Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

December 2007— Vol. XIII, no. 12

Dear Friends,

As we approach the end of the year 2007, it is time to send you my very best wishes for a festive season of remembrance, when we celebrate the coming of Our Lord. It is also the end of Volume XIII of this Newsletter. I began this venture on the occasion of my retirement from full-time teaching, expecting that it would provide a stimulating occupation for a few weeks. Instead, we have now completed thirteen years! Because of the rich plethora of publications in the field of contemporary church history, I have never had any lack of material to share with you through these short reviews which have appeared each month. I am of course deeply indebted to those of you who have contributed articles or reviews, or allowed their pieces to be reprinted from other sources. We also owe a great debt of thanks to Randy Bytwerk of Calvin College, who manages the website, to be found at the end of each issue. How long this service can continue I can’t tell, but I hope to be able to provide you with this kind of theological insight as long as possible. I am all the more encouraged to do so by the letters and messages I have received from so many of you, usually with favourable comments on the contents.

You will be interested to know that, at present, this Newsletter goes out to nearly 450 subscribers. Just out of interest I calculated the geographical distribution as follows:

USA – 182; Canada – 96; Britain – 56; Germany – 51; Australia – 22; France – 5; Italy, Denmark and Austria 4 each; Switzerland, South Africa and New Zealand 3 each; Ireland – 2; and Nigeria, Norway, Belgium, Japan, Phillipines, Holland, Finland and Oman – 1 each.

So we have a global outreach which is rather gratifying. And if you have any friends who might like to join us, please send me their names and addresses, both email and postal.

Contents:

1) Franz Jägerstätter –
2) Book review, Mitzscherlich, History of the Diocese of Meissen, Saxony.

1) On October 26th in Linz, Austria, in the presence of his 94 year-old widow, and conducted by leading members of the Austrian Catholic hierarchy, the service of beatification of Franz Jägerstätter was celebrated. One of our members, William Doino, wrote the following description of Jägerstatter for the journal First Things, which is reproduced here (slightly abridged) with thanks.

a) Executed in 1943 for refusing to serve in Hitler’s army, Jägerstätter was once known only to his relatives and neighbors—many of whom considered him mad. Born out of wedlock in 1907 in the tiny village of St. Radegund, his natural father was killed in the Great War. His mother eventually married a farmer named Jägerstätter, who adopted him. A Catholic from birth, Franz didn’t always follow church teaching. Rumor has it that he lived something of a wild life—possibly even fathering an illegitimate child—before reclaiming his faith and marrying.

In 1956, the American sociologist Gordon Zahn, then researching a book in Germany on another subject, came across Jägerstätter’s story. Transfixed, he thought it worthy of a serious biography and visited Austria to write it. After recovering Jägerstätter’s papers and interviewing surviving relatives and friends—including two priests who served as his spiritual counselors—Zahn published In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter (1964).

The book has since been translated into various languages, and it had a significant impact on the Church’s support for conscientious objectors. As the biography reveals, Franz Jägerstätter was the unlikeliest of heroes. He was “a relatively untutored man from a remote and isolated rural village,” writes Zahn. Moreover, he was “a married man with a wife and children for whom he was responsible and whose future welfare he was morally bound to consider.” . . .

After Hitler’s forces annexed Austria, completing the Anschluss, Jägerstätter was the lone voice in his village to oppose it and was appalled by the willingness of many of his countrymen, including high-level prelates, to acquiesce. “I believe there could scarcely be a sadder hour for the true Christian faith in our country,” he wrote, “than this hour when one watches in silence while this error spreads its ever-widening influence.” Commenting on the Austrian plebiscite, which gave approval to the Anschluss, he lamented: “I believe that what took place in the spring of 1938 was not much different from what happened that Holy Thursday 1,900 years ago when the crowd was given a free choice between the innocent Savior and the criminal Barabbas”. . . . .

As the takeover of Austria proceeded, Jägerstätter knew he would be asked to collaborate at some point. In early 1943, it came: He was ordered to appear at the military induction center at Enns, where he declared his intention not to serve. The next day, he was hauled off to a military prison at Linz, to await his fate. “All he knew when he arrived,” writes Zahn, “was that he was subject to summary execution at any moment.”

A parade of people—relatives, friends, spiritual advisers, even his own bishop—pleaded with Jägerstätter to change his mind. Some did not disagree with his anti-Nazi convictions or his moral stance; they simply argued he could not be held guilty in the eyes of God if he offered minimal cooperation under such duress, given the extreme alternative.

Jägerstätter, however, saw things differently. He believed Christians were called precisely to meet the highest possible standards—“be thou perfect,” said Our Lord—even at the cost of one’s life, if fundamental Christian principles were at stake. Serving Germany in a nonmilitary post would simply make it easier for someone else to commit war crimes. He could not participate in the Nazi death machine, even indirectly. He would not be swayed: “Since the death of Christ, almost every century has seen the persecution of Christians; there have always been heroes and martyrs who gave their lives—often in horrible ways—for Christ and their faith. If we hope to reach our goal someday, then we, too, must become heroes of the faith.” Indeed, he added, “the important thing is to fear God more than man.”

