ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 13, 1996 TAG: 9604150013
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: LESLIE HAGER-SMITH SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
What's a nice guy like Rudolf Ladislaus Czuczka von Gelse und Belisce doing in a place like this? In a week, for one thing, he'll be formally installed as the new minister at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Blacksburg.
Friends just call him "Rudi," thanks.
Gelsey started work here this winter after moving from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where he was living in restless retirement after 30 years of ministry in South Bend, Ind., Philadelphia, Detroit, and Niagara Falls. Retirement may be the only thing he can't adjust to.
This contemporary Old World guy has been around.
A name like his ought to have a story to go with it, and it does. In the crisp accent of his homeland, Gelsey explains that he now uses the shortened, Hungarian version of "von Gelse und Belisce," with an Anglicized spelling. The two names refer to the birthplace and landholdings of his aristocratic ancestors.
It was during the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy that his parents met and wed in Vienna. From the political maelstrom of post-World War I Europe, through the darkest hours of World War II, to this country's dramatic civil rights struggle, Rudi Gelsey's life reads like a history of the 20th century.
The younger of two sons, Gelsey was born into opulent wealth 70 years ago. His father, principal and general manager of a Croatian lumber industry, was a powerful and respected industrialist. Though Gelsey and his family lived in Austria, holidays found them on their ancestral lands in Croatia or at their summer estate in Hungary.
Being classically educated, and moving among cultures as he did, Gelsey became versed in no fewer than eight languages, including Italian, French, Hungarian, Croatian and Latin. But his childhood was marked by recurrent struggles with osteomyelitis, a painfully debilitating bone disease, usually caused by staphylococcus infection. Because antibiotics were then undiscovered, it was a life-threatening condition. Repeated hospitalizations disrupted his schooling and, eventually, disqualified him for military service.
The family enterprise, founded in 1884, prospered with the rest of Europe during a time of economic expansion. It was not only the exclusive supplier of lumber for the railroad just being built, but included a derivative chemical industry, as well.
When the company was nationalized by the communist regime under Marshal Tito in 1946, the family fortune went with it. Located in Belisce, near Osijek, it remains the largest corporation in Croatia today. Gelsey shows no hint of bitterness.
"Belisce now has two great claims to fame," he chuckles. "This company and the best soccer club in Croatia!"
Gelsey grows reflective as he traces the course of his life. "As a child, I felt that I would never be able to measure up to my father, and so, you see, my life has taken a completely opposite direction."
As a Catholic and an entrepreneur, the elder Gelsey found it hard to understand his son's devotion to Unitarianism, but the rift was mended decades later. A year before he died in 1985, Gelsey's father asked him to perform his memorial service.
"So I did a Unitarian memorial service in Vienna," says Gelsey warmly. His mother, moved by that experience, asked her son to perform her memorial service, too. Two years later, he did.
These days you'll find him swimming laps at the Blacksburg Aquatic Center, lunching with the Rotary Club, or leading biweekly meditations at the fellowship. A member of the International Association for Religious Freedom, Gelsey has traveled the world in service to his beliefs, including Egypt, Israel, India, South Korea and Japan. A result was his book, "A Faith for the Global Village." It's not Old World Vienna, but then, neither is he.
"When I graduated from the University of Geneva with a political science degree, I was passionate about the movement for European federation," recounts Gelsey. He became director of research for the Inter-University Federalist Union, a highly visible association of faculty and students with groups in every European nation. The young activist lived in Paris for two years while traveling throughout the continent to promote the cause.
The efforts of Gelsey and many like him led to the creation of the Council of Europe in 1949, forerunner of today's European Economic Community.
"Switzerland inspired me," he says. "Italy, Germany and France had been repeatedly at war, but the same ethnic groups under the Swiss federalist system had been able to live together harmoniously for hundreds of years."
However, Gelsey grew disillusioned by the division of Europe into East and West, and immigrated to Canada in 1949. He worked for the Gallup Poll of Canada several years, during which time he began to attend the historic Church of the Messiah, a Unitarian parish. In time, his church activities grew much more satisfying to him than his career. So, at age 33, he moved to the United States, to attend The Divinity School of the University of Chicago.
Before leaving Canada however, a vacation on the St. Lawrence Seaway diverted the course of his life. Aboard a tour boat, he overheard a young woman speaking German to her mother. He and Trudi, a native of Bavaria, were married in 1962, the day after he graduated from the seminary. Their two sons, now grown, live in Seattle and Denver.
Given his personal and political background, perhaps it was natural that he would embrace a religion that promotes individual freedom of conscience without a written creed.
"The idea of unity without uniformity was central to my work for a federalist Europe, and also it is central to Unitarian Universalism. Acceptance of diversity is a concept that we hold dear, and it derives from the theological concept of freedom of conscience, that one must not compel people's consciences," Gelsey says. "What we seek to do is to encourage people to live ethically, according to their highest conscience."
Diversity apparently has been a winning formula for the liberal fellowship, in a time and place where religious conservatism is ascendant. In addition to calling a minister, the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, off Glade Road, has doubled the size of its building in the last three years, and nearly doubled attendance, from about 50 to 90. In contrast, membership in other traditional Protestant churches nationally has been shrinking or stagnating.
Culture and religion aren't the only barriers Gelsey has tackled. In 1965, as minister of the UU Church of the Restoration in Philadelphia, he joined the struggle against racial segregation by marching with the Rev. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma, Ala.
"When we were told 'Clergy go in front' at an unauthorized march on city hall, I had never been more scared in my life, but did it anyway," Gelsey said.
King, one of the finest orators of the century, could prepare a sermon in under 10 minutes, Gelsey recalls with obvious admiration. "He would note three or four themes on an index card, and that was all.
"What people did not know of the private man, was that he had a delightful sense of humor," says Gelsey. He speaks with the emotion of a dedicated clergyman who spent the evening before King's last birthday with the martyred civil rights leader. "He was very warm, very spontaneous."
"Jim Orange, one of King's lieutenants, was speaking to our congregation on the Sunday before King was killed. In the middle of the sermon, he broke down and wept ... afterwards, he told me that there was a contract on King's life and that his only escape was to leave Memphis."
King refused. Two days later, on April 4, King was assassinated by James Earl Ray.
In February, Gelsey returned to his former pulpit in Philadelphia, to be honored at the presentation of the first Rudi Gelsey Social Justice Award. It commemorates Gelsey's 30 years of social activism.
The Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration which honors him was chosen by The Washington Post in 1992 as the finest model nationwide for racial integration in what otherwise has been deplored as the most segregated hour of the week.
"I'm thrilled," Gelsey says. But he quickly turns the topic back to the present. "Our Blacksburg congregation is theologically diverse. Now our goal is to become racially and socially diverse." The Rev. Rudi Gelsey is, as they say, a man with a mission.
Leslie Hager-Smith is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Blacksburg.
LENGTH: Long : 145 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Rudi Gelsey has come out of retirement to becomeby CNBminister at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Blacksburg.
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