Catholics in East Germany

...Some 70 million people have already been slain in a long succession of over 60 wars in only the last 60 years...

...As a result, Mass is celebrated there each afternoon for a good-sized congregation of devout Saxon Catholics and Polish tourists...

...The next day he received a phone call asking him if he knew what his son had done and if he realized that he would no longer be receiving the professional's pension...

...Its copper dome is an impressive sight from the Unter den Linden, but its congregation is woefully small since almost no one lives in the area...

...However, the two Catholic bishops at that time, in Berlin and Beissen, were persuaded by the Protestant leaders to join them in standing firmly against it...

...The East German government "allows" the West German Catholic Church to send its money, and so become one of its sources of hard currency...

...This is a drawing of a clock which formerly displayed the time as twelve minutes to midnight, symbolizing the nearness of a possible nuclear holocaust...

...Our politicians have a guilty conscience and their reactions are abnormal...

...The cathedral of Meissen, reflected in the waters of the Elbe, is symbolic...

...But this enormous church is in the very center of town surrounded by the ruins of the palace and the new business section...

...Priests have learned, from long experience, to give sermons that do not anger the authorities...

...Individual priests seem eager to excuse young people who go through with the ceremony because of peer presCommonweal: 35 sure (it is a time of festivity, getting presents, etc...

...The town church of Wittenberg, where Luther himself often preached, may have forty people on Sunday...

...His father, a skilled engineer, had been injured and was supporting his family rather well through a special pension granted professionals, a good deal more than that given to an incapacitated laborer...

...The old people and the middle-aged parents had known the Hitler days, and the teenagers and the children remembered only the late Walter Ulbricht and one of the most rigid of Communist states...

...nificant to note that the Bulletin o! Atomic Scientists, the magazine created over two decades ago to present the views of well-known scientists on critical issues, has recently changed the famous symbol on its cover...

...Who knows what will happen next...

...It looked like a typical summer tourist crowd in a resort area of Wisconsin or Michigan...

...Religious orders are allowed to exist...

...I concelebrated Mass wtih two East German priests at a parish in the country...

...Almost all received communion (in the hand, of course), and after Mass some stood around the door of the old school building to talk to the pastor...

...The pastor of the former Augustinian monastery church (where Luther took his vows and celebrated his first Mass) proudly showed me the Gothic windows and cloister and Luther's cell, but then sadly confessed that he has only thirty people in his Sunday congregation...

...The situation is similar in Berlin itself...

...As one of East Germany's one thousand priests told me, "Here we live always amid the politics of hysteria...

...i i CATHOLICS IN EAST GERMANY WILLARD F. JABUSCH The lot of a small minority The cathedral of Erfurt enjoys one of the most dramatic sites in Europe, balanced on a hilltop above the central "Marktplatz...

...It means, of course, that you can not be trusted as a teacher, that you will never be an officer in the military forces, that you will never be a manager of a firm or a supervisor, and that all government positions are closed to you...

...Certainly the Protestant Church, which had more to lose in a Communist Germany, predictably lost more...

...But just because bishops are now appointed to ancient episcopal cities like Erfurt and Magdeburg does not mean that many of the approximately one million Catholics will have an easier time of it...

...It has been possible to rebuild, with Communist approval and a lot of West German money, the historic St...

...But its output is carefully controlled and its titles are limited to a few devotional works, the altar missal, and the "Katholisches Gesangbuch...

...Here Martin Luther climbed the soaring staircase and entered the portal beneath the Gothic virgin and apostles...

...No new churches may be built in the suburbs, where, of course, there is the most need...

...The liturgy followed Vatican II norms, with much unaccompanied congregational singing of the traditional hymns that most German Catholics seem to know and' love...

...Hedwig to celebrate the Eucharist...

...And so, permission was given for the St...

...The Communist regime is frankly delighted...

...I was, perhaps, the only one in that chapel who have ever lived in a country where freedom of speech is taken for granted...

...No religious instruction may be given outside of a church building, but it is possible to gather children and young people in church for formational talks...

...And, of course, here deep in the heart of "Lutherland" Catholics have been an almost invisible remnant since the Reformation...

...It appears that the first Catholic impulse was to consider it a mere ceremony of civil maturity and not make a religious issue of it...

...It would appear there are more priestly vocations per million Catholics in this totalitarian climate than in Chicago or Boston...

...The Liturgy with its traditional hymns and prayers and Bible readings does not seem to offend the state...

...Priests and bishops are allowed to function liturgically in church, but since neither they nor their religion has any real status, there is the constant threat that what is allowed today may be ended tomorrow...

...Christian youth were, under no conditions, to take part in the "Jugendweihe" since it was tantamount to denial of the faith...

...once again, for the first time since the Reformation, Erfurt has a Catholic bishop to preside in its cathedral church...

...The pastor in this town told me of one boy who stood up in his class just l~efore the "Jugendweihe" and announced that he would not be making it...

...The party line reigns supreme and no book or newspaper may question it...

...And so, in every Christian home, the year a child is old enough for "youth dedication" is a time of soulsearching and often of real agony...

...FATHER W1LLARD F . JABUSCH, a previous contributor, is a mem...

...But it is important to remember that in this tightly ruled and doctrinaire land, where everyone must have an official classification of some kind, the clergy find themselves labeled by the government as "non-productive intellectuals"-certainly a highly vulnerable category and rather close to being a non-person...

...Security and peace for humanity lies in eliminating the domination of the military and weapon-makers in the world community...

...But it means also that your children will not attend a university and, as a result, their choice of careers becomes extremely limited...

...There are also some Franciscans and Redemptorists and even a couple of Benedictine monks who have returned from a novitiate in Poland to begin a small priory...

...Governments, and their leaders, must be bound by the same norms of behavior and law demanded of citizens within the nations...

...I would have been shipped away long ago...

...The Protestant Marienkirche in Berlin had eleven people for a Sunday communion service (including two African students...

...Most parishes meet instead in a rented room, perhaps an old hall or a former schoolhouse...

...Catholics represent, of course, only a small minority in this nation of almost eighteen million people...

...Benno-Verlag in Leipzig...

...the nave belongs to the Protestants, and the choir to the Catholics...

...The priest from Berlin remarked that his greatest penance is the utter theological isolation...

...The Communists reinstituted the ceremony after the war and made it even more a parody of the Catholic and Evangelical rites of adolescent confirmation...

...I met several young Christians who were highly intelligent and well-read--but they will never receive a degree or a position that requires a degree...

...Each day, just before supper, some of these Christians, young and old, gather in the crypt of the Berlin cathedral of St...

...11 October 1974:36...

...No, nothing printed will get through, and any other presents will cost so much in duty that he could not afford to pick them up at the post office...

...As the pastor cooked a Sunday dinner for me and his guest from Berlin on a little gas burner in his tiny apartment, he invited me to examine his library...

...They know well enough that their lot could be better or far worse in neighboring Communist countries...

...and in eliminating the exploitation by both national governments and multi-national corporations...

...Whether this should be a function of the Mass may be a debated point among many liturgical scholars, but the fact is that it seems to be doing the job rather well...

...Yet it is the Sunday and holiday liturgy itself which must assume most of the burden, together with family example and instruction, for the communication of the faith...

...The Catholic bishops have, at least until now, kept to the earlier and more rigorous position...

...Strangely enough, a Catholic publishing house exists...

...On the flagstones between the splendidly carved choir stalls he prostrated himself as the litany of the saints was sung over him during his priestly ordination...

...The priests felt that the older Evangelical pastors were more friendly, in general, and that the younger ministers seemed more nervous and suspicious...

...There was not a single title by any of the authors who have become important in Western Europe since the Council...

...They are, of course, not allowed to 11 October 1974:34 operate any schools or teach in state institutions...

...One young man sorrowfully told the pastor that he went through with it, but "just moved his lips...

...Our present situation has best been expressed by the late Teilhard de Chardin: "The age of nations is past...

...No longer, for exam#e, will the bishop of Bamberg, in West Germany, claim jurisdiction on the other side of the strongly guarded frontier and attempt to govern the parishes there through a local vicar...

...While the East German Christians I talked to could hardly be called optimists, neither had they lost their sense of humor and Teutonic irony...

...Even self-education has its severe limits...

...And, most of all, from the young pastor of the Marienkirche and his vivacious wife to an elderly Jesuit, they seemed quite without illusions, but, perhaps for that very reason, living with a deep and abiding hope...

...This does not mean, clearly, that they will be uneducated...

...They will never have the numbers and the political power of the Church in Poland...

...Young Catholics do not refuse to serve in the army, as the Witnesses do, and going to Mass does not constitute a crime...

...Hedwig's cathedral just behind the opera house...

...It all seemed so pious and respectable and "gemiitlich...

...Church furnishings and vestments are paid for by West German "church taxes," as are the small salaries of the clergy...

...One would suspect that with aggressive atheism as a common enemy, Catholics and Protestants would have discovered many common causes and arrived at some serious ecumenical cooperation...

...Post-Vatican II theology is simply unavailable in the DDR...

...And, although the clothes lacked some of the American style and color, it was not hard to believe that the standard of living here is the highest of the Communist bloc countries...

...Surely the new socialist government would not follow the evil Nazi suppression of Catholic publishing...

...Protestant pastors have since taken a much more benign view and have declared that it does not imply apostasy but only a dedication to a homeland that happens, unfortunately, to be officially atheistic...

...Censorship is all-pervasive...

...In East Germany, the one Catholic seminary, located at Erfurt, is crowded with some 120 young men studying for the priesthood...

...Could I send him something from West Germany or America...

...They pray very close to the tomb of Bernhard Lichtenberg, who preached in that very cathedral against the Nazi evil, was arrested and died on his way to the concentration camp...

...This requires building world democratic institutions which represent all humanity, and which are capable of establishing world law able to provide lasting peace with both social and economic justice, and effectively deal with the critical global problems of hunger and environmental depletion...

...It would be hard to find any historical or social prop to support the practice of their faith...

...bet o] the ]acuity o[ St...

...The Berliner agreed, "Our Cardinal has said that he has more trouble with West Berlin than with all the rest of the diocese...

...Such does not seem to be the case...

...He appeared in his gray suit and blue tie with some candy for the altarboys and a friendly word for the proud parents...

...There is not even the stimulus of a clearcut persecution...

...But," the pastor observed, as he served up some blueberries he had picked in the forest, "perhaps we have also avoided some of the recent turmoil...

...In any event, it is clearly a time for sorting out what is God's and what is Caesar's...

...The world community can no longer be left to the whims of a few national leaders pursuing their absurd nationalistic dreams which generally turn out to be nightmares...

...Mary o[ the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois...

...Just after the war, the Catholics approached the leaders of the new regime...

...To be a church-going Catholic in East Germany means several things...

...Certainly celibacy and materialism are not major problems for our priests...

...and most of all by ending unrestricted national sovereignty which allows any government to do whatever it wants, regardless of the barbarism and suffering it brings to other peoples...

...Unless, of course, he persuaded his son to take the oath with his class . . . . Some youngsters tell their parents they will say the words, but not mean them...

...The rented room, fixed up with pews and altar, had room for sixty, but on i.his Sunday morning between eighty and ninety people were packed in the seats and aisles...

...The all-powerful state gives--and takes away...

...Last year an agreement was reached between the Vatican and East Germany which allows for the establishment (or re-establishment) of Catholic dioceses in return for the Church's recognition of the present boundaries between the German Democratic Republic and West Germany and Poland...

...State "'Liturgy" Unlike the Jehovah Witnesses, there are not too many East German Catholics in prison...

...Rome has, in effect, recognized the "wall" (built, of course, "to protect the DDR from imperialistic elements") as something real and lasting...

...and the insistence of school authorities (who spend two years putting the children through a kind of socialistic catechesis...

...the Jesuits number about fifty priests and brothers and they have six or seven students living at one of their parishes and also studying at the Erfurt seminary...

...A substitute confirmation ceremony, the so-called "youth dedication" or "Jugendweihe" goes back to the time of Hitler, who saw the value of a civil liturgy of loyalty to the state at the very time when both Protestant and Catholic young people were getting ready for their church confirmation day...

...As the old Jesuit said, "At least this is better than the Nazi days...

...In Dresden, for example, many marks have been spent to restore the Italianate court chapel and its wonderful Silbermann organ, one of the most important Baroque monuments in the city...

...However, these are no mere cultural Catholics attending a ritual out of habit...

...But they also have a certain freedom unknown in Hungary where the seminary is much more rigidly controlled, or in Slovakia where many priests are not allowed to minister to their people and where the provincial of the Jesuits earns his bread as a day laborer...

...The time has now been changed to nine minutes to midnight in response to the new escalations of the arms race...

...Rather, it is the state "liturgy" that offends the Christian soul, and has become the major cause of conflict between Catholics and the regime and the reason for considerable anguish within Christian homes...

...Perhaps with this sense of loss and defeat and with Reformation monuments all around, little ecumenical enthusiasm can be expected in Saxony and Thuringia...

...The task before us now, if we would survive, is to shake off our ancient prejudices and build the earth...

...The great challenge now facing humanity is to regain control over our destiny...