After several months of imprisonment in Linz, Jägerstätter was taken to Berlin, where he stood military trial. According to witnesses, Jägerstätter was quite eloquent in his defense, but he was sentenced to death for sedition. On August 9, 1943, Jägerstätter was informed he would be beheaded that day. His last words as he was taken to the gallows were ones of peace, testifying to his faith: “I am completely bound in inner union with the Lord.” The prison chaplain who ministered to him that day later remarked, “I can say with certainty that this simple man is the only saint I have met in my lifetime.”

During his ordeal, many of Jägerstätter’s neighbors considered his act unnecessary and foolish, a sentiment that remained long after his death. Zahn, who interviewed Jägerstätter’s critics, examines all the explanations offered to question Jägerstätter’s sacrifice—that he was selfish, reckless, spiritually vainglorious, or even disturbed—and makes a convincing case that none of them hold.

The most unfair charge is that Jägerstätter put himself above his family. “I have faith that God will still give me a sign if some other course would be better,” he wrote, as he struggled to find a solution to his dilemma. Images of the Passion filled his mind: “Christ, too, prayed on the Mount of Olives that the Heavenly Father might permit the chalice of sorrow to pass from His lips—but we must never forget this part of his prayer: ‘Lord, not my will be done but rather Thine.’” . . .

The letters and statements he made to his wife and family at this time show the anguish his decision brought; he was overwhelmed with the sense that he was abandoning them and feared reprisals against them lay ahead. But Jägerstätter knew that God was watching and would ultimately avenge his elect, and so expressed hope of a reunion yet to come.

Because his country’s establishment did not choose the path of martyrdom, his witness has been contrasted unfavorably to that of the Catholic hierarchy. Jägerstätter, however, was not a critic of the episcopacy, much less the Magisterium. In fact, he was a strong defender of the papacy and cited the authoritative teachings of Rome—particularly the famous anti-Nazi encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (1937)—as a rebuke to the Catholics around him. “Many have not forgotten what the Holy Father said in an encyclical several years ago about National Socialism,” he wrote in 1942, contemplating his line of action, “that it is actually more of a danger than Communism. Since Rome has not to this day rescinded that statement, I believe it cannot possibly be a crime or a sin for a Catholic simply to refuse the present military service even though he knows this will mean certain death.” . . .

Since his cause was set into motion, predictably—and perhaps unavoidably—Jägerstätter has become a kind of political football, both in his home country and outside it. During the Vietnam War, he was invoked by its opponents as the ideal Christian, a prophet whose time had arrived. (Daniel Ellsberg actually said that Jägerstätter’s story influenced his decision to release the Pentagon Papers.)

Similarly, many pacifists have found in Jägerstätter a kindred soul. Zahn himself is a pacifist who refused service during World War II, serving instead in a work camp. Today, Jägerstätter is often cited by those who oppose the Iraq War. . . .

In his Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century, Robert Royal devotes an entire section to Jägerstätter’s martyrdom; and in his influential book on the Catholic just-war tradition, Tranquillitas Ordinis, George Weigel compares Jägerstätter to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. The wide differences among Jägerstätter’s Catholic supporters reveals that he is actually a unifying figure, a Catholic who transcends politics and calls all members of the Church back to Christ.

There is a profound lesson in Franz Jägerstätter’s life and martyrdom. It compels us to be brutally honest with ourselves, teaches us never to bow to the powers of this world, and challenges us to live an authentic Christian life. Among the last words Jägerstätter wrote are these:

Just as the man who thinks only of this world does everything possible to make life here easier and better, so must we, too, who believe in the eternal kingdom, risk everything in order to receive a great reward there. Just as those who believe in National Socialism tell themselves that their struggle is for survival, so must we, too, convince ourselves that our struggle is for the eternal kingdom. But with this difference: We need no rifles or pistols for our battle, but instead, spiritual weapons—and the foremost among these is prayer. . . . Through prayer, we constantly implore new grace from God, since without God’s help and grace it would be impossible for us to preserve the Faith and be true to His commandments. . . . Let us love our enemies, bless those who curse us, pray for those who persecute us. For love will conquer and will endure for all eternity. And happy are they who live and die in God’s love.”

b) One of Europe’s leading church historians, Victor Conzemius, writes from Luzern, as follows

Ein österreichischer Kriegsdienstverweigerer wird selig gesprochen.

Am 26. Oktober wird im Linzer Dom der oberösterreichische Bauer und Kriegsdienstverweigerer Franz Jägerstätter (1907-1943) selig gesprochen. Dass die Feier am österreichischen Nationalfeiertag stattfindet gibt ihr eine besondere Note. Es waren aber nicht die Österreicher, die den am 9. August 1943 im Brandenburger Zuchthaus enthaupteten Jägerstätter als Kultgestalt entdeckten, sondern der amerikanische Soziologe und Pazifist Gordon Zahn. . . . .Sein Opfertod wurde von der Mehrheit der Dorfgemeinschaft nicht verstanden und stiess auch manche Jahre nach dem 2. Weltkrieg auf Unverständnis. Doch dank der Biografie von Gordon Zahn, die in verschiedenen Übersetzungen verbreitet wurde, wurde Jägerstätter zu einer Leitfigur christlichen Pazifismus und über Österreich hinaus bekannt. Er inspirierte die amerikanische Friedensbewegung gegen den Vietnamkrieg und fand gewissermassen über den englischen Sprachraum den Weg zu seiner österreichischen Heimat. Weitere Biografien zu seiner Person entstanden; im Schul-und Religionsunterricht wurde er bald zum Begriff. Axel Corti drehte einen Fernsehfilm, der israelische Regisseur Joshua Sobol schrieb ein Drama. 1997 hob das Berliner Landgericht das Todesurteil gegen ihn auf. Die kirchliche Seite begleitete den wachsenden Kult um den Bauern aus St. Radegund und leitete 1994 in Rom den Seligsprechungsprozess ein. Im August 2006 weihte Bundespräsident Heinz Fischer einen Jägerstätter-Gedenkpark in Braunau – Hitlers Geburtsort- ein. Dass es heute noch Leute gibt, die in dem Kriegsdienstverweigerer einen irregeleiteten religiösen Fanatiker sehen, zeigen die Aufsehen erregenden unrühmlichen Äusserungen eines österreichischen Militärdekans (vgl. NZZ Nr. 189 vom 17.08.2007, S. 5.). Auf ihr Leben mit Franz angesprochen antwortet die heute 95jährige Franziska Jägerstätter in schöner Bescheidenheit: Wir haben einander gestärkt.

2) Birgit Mitzscherlich, Diktatur und Diaspora. Das Bistum Meissen 1932-1951. (Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte. Reihe B: Forschungen, Band 101). Paderborn, Schöningh 2005. 725 pp ISNB 3-506-71799-5

(This review first appeared on H-German on October 18th 2007)

The political division of Germany after 1945 into the rival states of the western Federal republic and the eastern, communist-controlled, German Democratic Republic necessarily affected the German Catholic Church too. This enforced separation led to very different developments on either side of the Iron Curtain. In West Germany, the Catholic Church regained virtually all of its privileges removed by the Nazis, successfully defended the validity of the 1933 Reich Concordat, and enjoyed an estimable place in the social and political life of the half-nation. By contrast, the Catholics in the GDR, like other religious communities, found themselves under a renewed political dictatorship, imposed by the central Marxist government in East Berlin, subjected to continual harassment and even persecution, and constantly spied on by the agents of the notorious ‘Stasi’.

The number of Catholics in East Germany was not large. The diocese of Meissen, which is almost coterminous with the state of Saxony, and includes the cities of Dresden and Leipzig, had only approximately 250,000 Catholics. Meissen derived this position from its mediaeval roots, and still retains the bishop’s seat in the small town of Bautzen. Compared to the much larger dioceses in western and southern Germany, Meissen was considered an outpost in the diaspora of the former Prussia. Nonetheless its comparative history during both the Nazi and Communist dictatorships is an illuminating and instructive chapter. It is all the more fitting because, throughout the period of 1932-1951 chosen for closer study, the diocese was under the leadership of one man., Bishop Petrus Legge. The nineteen stormy years of his episcopate are now thoroughly and excellently analyzed by Ms Mitzscherlich, formerly a doctoral student at Leipzig University, where she studied under Professor Ulrich von Heyl.

This volume appears, like many other previous dissertations, as a part of the renowned Blue Series published by the Catholic Commission for Contemporary History, which was first established in West Germany in 1967. There are now over a hundred similar studies in this series, forming an impressive record of first-class Catholic scholarship. (It would be fair to say that no other country or community can match this achievement). The original aim of the Commission was in part to provide documentary evidence of the Church’s experiences under Nazi rule, and in part to answer those critics who had challenged the hierarchy’s view, adopted immediately in 1945, that the Catholic Church had been a prime victim of Nazi totalitarian onslaughts. This aim was later expanded to cover earlier periods of German Catholic life, and more recently has been extended to the history of Catholicism in the German Democratic Republic. Mitzscherlich’s researches, which would clearly not have been possible during the period of communist rule, can therefore be regarded as a significant product of Germany’s and the Catholic Church’s reunification.

In Mitzscherlich’s view, the Catholics of the Meissen diocese were twice the targeted victims of totalitarian oppression. Their experience was brutal at the hands of the Nazi Gauleiter Mutschmann, one of the more radical of Hitler’s henchmen. So too, Saxony and its people suffered from the fact that the post-1949 communist regime aimed at remaking society along Marxist lines. Her concern is to depict how the Catholic population and its leaders coped with these onslaughts, and to describe in detail the successive waves of state-induced intimidation and indoctrination, At the same time she shows how the experience of Meissen was conditioned by the fact that the Catholics had all along been a minority and considered themselves as living in an isolated diaspora. Approximately half the book is devoted to the Nazi period and half to the post-war developments, and closes with the death of Bishop Legge in 1951. Its length derives from the need to consult the official archives in both west and east Germany, as well as the fortunately well-preserved local church records, and those of the Vatican for the early years. In addition, the author has been able to interview some survivors among the diocesan clergy, and adds this oral history to the record. As such, this is a meticulous and pioneering work.

When Bishop Legge was appointed in 1932, shortly before the Nazis took over power, the diocese of Meissen was a small and relatively poor Catholic outpost in a part of the country known for its strongly socialist, even communist, tendencies. Bishop Legge was a “”pastoral” bishop and resolutely abstained from all political utterances. But the dramatic events of 1933 evoked in Saxony the same ambivalent responses as elsewhere. The initial prohibition of Catholic membership in the Nazi Party was withdrawn by the bishops in March, and in July the signing of the Reich Concordat aroused hopes that the new political order would not only remove for ever the danger of a communist coup, but would lead to a working alliance with the church. In Meissen as elsewhere many churchmen came to believe they could be good Nazis and good Catholics at the same time.

Mitzscherlich’s narrative of events covers virtually all aspects of Catholic public life, but especially those which had political dimensions, such as the press, the schools, the associations or the youth work. Her examination of these different aspects is thorough and obviously based on exhaustive research. So her conclusions are all the more well-founded. She shows that for the first two years the Catholics of Meissen enjoyed a relatively quiet life, which only reinforced their illusions about their new political masters.

The situation changed drastically in 1935 with the arrest of several youth chaplains and leaders. This initiative apparently came from the Gestapo’s new campaign against “political Catholicism”, coupled with the Nazi drive to monopolize all youth work in the hands of Baldur von Schirach, the Hitler Youth leader. At the same time, the Saxon Gauleiter Mutschmann took over the executive control of the provincial government. Matters quickly escalated. A series of edicts against Catholic youth clubs, including prohibitions, was issued during the summer months. And worse followed in October when the Bishop himself, as well as his Vicar-General, was arrested and imprisoned on alleged grounds of smuggling currency out of the country. Even though later acquitted, he had to take a leave of absence from his duties and spent more than a year in exile in west Germany.

Despite this clear evidence of Nazi hostility, the Catholic faithful continued their support of the regime, endorsed the Nazi anticommunist and anti-Semitic propaganda, and welcomed Hitler’s expansionist goals. The bishops were equally timid in failing to protest the persecution of their colleague Legge, were unwilling to mount any form of public protest, and instead merely attempted to uphold the legalities of the Concordat. As for Bishop Legge, the public humiliations of his trial, the lack of confidence demonstrated by his clerical superiors, and the imposition of an unwanted Coadjutor bishop, affected him deeply and had lasting consequences during the remainder of his episcopate.

In these depressing circumstances, the Catholics in Meissen were faced with ever-increasing Nazi depredations. Catholic schools were closed, newspapers and journals censored, building permits refused, festal processions prohibited, and state subsidies curtailed. Catholic officials were constantly walking on a tight-rope. Priests could not fail to note that their church services and sermons were under surveillance. Approximately thirty priests were put on trial for alleged anti-state activities, and eleven (nearly 10% of the diocesan clergy) were sentenced to a concentration camp. where three lost their lives. This atmosphere of intimidation went hand in hand with the belief amongst Catholics that supporting Hitler and his regime would be rewarded by more favourable treatment in the future. Particularly after the outbreak of war, the clergy were at pains to demonstrate their national loyalties and to preach obedience to their flocks.

Passivity, isolation and fear of the consequences led Catholics to concentrate on their internal religious life, as an alternative to the strident Nazi propaganda in their surroundings . Mitzscherlich’s skillful researches in the surviving documentation led readily enough to her view that the Meissen Catholics were victimized. At the same time, however, she found no evidence in the archives of any discussion of other aspects, viz.. the Catholics’ response to the Crystal Night pogroms, to the war-time mass murder of the Jews, to the so-called “euthanasia” program , or to the bestiality of the campaigns of the eastern front. But it was just these areas which demonstrated the Catholics’ failure to oppose the criminal regime which they had for the most part, loyally and vocally supported, or to take more than isolated measures to uphold Catholic and Christian values. How far such matters were spoken about privately in the parishes canot now be reconstructed. But the silence on these subjects in the Catholic records is rather glaring.

In the second half of the book Mitzscherlich pays the same close attention to the fate of the Meissen Catholics under the Soviet occupation and later East Communist dictatorship. She naturally stresses both the continuities and the discontinuities between the two regimes. Again her narrative and analysis of these new circumstances is insightful and exemplary. One of the first significant developments under Soviet rule was the re-establishment of political parties. Shortly after, the Christian Democratic Party was founded, appealing to both Protestants and Catholics. But within a year, and before the official establishment of local governments, it became clear that the Soviet authorities were determined to place power in their hands of their Marxist followers in Germany, many of whom had spent the war in exile in the Soviet Union. In Saxony, the so-called Socialist Unity Party came to dominate. Its leading officials included communist hard-liners who made no secret of their virulent anti-clerical and indeed anti-Christian antipathies. In such circumstances the CDU was quickly reduced to being a mere front party, which served to disguise the basic hostility of the new regime.

In Meissen, Bishop Legge showed no willingness to allow himself to be drawn into any new political troubles. He and his officials sought in vain to regain lost ground in the matter of schools, press publications and youth work. But with the official establishment of the German Democratic Republic in 1949, it was clear that only a repetition of totalitarian repression was to be expected. Which indeed followed. The few priests who had believed it possible to achieve a Christian socialism were soon enough disillusioned by the barrage of stereotyped defamation against the Catholic Church members as the agents of the imperialist west, in the pay of Rome, ex-Nazi sympathizers, or unrepentant warmongers. The 1950s saw a continuous onslaught which differed little from that of the Gestapo. The aim was clear: to achieve a complete separation of church and state, and to assert the ubiquitous political control of the ruling party.

Despite all this, the new regime sought to attract the support of those it called “progressive Catholics” who would demonstrate their anti-fascist credentials by aligning themselves with the goals of the new communist rulers, especially in the creation of a “peace front” against the ”revanchists”. The evidence, as Mitzscherlich tell us, is that such propaganda was virtually everywhere ineffective. Catholics had for too many years been indoctrinated against the errors of Marxism. There was little of the self-deluding wishful thinking they had displayed under the Nazis. And the outspoken opposition of both the Vatican and their West German colleagues to any such compromises or concessions prevented the emergence of any group of Catholic “fellow-travelers”.

With the growing tensions of the Cold War and the unremitting ideological campaigns of the SED party, the pressures increased on the Catholic church to conform with suitable messages of support for the communist aims. Any refusal was naturally seen as a sign of the “reactionary and state-hostile” attitudes of the clergy, a few of whom suffered imprisonment as a result. So discretion led to an almost complete silence on political matters. At this point, it would have been helpful if Mitzscherlich had made some comparisons with the parallel experiences of the Evangelical Church, though this might well have led to an unmanageable expansion of her text.

Bishop Legge’s final years were ones of great disappointment. His hopes of recovering from the Nazi depredations were increasingly frustrated by the deliberate plans of the new Saxon authorities to impose their own totalitarian monopoly over all aspects of communal life. The result was once again to force the church to withdraw into its liturgical sanctuary and to concentrate on inner spiritual tasks. The Catholic community became an island of ideological nonconformity. This stance was to be maintained throughout the forty years of the GDR’s existence, and as such enabled the church to emerge in 1990 relatively uncompromised. This retreat was only strengthened by Legge’s unwillingness to associate himself with colleagues beyond the diocese’s borders. He only once attended the national bishops’ conference in Fulda, which may be seen as a sign of his continuing frustration. He died early in 1951 as the result of a car accident.

No one familiar with the events of the German Church Struggle, or the vast historiography which has since been written, can fail to admire Mitzscherlich’s praiseworthy industry. This is a story which will not need to be told again. Mitzscherlich is to be congratulated in her fine analysis of the developments in an undistinguished minority diocese and on the even less than striking leadership of its bishop. It can only be regretted that similarly insightful studies of other larger and more significant dioceses are still to be written. Yet she is quite right in seeing this as another chapter in the long history of struggle in Germany between the religious milieu and in this case two variants of political power. Avoiding any hagiographical overtones, the author presents her material more as an omen for the future. As such we can be grateful for her diligent research and perceptive analysis.

Appended are some useful statistics relating to the Catholics in Saxony; biographical notes on the personalities mentioned; and a full bibliography and index.

JSC

3) Call for Papers:

The Canadian Catholic Historical Association will be holding its annual meeting for 2008 at the University of British Columbia from May 31st – June 8th, as part of the Annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation.

The general theme of the Congress is “Thinking Beyond Borders’

Proposals are invited for scholarly papers on Canadian Catholic history, or on any aspect of Catholicism in Canada. These should be sent with a 250 word summary and a one-page c.v. before January 31st 2008 to the President and Program Chair, Dr Heidi MacDonald of the University of Lethbridge, Alberta = heidi.macdonald@uleth.ca

Wishing you all a very merry Christmas, and God’s blessings on all your endeavours,

John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

November 2007— Vol. XIII, no. 11

Dear Friends,

This month is the month for remembrance. On November 5th, we are pleased to remember Guy Fawkes, the seventeenth century’s notorious “terrorist”. He became the centrepiece of England’s most vicious outburst of deliberately organized Protestant bigotry. Church and state combined to ensure that his treason was remembered by having his effigy burnt every year on innumerable bonfires – a tradition which still continues four hundred and two years later. So it is perhaps fitting that I send you two reviews from the recent history of the Anglican Church, both of which I believe have a more positive message to convey for the present. But I also add a short piece reviewing an article by a young German scholar which exemplifies the contradictions in much of the history of the German churches during the traumatic Nazi years.

