by Donald Szantho Harrington,
Minister Emeritus of The Community
Church of New York
Vilma
was born in the tiny Transylvanian village of Aldoboly,
Hungary on January 15, 1913. I have seen the humble house
in the foothills of the great Carpathians where she came
into this world in the days when Transylvania was still
the most important part of the kingdom of Hungary, which
it had been for some one thousand and seventeen years
until the Treaty of Trianon in 1919 gave it to Romania.
Her father, Dr. Vitus Szantho, was the presiding judge
or magistrate in the nearby county seat town of St. George
(Sepsi Szent Gyorgy). Her mother was a beloved kindergarten
teacher in the local public school. They had a home in
town also, as well as in the village, at the top of a
small hill overlooking the Town Hall and Plaza, and were
one of the most respected families in the town, their
ancestors having lived there and in the surrounding villages
from time immemorial .
Vilma remembered vividly the vicissitudes of World War
I, when there was little food and no sugar. She remembered
when they had to flee to Budapest at the war's end as
looting soldiers ransacked her town, taking away everything
they could carry. For six months her family had lived
in a railroad car in Budapest before being able to return
to rebuild and restore their home. When Transylvania,
which was the first settled part of Hungary, and the only
part not to suffer Turkish occupation in the sixteenth
century, was up for grabs in 1919, it was rather casually
given by the French and British to Romania, so Vilma,
as a little Hungarian six year old, awoke one morning
in her own home and bed to be told that she was no longer
Hungarian but a Romanian subject, thenceforth to be required
to transact business and pursue much of her higher education
in a foreign language.
In 1926, when she was thirteen years old, Vilma went to
the gymnasium to prepare for entrance to the University.
As she neared graduation from the gymnasium in 1930, her
four older brothers, Karoly, Bela, Zoltan, and Andras,
were often asking her what she wanted to be when she grew
up, to which her answer always was, "A Minister!"
Her father and mother shook their heads. In those days
in Eastern and Central Europe, when girls graduated from
high school, they got married and settled down to have
families. A very few might enter the legal profession
or seek to become doctors, but a woman minister was simply
unheard of. There was no provision in church law for a
woman to study for or to be ordained as a minister. No
woman had ever been admitted to any of the theological
schools in the capitol city of Kolozsvar. But Vilma was
persistent, and asked her father to intercede with the
authorities at the Unitarian headquarters. He finally
agreed to do so, though muttering that he couldn't understand
why she couldn't become a doctor or a lawyer if she had
to have a higher education.
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As
a citizen of some influence, he evidently was successful,
because in 1931 Vilma was admitted to the almost four
hundred year old Unitarian Seminary in Kolozsvar. She
gathered that the Bishop and Dean were not worried, being
certain in their minds that this beautiful, vivacious
girl would almost certainly marry one of the young ministers,
and so the question of ordination to the ministry would
never arise. Even if it did, they felt they could divert
her to a teaching ministry, and while she was in theological
school she did field work with the children and young
people of the capital city's great Unitarian Church.
They did not know Vilma! She considered her decision to
be not just a divine calling, but an imperative human
calling. As she put it in one of her memoirs: "I
wanted to work with people from the cradle to the grave,
with young and old, whether rich or poor, whether happy
or sad, and I felt that the only profession that offered
such an opportunity was the ministry."
When the day arrived, not only the villagers, but reporters
from nearby Torda and Kolozsvar were present. The villagers
were open-hearted and enthusiastic towards this bright
young woman who had dared to challenge the sex barrier
which had been in place in the church in this part of
the world since the beginning of the Christian era. As
her host minister and she stood at the door of the church
to shake hands with the departing congregation, amidst
a buzz of warm approval, only one old man had some doubts.
He put it this way: "It is all very well, Miss Reverend,
but I am wondering - where you will be minister, who will
be the minister's wife?" The question itself tells
something of the role of the minister's wife in Hungarian
Churches. Never is it said of her, as I have heard it
said of some ministers' wives here in America, "Oh,
she's just the minister's wife." No, sir. Over there,
the minister's wife sits at the front of the church facing
the congregation, and has definite prerogatives, honors,
and responsibilities. So his question was by no means
facetious. He wanted to know.
In 1936, at the age of twenty three, Vilma graduated from
the Unitarian Theological School in Koloszvar and, perhaps
further to delay the problem of ordination, was recommended
by church authorities for a year's study at Manchester
College, Oxford, and for travels throughout the British
Isles. While there, she made many friends and met a number
of women ministers from among the British Unitarians.
She also attended the Congress of the International Association
for Religious Freedom at Oxford in the summer of 1937,
where she met the Rev. and Mrs. Alson H. Robinson, from
Plainfield, New Jersey. Between Rev. and Mrs. Robinson
and Vilma it was love at first sight. "But, you must
come to America and study at Meadville Theological School"
they exclaimed. When she replied, "I'm sorry, but
I can't. I have no money, no visa and my passport will
expire this year," the Robinsons rejoined,"Then
we will extend the passport; we'll get the visa; and we
will see to it that you have a full scholarship, covering
everything, including travel." She made her way at
once to Meadville on the shores of Chicago's Lake Michigan.
As winter turned to spring, I often asked her to go walking
with me. One evening, in late March, as we were walking
our usual walk, I suddenly realized that I was falling
in love with this girl. I proposed to Vilma for the first
time. I told her about my growing love of her and of my
slowly intensifying conviction that we were made for each
other and that we should be married. Her reaction was
that she liked me too, but that it was not possible for
us to marry. She had been sent to the United States in
order to serve her people at home the better. I must confess
that this was quite a let down for me, for it had taken
me quite a little while to build up the courage to verbalize
what was in my heart, and her answer was all too final.
