THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD Pope tells Germans to put the faith first


Robert Mickens In Freiburg


POPE BENEDICT XVIhas concluded his third papal visit to Germany by firmly rejecting the idea that the Church must make structural reforms in order to survive. “It will be small communities of believers – and these already exist – whose enthusiasm spreads within a pluralistic society and makes others curious to seek the light which gives life in abundance,” he said last Sunday before leaving Freiburg, the last of three cities on his four-day visit. Here in the Black Forest area where


Christianity is still strong, and in the highly “dechristianised” cities of Berlin and Erfurt, which were within Communist East Germany, he challenged Catholics to be fervent in their faith, obedient to the hierarchy and generous in service to others. “I encourage the Church in Germany to pursue with resolute confidence the path of faith which leads people back to their roots, to the heart of the Good News of Christ,” the 84-year-old Pope, who has also made official trips to Cologne and his home region of Bavaria since his election to the papacy in 2005, said in his farewell speech at Lahr Airport. Benedict XVI began his tightly scheduled visit to Germany on 22 September in Berlin, where in less than 24 hours he met the country’s political leaders, gave a major speech to the Bundestag, celebrated a Mass for some 70,000 people in the 1936 Olympic Stadium and held separate bridge-building meetings with Muslims and Jews. Two Catholic statesmen, Federal President


Christian Wulff and Bundestag President Norbert Lammert, told the Pope gently but


firmly they hoped for more openness on issues such as allowing Communion for the divorced and remarried and concrete moves to bring Protestants and Catholics closer together. Pope Benedict won praise for his 20-minute


address to the Bundestag, which was boy- cotted by some 100 members and protested by 20,000 youths in a nearby city square. In the address, he sought to set down “the foun- dations for a free state of law”. The Pope travelled to Erfurt for the second leg of his journey, holding a closed-door meet- ing with Lutherans before speaking at an ecumenical prayer service in the former Catholic church where Martin Luther was originally ordained an Augustinian priest in the sixteenth century. In the private meeting, he said he had always been impressed by the fact that the Protestant reformer spent his entire life pondering how one received God’s grace. “For who is concerned about this today – even among Christians?” the Pope said. The president of Germany’s Lutheran Church council, Dr Nikolaus Schneider, said


Luther was a “hinge” between Catholics and Lutherans and he urged the Pope to “take real steps for reconciliation”. Pope Benedict said it was more important that mainline Christian confessions worked more closely together to counter the challenges posed by secularism and by new forms of Christianity that have “little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content”. At an outdoor Mass on Saturday morning


for Erfurt’s tiny Catholic population, the Pope paid tribute to the Christians in eastern Germany who preserved their faith despite Nazi and Communist attempts to destroy it. “You have had to endure first a brown and then a red dictatorship, which acted on the Christian faith like acid rain,” he said. The night before, he celebrated open-air Vespers at a Marian Shrine in nearby Etzelsbach, a Catholic bastion under Communism. During the final stop of his journey in


Members of the clergy put on rain ponchos as Pope Benedict XVI celebrates Mass at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium. Photo: CNS/Reuters, Morris Mac Matzen


Freiburg, the Pope told reform-minded members of his flock that “the renewal of the Church will only come about through open- ness to conversion and through renewed faith”. At a meeting on Saturday with the governing council of the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZDK), a 150-year-old umbrella organisation of laity associations, he told the lay leaders: “The real crisis facing the Church in the Western world is a crisis of faith.” Later in the evening at an outdoor candlelight prayer vigil, he told 20,000 young Catholics that “damage to the Church comes not from oppo- nents, but from uncommitted Christians”. To read all the Pope’s speeches in Germany


go to www.thetablet.co.uk (See Robert Mickens, page 8; Bundestag address, page 10.)


Reform hopes disappointed, but bishops to address ‘new challenges’


REACTIONS TO the Pope’s visit in the days immediately after his return to Rome were almost evenly split between dismay and enthusiasm, but as time passes disappoint- ment would seem to be outweighing enthusiasm, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt. German Catholics are disappointed that


the Pope made no mention of the ongoing Dialogue Procedure for church reform in Germany but on the contrary demanded absolute loyalty to Rome. The president of the German Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, told journalists in Freiburg that while the visit had been an “important stimulus”, Pope Benedict had also presented German Catholics with a number of chal- lenges. The German bishops would be


discussing these challenges at their autumn session from 4-7 October, he said. Archbishop Zollitsch said that when Pope Benedict had met privately with the German bishops for lunch in Freiburg, in an as yet unpublished address, “he [the Pope] encour- aged us to proceed on the path of renewal”. The Pope had not addressed the concrete problems, Archbishop Zollitsch explained, because he was concerned with the funda- mental question of faith. “When we have resolved this central issue of our faith, he [Pope Benedict] will help us to solve the indi- vidual questions,” the archbishop said. The governor of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, who is a committed Catholic and met Pope Benedict on his visit,


said he was disappointed that the Pope had been so “unwieldy”. “Intra-church criticism is declared disloyal and disobedient far too quickly instead of realising that it is based on concern for the Church’s future”, he said. “We are standing on the half-landing and


will have to strive to remain at this level,” the chairman of the German Protestant Churches, Nikolaus Schneider, offered as a summing up of the ecumenical situation. The governor of Thuringia, Christine Lieberknecht, who met the Pope at Erfurt, told the Thüringer Allgemeine: “I can understand those who expected more and are now disappointed.” Manfred Kock, the former chairman of the German Protestant Churches, said the visit was a “demonstration of Roman centralism”.


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