Do please feel free to send me your comments – to my home address – jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Please do NOT press the reply button above, as this will then bring your views to the total membership on my list

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) John Allen, Rabble-Rouser for Peace: Desmond Tutu

b) Andrew Chandler, The Church of Engand Commissioners

2) Journal article: H. J .Buss, An Evangelical Martyr: K.F.Stillbrink

1a) John Allen, Rabble-Rouser for Peace. The authorized biography of Desmond Tutu New York, London: Free Press 2006. 481 pp. ISBN 13 978-0-7432-6937-7

South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s was blessed with two outstanding leaders of world renown, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Mandela’s political achievements in bringing about the overthrow of the apartheid system and his election as the nation’s first black president have been well described in numerous biographies. Recently he was honoured by having his statue erected in London’s Parliament Square. Desmond Tutu’s achievements are less spectacular and belong more fittingly in the category of being inspirational or even “spiritual”. His biography by John Allen is therefore most valuable in letting us see how he succeeded in gaining this kind of international fame, which many consider puts him in a similar class to Martin Luther King or even Mahatma Gandhi.

The dangers of such authorized biographies are obvious. They can so easily become sanctimonious or over laudatory. But John Allen is one of South Africa’s most experienced journalists who has worked with Tutu for forty years, and was latterly director of communications for Tutu’s most notable sphere of activity, the famous Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He is therefore careful not to become unbalanced or one-sided in his presentation and skillfully interweaves quotations from Tutu’s critics or opponents, which allow his readers to judge for themselves.

In addition Allen has done extensive archival research, even obtaining material from the former regime’s security services. His acquaintance with the literature on South Africa’s recent history is exemplary, and his writing style is authoritative and convincing. He thus updates the previous excellent biography by Shirley Du Boulay written twenty years ago.

The picture Allen draws is complex. Tutu is shown to have been throughout his life – and is still – caught in an on-going state of tension between his career as a pastor and his calling as a prophet – both spent on the intrinsically dangerous fault-line between religion and politics. His success has lain in his ability to steer a careful course between being dismissed on the one hand as a religious zealot or idealistic dreamer, or on the other as a political schemer or even “terrorist” who deserved to be locked up. His opponents, as quoted by Allen, continually tried to vilify and entrap him – there is even talk of a possible assassination – but failed to do so. In part, this was because of the widespread popular support he consistently enjoyed, not just from his African followers with whom he shared their anguish over the oppressive evils of the apartheid regime, but also from the international community, especially in the Christian churches.

Tutu’s father was a teacher, and Desmond followed in his footsteps, until the South African government imposed new restrictions on Bantu education. He then turned to the Anglican Church, where he was sponsored by members of the British-based Community of the Resurrection in Johannesburg. Their ministry in the slum parishes of Sophiatown gave them a clear insight into the plight of the African urban poor. But their white skins and paternalist manners inevitably separated them from the aspirations for political freedom, increasingly being voiced by Africans. It was Tutu’s success that he combined the priestly caring habits of the Community’s leaders, especially Trevor Huddleston, with a passionate engagement with African sufferings and protest.

Shortly after Tutu’s ordination, the Community arranged for him to spend three years at King’s College, London for further theological education. They recognized his gifts as a potential African theologian – a virtually non-existent quality. In England, he was a great success. His personality expanded in an atmosphere of freedom where he and his wife Leah could walk everywhere and be respected as individuals. In addition his irrepressible sense of humour made him the life and soul of the party. He learnt how to gain and hold the sympathy of white audiences with his appeal to their consciences and his vivid evocation of African sufferings. He established good contacts in English society which were to serve him in good stead.

On his return to South Africa in 1967 he was briefly attached to the Anglican theological seminary for black students. This too was subject to the oppressive restrictions of the apartheid government. Tutu was soon personally confronted with the intimidating tactics of the police. It was here, Allen suggests, that Tutu recognized the need to transform his burning sense of injustice into a creative ministry to the victims of violence. But his next posting from 1972-75 was as vice-director of the World Council of Churches’ Theological Education Fund, based in London. Here he gained a most significant overview of the needs of the whole African continent, and in particular of the need to develop an African theology of liberation which would be authentic. Political freedom, already achieved in many parts of the continent, had to be matched by cultural change which would reflect a true emancipation from European models. He resolutely opposed the view of some missionaries that Africans had first to become westerners before they could become Christians.

But Tutu’s energies were never fully devoted to exploring this new theological frontier. He remained attached to the traditional formsof language and piety, especially in the Anglican church. In part, this enabled him to relate so well to his white South African, European and North American supporters.

