The threat of peace

...Of greater concern to church officials is the monolithic nature of education which does not encourage the pupils to think critically for themselves...

...He also spoke of the increasing numbers of young people at the Blues-messe" or folk masses he organized, saying attendances had gone from 250 to over 5,000...

...Revolution' is a word which is occupied," he said when speaking of his attempts to describe the theology of liberation to the young...

...The churches also publish weekly and monthly magazines and run publishing houses...

...They now see the importance of coordinating the various movements of dissent in Eastern Europe, and he uses his flat for meetings of groups of Polish exiles...

...The churches also have the right to make a number of television programs each year for transmission on state TV...

...As he spoke I noticed a copy of Charter '77 from Czechoslovakia on the wall behind him, and he told me that the movement has been inspired a lot by the example of Solidarity...

...He told me that any movement independent of the state raises for them associations of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1980...

...In recent years also the churches have been given permission to build churches in the new housing estates though the state uses this as a means of earning more "hard" Western currency since it requires the churches to pay for the building in West German marks...

...Already the private sympathy of church leaders for the cause of the peace movement is known but they may be increasingly called on to show this more openly...

...Further down the street the house where he lived is closed for renovation...

...One priest used the words "frei-raum" or free-room to describe how the churches provide the only opportunity for people to discuss openly their experiences, the only possibility to disagree publicly with the all-pervasive and narrow state ideology...

...The state also finances six theological faculties in state universities in all of which Protestant clergy are trained...

...The roots of this peace movement go very deep, however...

...In fact, when I pressed officials to give concrete examples of what this means in practice the only instance they could mention was that the theory of evolution is taught to explain the origins of the race rather than a creationist view based on the Bible...

...Chesterton and of Charles de Foucauld, published by the Catholic publishers, on sale in bookshops...

...The Wartburg castle where he translated the New Testament into German has scaffolding around one section of it...

...The door of the Castle church in Wittenberg where he nailed his ninety-five theses in 1517 is covered over by scaffolding...

...I visited the Lutheran-run St...

...The Communists have had to accept that the church is not going to wither away as they had first thought and the Christians have also come to realize that the state they now live in is not provisional as they had believed when it was first set up in 1949...

...The Augustinian monastery in Erfurt where he became a monk is being reconstructed...

...At the same time it officially defined its position as being "a church neither alongside nor against, but a church in socialism...

...So worried is the state at the movement that it prohibited the wearing of armbands bearing the biblical slogan "Swords into Plowshares'' which was becoming a symbol of the movement...

...Stephanus the churches maintain hospitals, sanitoria, childrens' homes, and convalescent homes...

...The churches have complete freedom to run their internal affairs without interference, they have their services broadcast on a rotating basis by state radio every Sunday morning, and they even get state monies towards the upkeep of the clergy...

...Honecker officially welcomed the cooperation of the church in the development of society...

...he does not want to move to the West though he says the state would like to see him do so...

...Not only has Martin Luther been rehabilitated in the ruling ideology after many years of being regarded with some suspicion but the state has set up a Martin Luther committee under the chairmanship of Erich Honecker, the General Secretary of the Communist party, the SED, which groups Marxist politicians and academPEADAR KIRBY, an Irish journalist living in Dublin, recently returned from East Germany...

...The Catholic seminary in Erfurt has some one hundred students...

...The Catholic church, on the other hand, has only 1.3 million members, many of them German Catholics who had to leave Poland and Czechoslovakia after the second World War and so people who identify little with the part of Germany they now live in...

...Rainer Eppelmann, a youth pastor in East Berlin, is acknowledged as one of the main leaders of the peace movement...

...In the same complex is a school for 120 mentally handicapped children, 60 of whom live in...

...This cooperation is the most vivid symbol of the increasingly good relations between the majority Lutheran church and the Communist state authorities of East Germany...

...The state's fear that the peace movement may become for the GDR what Solidarity is for Poland may become a self-fulfilling prophecy if they continue to try to repress every public manifestation of it...

...The careful modus vivendi built up between the majority church and the state over many years may therefore be threatened by the very deep and sincere commitment to disarmament of the peace movement...

...ics with theologians, church historians, and four Lutheran bishops...

...This, according t6 a senior priest, is greater than is given in any other Eastern Bloc state...

...The churches care for over half the mentally handicapped in the GDR and state officials I met were lavish in their praise of the dedicated work done by the churches in this field...

...Not all sectors of the Lutheran church welcome this new public militancy...

...An order of Catholic nuns runs the state's only private secondary school in East Berlin...

