As Germany celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, some Protestants feel the crucial role their church played in shepharding the democracy movement to success is quietly being overlooked. This seems strange to someone like myself who reported on those events back then. Any reporter in Berlin in the tense weeks before Nov. 9, 1989 knew the Protestant (mostly Lutheran) churches sheltered dissidents and was working for reform. But the idea that this was fading from public view came up during my recent visit to Leipzig when, at an organ recital in Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Thomas Church (Thomaskirche), the pastor mentioned the point in a sermon.

(Photo: St. Thomas Church in Leipzig with Bach statue, 17 Oct 2009/Tom Heneghan)

When I later went up to Berlin, I ran the idea past a leading east German Protestant theologian and a pastor and two parish council members from the Gethsemane Church (Gethsemanekirche). That church in eastern Berlin was one of the most active centres of protest in the tense months before demonstrators forced open the Wall on Nov. 9, 1989. They all agreed.

The many anniversary celebrations, documentaries and discussions now underway across Germany seem to focus mostly on how fearless street protesters and astute politicians pulled off the “peaceful revolution” that ended communism. Films and photos of dissidents packed into the Gethsemane Church in East Berlin or Leipzig’s St. Nicholas Church (Nikolaikirche), the leading houses of worship that sheltered them until the Wall opened , are among the trademark images.  But those crowded “peace prayer” evenings were only the tip of the iceberg of behind-the-scenes work by pastors and lay people who considered it their Christian duty to promote civil rights and human dignity in a rigid communist society.

At the organ recital, Rev. Christian Wolff illustrated the point by mentioning a recent commemoration in Leipzig attended by German President Horst Köhler, Chancellor Angela Merkel and other dignitaries.  “At the ceremony, Werner Schulz spoke of the role of the churches — nobody else did,” he noted, referring to a former East German dissident who is now a European Parliament deputy. Köhler didn’t go into it in his speech, the main address of the day. While the Protestant churches didn’t claim all the credit for the success of the protests, Wolff said, “it wasn’t just a quirk of history that Christians took leading roles in the late 1980s.” They acted out of their religious convictions that each person had God-given dignity and rights that the communists were denying them.

(Photo: St. Nicholas Church, 9 Oct 2009/Steffen Schellhorn)

Richard Schröder, the East German theologian who was a Social Democratic politician in the transition period and then headed the theology faculty at Berlin’s Humboldt University, agreed the churches’ role was being overlooked. “In the media reporting now, the Wall seems to have fallen without any pre-history,” he told me during an interview at his home south of the capital. “Western German public opinion doesn’t have a clear perception of the churches’ role.” He thought the dynamics of politics and the media in united Germany played a part in changing the public perception of 1989.  Most politicians and journalists come from western Germany, he said, and had no experience of the underground activity bubbling below East Germany’s calm surface during the 1980s. Because 3/4 of eastern Germans belong to no church, the westerners underestimate the influence the churches had, even among the non-religious. This is the image that is now being repeated in speeches and television documentaries around Germany, Schröder said.

The pre-history to the Wall’s fall goes back at least to the early 1980s, when underground groups opposed to the superpower arms race linked up with activist pastors increasingly critical of the regimentation of life under the communists. In 1982, Leipzig’s St. Nicholas Church launched weekly “peace prayers” mixing Gospel readings with political debates. Police did not break up church services, so these sessions gave dissidents a freedom of speech and assembly they could find nowhere else.

(Photo: Nikolaikirche - offen fuer alle (St. Nicholas Church - open for all), 18 Oct 2009/Tom Heneghan)

Similar alliances emerged in many cities, aided by the large network of parishes maintained by the Protestants, who far outnumbered the cautious Catholic minority. By 1988, the Stasi secret police counted 160 such groups, almost all connected to the churches.  In the debates, pastors sometimes cited models such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian executed for resisting the Nazis, and the non-violent strategy of U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King. In guidelines for participants at his Monday evening “peace prayers,” St. Nicholas Church pastor Rev. Christian Führer laid down the rule that “participants and their contributions to the debate may not contradict the Gospel of the crucified Christ and its message of reconciliation and must be based on the commandments of God insofar as they aim to preserve life.”

Such activist pastors were a minority among the clergy, but became a majority in the political parties that formed in the autumn of 1989. The speaking and organisational skills developed in their church careers, one of the few areas of East German life not controlled by the communists, clearly helped them to take charge.

As Werner Schulz put it in the speech that Pastor Wolff cited, “the peaceful revolution was, at its core, also a Protestant revolution … Its pioneering motto ‘no violence’ was the essence of the Sermon on the Mount, the most revolutionary passage in the Gospel…  Protestant churches were base camps of this revolution… People went from peace prayers to street protests with a serious Protestant manner, disarming reasonableness and discipline.”

(Photo: Werner Schulz, 22 July 2005/Arnd Wiegmann)

The gap in perception of 1989  emerged clearly at a forum I attended in eastern Berlin where the Gethsemane Church showed a film about its role in 1989 and invited comments from audience, which was about 2/3 Ossis (easterners) and 1/3 Wessis (westerners) who’d settled there since the government moved from Bonn in 1999.  One Wessi criticised a section on the “Round Table” — a church-moderated public panel that helped oversee the transition to democracy between December 1989 and March 1990 — as not lively enough to show the real drama of that period.

The Ossis promptly and unanimously disagreed. They found it thrilling to see clips of civil rights activists politely grilling once untouchable communist officials, uncovering their corruption and insisting they take responsibility for their misuse of power. This showed the new democracy in action, they said.

The film, Ende der Eiszeit (End of the Ice Age), also showed the central role of the churches in shielding the dissidents and encouraging them to embrace non-violence and transparency.  “Without the churches, this openness couldn’t have come about,” said Rev. Heinz-Otto Seidenschnur of the Gethsemane Church. A parish council member there, archeologist Ursula Kästner, said the church stepped into a vacuum to ensure a peaceful transition. “This was the church’s synodal principle at work,” she told me. “Otherwise, we would have had violence like in Romania.”

(Photo: St. Nicholas Church, 18 Oct 2009/Tom Heneghan)

Dieter Wendland, a graphic designer and veteran member of the parish council, said the phenomenon of packed churches burst like a balloon when the Wall opened. “On the first Sunday, almost all the pews were empty. About 10 people were sitting there and that was it. It was a bit depressing, but I said we’ve achieved what we were struggling for.  Now we can do the work we’re called to do, that is, organise church life and preach the Gospel.”

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German Protestants on Wednesday elected Margot Kässmann, a divorcee and the Lutheran bishop of Hanover, to lead their Church, the first woman to take the post and only the third woman to head a major Christian church.

Kässmann, 51, a regular on television talk shows and known in the media as the “pop bishop,” was considered something of a controversial candidate to lead Germany’s roughly 25 million Protestants because she is divorced. But she won 132 of 142 votes at a synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), an umbrella group for 22 Lutheran, Reformed and United Churches, in the vote to replace the retiring Berlin Bishop Wolfgang Huber, 67, as EKD chairman.

“The election sends a signal to the Church worldwide that God calls us to leadership without consideration of gender, color or descent,” Rev. Ishmael Noko, general-secretary of the Lutheran World Federation, told the Ecumenical News International news agency at the synod in Ulm.

Read the whole story here.

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Sweden’s Lutheran church, the Church of Sweden, has decided to conduct gay weddings in the Nordic country from Nov. 1. “We are the first major church to do this,” said Kristina Grenholm, the church’s director of theology. The decision came after the Swedish parliament earlier this year passed legislation allowing homosexuals to legally marry, changing a previous law permitting legal unions but not formal marriage.

“For my part, the right decision was taken, but I can empathise with the many who believe this has gone too fast,” Archbishop of Sweden Anders Wejryd told a news conference.

Sweden’s Lutheran church, which split from the state in 2000 but remains the country’s largest religious community, had previously said it was open to registering same-sex unions but wanted to reserve the term matrimony for heterosexual marriages.

Read the whole article here.

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The largest U.S. Lutheran church group is about to begin a detailed discussion at the grass roots level on a policy change that would enable people in same-sex relationships to become clergy. Between now and June the debate will spread over some 65 synods covering the 5-million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

These meetings will produce comminiques which will be sent to the church’s convention in August where a final decision will be made on issues that have nagged the church and other denominations for years.