In 1975 Tutu was elected to be the first African Dean of Johannesburg, but only a year later was chosen to be Bishop of Lesotho, in the nearby black-ruled mountainous and poverty-stricken enclave. Two years later he returned to the more strategic post as executive director of the South African Council of Churches, again based in Johannesburg, which gave him a highly visible platform both nationally and internationally. Here he used his oratorical skills in addressing both black and white audiences, and became one of the best known advocates of the World Council of Churches’ plea for solidarity with the world’s poor and marginalized as “the voice of the voiceless”.

In so doing, he circumspectly steered through the dangerous waters of political controversy. He knew full well the risks he ran in alienating not only the government by his outspoken attacks on the state’s injustices, but also the militant blacks, no longer ready to listen to a message of peace. It was a daunting challenge to uphold the Christian hope of liberation not only for the oppressed but also for the oppressors. Confrontation had to be matched with dialogue in the hope of gaining some alleviation from a rigidly biased government.

This balancing act was enormously helped by Tutu’s being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1984. Allen suggests that the Norwegian selection committee was strongly influenced by the need to widen its horizons and to show its regard for campaigners for human rights as an integral part of the peace process. After the awful riots in Soweto and the repressive responses of the government, South Africa seemed to be the right place, despite the limited impact of the award being given to another black activist, Albert Luthuli two decades earlier. But there were several candidates for this honour. In Allen’s view, Tutu was chosen as the man whose political reputation was the least controversial. But certainly, as the Committee later acknowledged, their hope was that this presentation would help in the process of obtaining political change in South Africa.

The Nobel Prize gave Tutu a world fame, which he was soon to exploit. His growing prominence produced a sharply polarized reaction. His supporters around the world loved and admired him for his inspirational leadership. White supremacists regarded him as a dangerously turbulent priest, and even threatened him with death. But he himself increasingly saw himself as a reconciler, seeking the goal of racial harmony. Yet he could also appear in contradictory guises. “One week he makes a speech of Christian love and the next week he makes a speech which sends a shiver down the spines of white Christians”. Or as another witness recalled: “One minute he seems to be whipping up a riot. The next minute he has stopped it cold. And then he has his audience laughing”. Hence the somewhat ambivalent title of this book, which might seem to cast doubt on whether peace is best served by the kind of rabble-rousing at which Tutu excelled.

There can be no doubt that Tutu was genuinely outraged by the inflexible and discriminatory policies of the government. His speeches during the 1980s took on a note of angry defiance. But he stopped short of openly advocating violence, even at the risk of being dismissed as irrelevant. The courage needed to adopt such a precarious stance is well attested by his biographer. He relied extensively on his intuition, or, as he believed, the call of God. Yet he could also be willful and obstinate, much to the distress of those who had to work with him. But many of these faults could be ascribed to his innate anger against the oppressive system under which he lived.
It is still too early to say how much Tutu’s influence can be credited in bringing about the downfall of white supremacy rule in South Africa, or more particularly the prevention of bloodshed in the process. Certainly his commitment to inter-racial reconciliation became more pronounced as his responsibilities grew. His short tenure as Bishop of Johannesburg was followed by a decade as Archbishop of Cape Town. In both spheres he was much engaged in his pastoral role of seeking peaceful change as well as presenting South Africa’s case to sympathetic audiences abroad, especially in the United States. Allen gives a full description of Tutu’s largely unsuccessful attempts to persuade the U.S. government, particularly under Ronald Reagan, to impose punitive economic sanctions on South Africa. But among the more liberal sections of the community he was wildly popular Allen also pays tribute to Tutu’s solidarity with the blackvictims of violence by attending and speaking at innumerable funerals. He was appalled by the thought that South Africa might be engulfed in flames, and sought to moderate counsels of extremism. He remained a pastor whose humility, dedication and commitment was placed in the service of those suffering on the front line of injustice. His emphasis on the need for discipline in a non-violent struggle was remarkable. His ability to maintain such a stance, despite all the frustrations anad apparent lack of success, has to be seen as one of his main achievements.

The other notable achievement was his success in chairing the post-liberation Truth and Reconciliation Commission. His contribution was to lend his undoubted reputation to what might have been a highly divisive policy, or turned into a vindictive witch hunt. But Tutu managed to bring about a constructive atmosphere of reconciliation through amnesty of the wrong-doers, both black and white, and through forgiveness by those wronged. This was for Tutu a gospel imperative. He singled out witnesses who embraced forgiveness, and made their stories his leitmotif. Even if the chief politicians of white South Africa could not be brought to acknowledge how misguided their policies had been, the whole process can be judged to have had a salubrious, even redemptive effect. It has established a model which the world may well want to adopt elsewhere.