...The suspicion with which they view the state was underlined by the far less successful "summit" between Catholic and state leaders in January 1980 when the Catholics insisted on restricting discussion to church matters...

...The Lutheran church formally acknowledged this when it broke its institutional unity with the church in West Germany in 1969, setting up a separate federation in the GDR and thus adding greater legitimacy to the division of Germany...

...From a situation of mutual confrontation after the war, Christians and Marxists have now come to take each other seriously, according to Dr...

...The eight provincial Lutheran churches in the GDR comprise some eight million members out of a population of some seventeen million...

...They have no tradition of state links as the Lutherans had under the Prussian Empire and neither can they draw on the record of the 'Confessing Church' when a section of the Lutheran church won respect from the Communists for their principled opposition to the Hitler regime...

...Our movement is not a sudden fad, it has deep roots," he said in describing the wide network of discussion groups under the protection of the church, some of which date back to the 1960s...

...These publishing houses even export Bibles to the West...

...Claus-Pieter Hertz, professor of theology in the University of Jena in the south of the country...

...In return the state has given greater freedom of action to the church, a position formally expressed at an historic "summit meeting'' of the leaders of the Lutheran church and the state in March 1978 at which Mr...

...In discussions with some of the church's leaders they continuously emphasized to me that the different political situation they worked in must be taken into account and that their way must be that of dialogue with the state rather than confrontation which could be counterproductive...

...More striking is the network of social services run by both the Catholic and Protestant churches with state financial help...

...But he emphasized that he is a "Christian Marxist," and that the GDR is his state...

...They see themselves as a diaspora in a double sense, as one priest put it to me...

...One youth pastor explained the results of this when he told me the difficulties he has had getting young people to discuss issues like peace or disarmament because these are words used constantly in the official ideology...

...They are in a minority position as against the Protestant church on the one hand and the Marxist-Leninist state on the other...

...As well as institutions like St...

...The work in progress is a combined effort by church and state in East Germany to restore these buildings in time for the five-hundredth anniversary of Luther's birth next year...

...Neither did they seem very worried by the state's official policy of educating all children in an atheistic worldview...

...In the educational sphere the churches have their own colleges to train church workers...

...The territory of the presentday German Democratic Republic (GDR) is the heartland of German Protestantism and contains all the main sites associated with Luther's life...

...But while Protestant links with the state have been growing, Catholics have remained aloof...

...This is the growing peace movement which in recent months has issued what is called "The Berlin Appeal" calling for disarmament in East as well as West Germany and which held a spontaneous demonstration in the southern city of Dresden after a church service commemorating the allied bombing of the city in 1945...

...Though no religious education is allowed in state schools, any of the priests or pastors I spoke to about this say it as an advantage for the churches to have to run programs of religious education in the church since it strengthens parish life...

...The principal singer and writer of songs for these liturgies, the nineteen-year-old Karl Winkler, had recently been expelled to West Berlin after spending thirteen months in prison...

...OUT OF THIS widespread network of discussion groups, or ' 'basengruppen'' as one priest called them (the similarity with the term comunidad de base, used all over Latin America, immediately struck me), a new and politically explosive phenomenon is arising...

...The Lutheran church runs three theological colleges as well as catechetical centers and schools of church music in which it has a rich tradition...

...Though there is no formal censorship, I was told that discretion has to be exercised as to what is published...

...Even more remarkable is the fact that the Lutheran church remains the only large private landowner in the state since its extensive landholdings were not confiscated during the land reform...

...The Rev...

...His name was the first of the thirty-five signatures on the "Berlin Appeal: Make Peace Without Arms" and after it was published in a West German newspaper in February he was immediately arrested and held for two days by the police...

...However, I did notice translations of G.K...

...This was explained to me by Jurgen Fuchs, now living on the other side of the Wall in West Berlin after he was expelled from the GDR in 1977 for publicly protesting at the expulsion of a famous folk singer, Wolf Biermann...

...Stephanus home in East Berlin where 120 old people live in excellent conditions and receive a high standard of care...

...Because of this the young people I met randomly in cafes and restaurants all agreed that the churches are very popular with the young, and one priest told me how atheistic parents are worried when they see their children going to church, an ironic twist to the worry many Christian parents have in the West when they see their children giving up religious practice...

...As one put it graphically, referring to the desire of many young people to organize mass demonstrations such as those they have seen on Western television, "such a demonstration would be seen here as an enemy attitude against the state that must be defeated with all state power...

...But in spite of these initial difficulties the churches have come to fulfill a vital role as the only institutions not controlled by the state...

...DESPITE THIS STANCE, however, the Catholic church enjoys the same wide measure of freedom given to the Protestant churches...