The ELCA’s current policies allow gays to serve in the ministry but not engage in sexual relations outside marriage — and the church defines marriage as being only between a man and a woman.

But possible changes advanced this week when the Church Council, a top governing body, approved with only minor revisions recommendations made by a task force  after a lengthy study.  Those recommendations will go before a membership convention in August, after input from the synods which are beginning their meetings this month.

The task force report asks whether the church wants to find ways to recognize life-long, monogamous same-sex relationships, and if so whether the church is committed to finding a way for people in such relationships to serve as clergy. There are other recommendations and proposals on how the process would work, but the first two steps have drawn the most attention.

ELCA officials said they foresaw “an extensive church-wide discussion” in the synods which elect delegates to the convention whose 1,000 members will be 60 percent laity and 40 percent clergy, and the debate reflects shifting societal attitudes towards gays in general and their role in the church in particular. 

Lutherans Concerned/North America, which speaks for gays in the church, said it was “pleased but cautious” with where the issue has advanced.

“For the first time in the history of our church, a recommendation for the elimination of the policy of discrimination against ministers in same-gender relationships will come to the floor of the church-wide assembly, brought by the church-wide organization itself,” said Emily Eastwood, executive director of Lutherans Concerned/North America.

(Photo: Same-sex issues have been big news in America in recent months. Two men walk hand in hand outside the California Supreme Court during a Proposition 8 demonstration in San Francisco, California March 5, 2009. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith (UNITED STATES)

How much fun — really — can you make of religion?  A U.S. marketer of board games may find out with ”Playing Gods” which it calls “the world’s first satirical board game of religious warfare.” It had its European premier this week at the London Toy Fair and will make a U.S. debut at the New York Toy Fair in February.

Ben Radford, head of the company that put the game together, said in a news release it is designed for two to five players who act as “gods” and …

“Try try to take over the world and make everyone on Earth worship him or her. As a god, you can try to convert other gods’ followers, promising them things like Afterlife, Prosperity, and Miracles. Or you can kill them off with plagues, locusts, earthquakes, floods, and other Acts of Gods.

“Watch out, though, because bad things can happen to good gods—one of your vicars is caught with a prostitute? Too bad, you lose a sect!

“Players can pit Christians against Muslims and Hindus against Jews, or be the mascot, a machine-gun-toting Buddha. Players may choose to be any god from Jesus to Moses, from Cthulu to Zeus, from the Cult of Oprah to the Almighty Dollar. (And yes, there is a Muslim figure.) Though the theme includes religious battles, it is really a satire with an underlying message of peace, encouraging people to think about the tragedy of killing others just because they have different beliefs.”

It costs about $40, and German, French, Spanish and Portuguese versions are available in preparation for the European launch. Information is available at http://www.PlayingGods.com. Radford says the gods seem to be smiling anyway — he’s selling about 10 games a day.

Today is Reformation Day, the anniversary of the day in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg in eastern Germany and set off the Protestant Reformation. It is a public holiday in the five eastern German states, in Slovenia and — this year for the first time — in Chile.

Chile? Isn’t that traditionally a Catholic country? Even the Catholic parts of Germany don’t celebrate Reformation Day.

Yes, Chile is traditionally Catholic, but now only about 70% so. Like elsewhere in Latin America, Protestant churches — especially evangelicals and Pentecostals — have spread rapidly in recent decades. They now make up just over 15% of the Chilean population, up from 7% in 1970. It’s not a new story, but creating a holiday especially for Protestants is a symbolic step towards recognising the changes in the religious landscape in Latin America.

The holiday is not officially called Reformation Day but Día Nacional de las Iglesias Evangélicas y Protestantes — National Day of the Evangelical and Protestant Churches. President Michelle Bachelet mentioned the Luther link in a speech (here in Spanish) about the new holiday, which she stressed was a sign of equality of faiths in Chile’s secular state. She also called it a form of recognition of the contribution made by the evangelical churches to national progress in all fields, of their preaching of values that enrich our existence and strengthen the culture of tolerance and respect.”

Do you think if other Latin American countries will follow Santiago’s example? Should they?