II
At
the time of the new Bishop's installation, a number of
new ministers were to be ordained with the ceremony of
laying on of hands. I discovered that Vilma was supposed
to be one of them, but as church law didn't provide for
ordaining a woman, no one knew quite how to proceed. My
presence, and our new engagement, made the whole thing
doubly embarrassing. After lengthy discussion, a compromise
was reached. She would be ordained and certified to preach,
but not publicly, rather privately, by the Bishop himself.
And so it was - to Vilma's disappointment, but final agreement.
Our joint ministry began upon our arrival in Chicago in
September of 1939. I had been called to be minister of
The Peoples Liberal Church of Chicago, a fine, old, independent
church in the Englewood area. From the beginning, Vilma
was both minister's wife and minister, giving me constant,
daily encouragement, support, counsel, advice and criticism.
I did virtually nothing of importance without first talking
it over with her, and that became a habit which I followed
for the rest of my life with her, much to my own benefit
and that of my congregations.
By then, our first child was on the way, and we had agreed
that while the children were young, our first concern
must be for them. Ilonka was born on April 10, 1940, just
a little over a year after our wedding on March 28, 1939.
Francis David arrived three years later on April 21, 1943.
Her first ministering was to me and to them.
Yet, while still pregnant with David, we had together,
as co-ministers, founded the Beverly Unitarian Fellowship
in the Chicago suburb of Beverly Hills. I repeated my
Sunday morning services on Sunday evenings in Beverly,
and Vilma took on the task of leading the Church School
and serving as Associate Minister.
In 1944, we responded to the call to come to New York
City as Junior Colleague and ultimate successor to the
famous John Haynes Holmes who was one of our heroes. Here
in New York we ministered together, she in one capacity
or another, for almost forty years.
III
For
the first ten years, which were while the children were
small, she was mostly the Minister's Wife. Her practice
of her profession was sacrificed gladly to the well-being
of our children, though as Minister's Wife, she still
took a keen and active interest in every church activity,
never missed a Sunday at church, and helped us to start
our first Church School.
In 1954, when we lost our Minister of Education, she became
for five years our Director of Religious Education. Under
her colorful and deeply spiritual leadership, and spirited
personality, our school enrollment doubled, tripled and
quadrupled. Parents came with their children, eager for
them to be with her.
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Then,
in the 1960's, Vilma became Minister to College Students,
first for the Metropolitan Unitarian Universalist District,
and when it could no longer maintain such a ministry,
she continued leadership of the Columbia-Barnard Group
on behalf of the Community Church. Vilma was, without
question, not only one of the most successful Unitarian
Universalist Ministers to College Students, but had for
several years the most popular student group on the Columbia-Barnard
Campus. She specialized in bringing some of the great
personalities of our city who were in retirement to tell
the story of their struggles for a better society for
everyone, people like David Dubinsky, Roger Baldwin, Roy
Wilkins, and the various, local Unitarian Universalist
ministers.
In her Journal, she wrote: "Off and on, I have served
our church in practically every conceivable capacity.
I served where the need was, and never for full pay. My
reward was in knowing intimately my dear friends and members
of this congregation, and in serving them, working together
with them, for nobler lives and a better social order,
helping each other to believe that goodness is possible,
and to feel that Greater Reality, the Great Spirit which
broods over and moves among us always. The friendship
and love I experienced across the years at Community Church
gave me the strength to say - Yes! to life, even when
the going was tough."
Along with these official functions, Vilma undertook what
may in the long run prove to be even more important. She
became the unofficial ambassador of the Hungarian Unitarians
to the American Unitarian Universalists, ceaselessly telling
the story of Hungarian Unitarianism to the people of our
liberal churches all across America.
We had left Transylvania in August of 1939. It was twenty
years before we could get a visa to go to Romania again.
In the meantime, her father and mother and older brother
all died. Immediately after World War II we had begun
trying to get visas, but not until 1959 were we finally
able to do so. That year we took the first of four pilgrimages
of American Unitarian Universalists to visit the Unitarian
Churches in Transylvania.
None of us will ever forget the first Hungarian village
we visited in Transylvania that year. (I believe Frankie
Challenger was with us that year). It was an all-Unitarian
village, just one church, the Unitarian! As we arrived,
the church bell began ringing wildly, and the people poured
out of their houses and came running in from the fields.
First we went to the church to be welcomed with an overflowing
congregation, and sang exuberant hymns, the roar of the
voices shouting the hymns almost deafening us. Then we
went over to the parsonage for cognac, good food, wine
and much visiting. Vilma, of course, had to do all the
translating, and as the trip progressed into way after
midnight, stopping at village after village, she became
dreadfully tired. At that first village, when we finally
returned to our bus to go on to the next village, we found
the bus quite literally, covered with flowers!
Our last pilgrimage was in 1979, when we went to mark
the Four Hundredth Anniversary of Francis David's martyrdom
by visiting the old castle dungeon in the mountain top
ruins of the town of Deva. Once again, this was an unforgettable
experience, when we all felt very close to that great
human being who in 1568 had persuaded King John Sigismund
to make religious toleration the law of the land, and
who, for his temerity, under a later king had paid the
supreme price of martyrdom.
Vilma was always looking forward with hope. In January
of 1982, just before we discovered her cancer, she wrote
in her diary:
