind up with the magisterium, the papacy.

"You can kind of sum it up, in terms of Christianity -- how do I know that what I believe is true? I don't want to believe error, I don't want to believe my own fictions; I want to know what's true. I love Jesus Christ. I want to follow Him. I want to know what He wants me to do -- not what I want to do. How do I find that out? I've got to get beyond my own persona, my own desires, wishes, feelings; I've got to know what is Christianity. Therefore, you have to deal with these doctrinal issues, because Christianity is so various. Who am I to figure all these things out when for two millenia Christians have been bickering about them?" Thus, in 1983, Vree and his family entered the Catholic Church, and the New Oxford Review became a Catholic journal.

Conversion has, undoubtedly, changed Vree, though politically, it has not made him a Whittaker Chambers. He is now "not very political at all," said Vree. He also is not anti-Communist and pro-capitalist, for he sees Communism and Western capitalism as merely two materialisms; the first, he said, was crude in its appeal, but the second is more seductive. If anything, Vree said he embraces what he wistfully calls "Catholic socialism," which he said was outlined by Popes Pius XI (in Quadragesimo Anno) and John Paul II (in Laborem Exercens). This Christian socialism, said Vree, "is about workers assuming ownership of what they do, where workers are involved in management and have a share in the company. If the company does poorly, their wages go down; if their company does well, their wages go up. It's trying to get beyond the adversarial character of capital and labor; it's trying to bring labor and management into a co-determinative relationship so they are not like the master and servant."

But Vree thinks discussion of the Church's social doctrine "is pretty much played out." With the defeat of Bolshevism, he said, it is meaningless to talk about an alternative to capitalism. "When Bolshevism went bust, there was no rival; the elites had no more interest in appeasing the working class or counteracting socialist tendencies," Vree said. "Capitalism has won; multinational corporations have won. We live in an era of globalization and the new world order. I don't think there is any viable alternative to it, and I say that sadly. To talk about socialism, I think, is pointless."

So it is that Vree and the New Oxford Review have of late concentrated on the internal cultural struggle in the Church. Vree said, when he became Catholic, he had not expected to discover the same problems he had encountered in the Episcopal Church. At first, he said, he lay low. "Who was I to come in, in 1983, and start criticizing? 'I'm grateful to be here, I've got a lot to learn,' I thought. But then when you start to feel that you are not just a convert; you're a Catholic now, you're a seasoned Catholic now and not a rookie; and you see things that are wrong, you say, 'I think I have to say something about this. I can't be quiet anymore.' Not that I was that quiet before; but I had to become a little more outspoken."

Some would say, though, that Vree became a lot more outspoken; maybe, too outspoken. Yet, such criticism doesn't bother Dale Vree. "I see the same diseases in the Catholic Church that I saw elsewhere, and [I asked], 'why do I have to fight this battle?' Somehow I was put here, so that's what I'm called to do. I can't save the Church by myself, but I can help; and I know that people who read NOR are so grateful; they say, 'you're articulating what I see needs to be done.'

"I can see that it's a great benefit to many people," said Vree. "That's why I am doing it."

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