Apropos Luther, Der Spiegel has an interesting article in English about how Wittenberg — whose population is only 10% Protestant — may be in for a remake to turn it into “a true Protestant Rome” . This is part of the preparations for the 500th anniversary of Reformation Day in 2017. But Calvin Year (“Calvin09″), the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, is coming up soon and Geneva will certainly play up its claim to that title.

Is Pope Benedict planning a visit to a cradle of Protestantism? Should a Catholic pontiff tour the medieval castle where Martin Luther translated the Bible into German at the start of the Reformation? It’s far too early to get confirmations or denials from the Vatican or the German government, since the visit — still only in the rumor stage — is not due until the spring of 2009. But a local newspaper in the eastern state of Thuringia, where the Wartburg is located, says security planning has already begun.

According to the Erfurt daily Thüringer Allgemeine, an advance team from the German president’s office in Berlin has already met local police. Dieter Althaus, the state premier who invited Benedict to Thuringia during a visit in Rome in April, has also met mayors from towns in the area “to discuss the emergency case of a papal visit. Also in Eisenach, the words ‘pope’ and ‘Wartburg’ are mentioned together more frequently.” An earlier German press report about a possible trip mentioned that Benedict would visit Eichsfeld, a nearby island of Catholicism in an otherwise Lutheran region, so he would be in the neighborhood.

Apart from the security, a visit by any pope to the Wartburg would need careful preparation to ensure it helps rather than hurts Catholic-Protestant relations. If that pope is Joseph Ratzinger, the task becomes even more tricky. Pope Benedict has studied the writings of Martin Luther — he’s probably the only pontiff who ever has — and impressed Lutherans with his knowledge and appreciation of his fellow German theologian. At the same time, he has also been blunt in describing Protestant denominations as “not proper churches.” In fact, he doesn’t refer to them as churches at all, but “ecclesial communities.” Not surprisingly, Protestant leaders feel offended.

Do you think a papal visit to the Wartburg would help or hurt ecumenical relations?

“Do Catholic countries have better football players?”

I was surprised to see this headline on the Austrian Catholic website kath.net today… and even more surprised to see they seemed to mean it seriously.

“A look at the participants in the final round of the European football championship in Switzerland and Austria suggests this,” kath.net writes in a report from Vienna. “In seven of the 16 participating countries, Catholics are clearly in the majority: Poland (95 percent of the population), Spain (92 percent), Italy (90 percent), Portugal (90 percent), Croatia (77 percent), Austria (69 percent ) and France (51 percent). Only one Protestant stronghold confronts them, Sweden. Of the 8.8 million inhabitants of the northern European country, 80 percent are Lutherans.”

There’s no hint of analysis of why this should be relevant, or mention of the personal faith — or lack thereof — of the players on these national teams. This purely statistical view (sports fans love stats, don’t they?) goes on to point out which participating countries have large numbers of both Catholics and Protestants (Germany, Switzerland and Netherlands).

The article notes that only 32 percent of all Czechs call themselves Christians, making the Czech Republic the most “de-churched” participating country, i.e. the country where religion has retreated the most. Even there, though, the Catholics make up the largest group among the believers (26.5 percent of the population). So maybe they still have a chance after all.

No religion story in Europe is complete without a mention of Islam, so the Vienna-datelined article ended up with a comment about Turkey. The Turkish team, by the way, beat Austria’s co-hosts Switzerland 2-1 on Wednesday in Basel and face the “de-churched” Czechs on Sunday in Geneva, aka “the Protestant Rome”.

“The only Muslim-dominated country in the European Championship is Turkey, where 98 percent of the 72 million inhabitants are Muslims. The 120,000 Christians there have a hard time because of much discrimination,” it wrote. “In Europe there are 224.5 million Catholics, 57.8 million Protestants, 39 million Orthodox, 15.7 million Muslims and 1.6 million Jews.”

These statistics appear to be completely irrelevant to Euro 2008. In fact, with the large Catholic majority in Europe that kath.net mentions at the end, it’s almost inevitable that many countries with a Catholic majority will end up in the final rounds every time the championships are held. Can any football fan tell me if there’s something this religion editor is missing?

The Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) has just published a booklet for school teachers urging them not to advocate creationism or intelligent design (ID). That’s “evangelical” as in the German evangelisch (meaning Protestant, mostly Lutheran), and not “evangelical” as it’s more commonly used in the United States. Still, it’s interesting to see that the EKD in Germany, where there are few U.S.-style evangelicals and almost no dispute about the theory of evolution, felt it necessary to issue a 22-page booklet about teaching evolution. It’s called “The Origin of the World, the Theory of Evolution and the Belief in Creation in School” (here in German).

EKD Chairman Bishop Wolfgang Huber (pictured below) writes in the introduction that there is “an intense debate” about these issues but that “it is being conducted in Germany in a different way from, for example, the United States of America. Still, a fundamental clarification is of considerable practical importance.” He doesn’t elaborate.

The daily Die Welt gave a bit more background. “This dispute is increasingly spilling over from the USA to us and has already led to political debates. The Hesse state culture minister (and Protestant synod member) Karin Wolff spoke last year of a “surprising agreement” between evolution and the Bible. With that she sparked a dispute within the Church in which the reasonable faction of the EKD found itself confronted with the growing strength of evangelicals loyal to the Bible. This “orientation aid” should now calm the dispute by setting limits towards both sides.”The “orientation aid,” as the booklet is called, criticises Richard Dawkins and other atheists for thinking science can disprove the existence of God. It compares the books of the “new atheists” to the communist textbooks in East Germany: “The new atheism propagated by Dawkins and others today fits seamlessly into this ideological scheme.”

The booklet has several pages on the relationship between science and religion. Sorry, I can’t translate them all but they boil down to saying that biblically literal creationism is unseriös (”unserious” is a serious put-down in German). ID turns God into a god-of-the-gaps, it adds. So how does the EKD want German schools to deal with creation? Unlike in the U.S., even state schools in Germany have religion classes, separated according to religions and denominations. The EKD says it believes the Biblical story of creation explains the overall purpose of life while science explains the physical details. “God the creator is part of this belief, but not creationism,” the booklet writes. “So Protestant religion class can discuss creationism, but not advocate it.”

The booklet talks positively about “cooperation that connects subjects” (fächerverbindende Kooperation) and says “in principle all classes can deal with both the belief in creation and the theory of evolution.” Religion class is special in that it can advocate a religious view such as God as creator. “But teachers, because of their pedological responsibility and the duty to be evenhanded that goes with their occupation, cannot claim a comparable right for themselves, neither about creationism nor other views, for example atheist ones,” it adds.

Is Martin Luther, the German monk who sparked the Reformation, going to be “rehabilitated” this year by Pope Benedict? Some media say yes, the Vatican says no way. Here is an interesting sequence of events that says a lot about how something can take on a life of its own, regardless of whether it may be totally correct.
0It all appears to have started on March 2, when ApCom, an Italian news agency, ran a three paragraph article, here in Italian , merely saying that the pope and some of his former PhD students (the so-called Ratzinger- Schlerkreis), would discuss Luther during their yearly summer encounter in August at the papal summer villa at Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome.
APcom, said the seminar would discuss whether Luther “wanted a rupture … or intended to reform the Church but without traumas”.
On March 5, two days after the APcom report, the Turin newspaper La Stampa ran a story with the headline “Ratzinger reforms Luther. ‘He had many Catholic ideas. The theologian pope summons his students for a seminar of study on the heretic.”The article, seen here in Italian, quoted Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Council for Promoting Christian Unity, as saying the choice of topics was meant “to favour a climate of encounter with Protestants.”
The day after the article in La Stampa, the Times of London reported that “Pope BenedictXVI is set to rehabilitate Martin Luther, arguing that he did not intend to split Christianity, but only to purge the church of corrupt practices.”
From there, the story took off,was repeatedby some news organisations around the world, was the buzz on the blogs, and even prompted an editorial critical of the pope by the Financial Times, called “Papal Indulgence - Cosmetic changes cannot hide Benedict’s dogmatism”.
The Vatican itself finally weighed in on March 8, when Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s chief spokesman, told the Italian news agency Ansa, that the Financial Times editorial was “totally without foundation because no rehabilitation of Luther is foreseen.” The Ansa story went onto say that the specific theme of this summer’s meeting had not yet been finally decided.
What do you think about how the media covered this and do you think the pope should “rehabilitate” Luther?