Following his retirement, Tutu wanted more time for meditation and prayer. But there were rival attractions, such as the innumerable invitations to speak, which were also lucrative. He enjoyed the limelight, the first-class air travel and the publicity his appearances evoked. But he also welcomed the opportunity to protest against injustice, or to expound the gospel in its contemporary, often political, setting. Allen entitles his final chapter: “The International Icon”, which aptly summarizes Tutu’s status in recent years. As the most prominent exponent of the power of moral leadership, Tutu embodies a Christian faith which is both active and yet “spiritual”. His vision of reconciliation which can heal society’s wounds and his embodiment of an African model for human community living in peace will surely be regarded as a legacy of great significance.

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1b) Andrew Chandler, The Church of England in the Twentieth Century: The Church Commissioners and the politics of reform, 1948-1998, Woodbridge. U.K.: Boydell Press 2006, xii + 542 pp. ISBN 978-1-84383-1655.

The Church of England is a venerable institution. Over the centuries it has garnered a treasury of riches, both spiritual and material. Andrew Chandler’s concern is with the latter, or more specifically with the management of the central funds held by the church during the latter half of the twentieth century. In 1948, the gifts of earlier benefactors and grants from Parliament, made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were amalgamated and placed under the jurisdiction of a body known as the Church Commissioners. Their responsibilities were wide, even awesome. Their mandate was to provide support for the cure of souls in the Church of England. This was interpreted as the use of the proceeds of their endowments to support the clergy and make their ministry more effective. Chandler’s achievement is to chronicle the next fifty years of the Commissioners’ activities, on the basis of full access to the voluminous papers this bureaucracy created. The story is complex, at times dramatic, and full of intriguing surprises. Chandler’s style is incisive. His judgments are eminently fair. And he manages to keep his balance and not be overwhelmed by the amount of detail. This is not a book for beginners. A knowledge of the Church of England’s structures is required. But the book’s length is justified, not merely because the story has not been told before, but because the complexity and the interwovenness of the structures, both of church and state, need sufficient space to be understood.

In the aftermath of the Second World War and the Great Depression, all sections of English society needed a fresh start. The Church of England had its established place in society. It had a representative of the church in nearly every village – though many of them were pitifully paid. It had thousands of ancient churches – no fewer than 8000 dating from the later Middle Ages – most of which needed repair and upkeep. It had 43 dioceses across the face of England, each with its own bishop and cathedral – often scenically beautiful but also nearly bankrupt. The Church Commissioners were the only group which had an independent source of funds, and a bureaucracy based in London. Its leaders were drawn from the civil service, and their mindset was administratively bureaucratic. So they set to work.

Their authority derived from a Board, over ninety strong, on which were represented all sections of the church, also officials from the government, the ancient universities and sundry other interests. It was chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. Luckily for this fledgling experiment, the then Archbishop Fisher took a keen interest, was easily available, recognized the issues and encouraged the bureaucrats. Chandler obviously disagrees with those critics who were to denigrate Fisher for his “dull schoolmasterly” style and his lack of ecumenical vision. But in practical terms he was the right man.

The church after the war faced horrendous problems, all of which would cost money. The resources from past centuries had been carefully hoarded, but the Commissioners’ staff recognized from the first that more was required. They embraced the post-war climate of expansion, made shrewd investments in thriving companies and housing estates, sold off marginal and agricultural properties, and sought to become the model of capitalist enterprise – all for the benefit of the clergy and their dependents. But there were limits. The Board of Governors prohibited certain categories of firms, such as armament manufacturers, or the makers of alcohol and tobacco. Even if profitable, these would not be approved of. Their Assets Committee was composed of experienced financial experts, many of whom also sat in the Church Assembly, later the General Synod. All were convinced that modernization was the way to improve the lot of the poorer clergy, whose penury had been a scandal for generations. As a national body they sought to implement schemes for equalization of the clergy’s stipends, and particularly to help the poorer dioceses to make step by step improvements.

In earlier years, many parishes had been supported by lay patrons – usually local aristocrats – who paid the vicar’s salary and maintained the vicarage. But with the post-war economic changes, the increased mobility of the population, the rapid growth of new towns and the needs of the urban populations, such a system would no longer work. At the same time, the laity in the past had rarely been motivated to contribute themselves. The Church of England had pockets of wealth, to be sure, but this didn’t trickle down to those who needed it most. The Commissioners saw their duty in reforming the system for the benefit of those at the bottom. In four decades they were to be remarkably successful. Their income rose more rapidly than the often precipitous rate of inflation, so that they could keep pace with the frequent demands of their beneficiaries. Their expertise came to be seen as beyond criticism, and their confident pride in their own achievements was undoubted.

But as their financial gains grew, so did expectations. Chandler gives a perceptive picture of how their horizons expanded, to include the repair of dilapidated vicarages and the care of redundant churches. On the personnel side, they saw the justice of including part-time clergy and non-ordained church workers. Above all, they were persuaded that they should contribute to a much more generous pension scheme, nationally funded and covering widows and dependents. These projects involved vast, often incalculable commitments. But with their portfolio’s value rising rapidly, and with rents and dividends flowing in, the managers were confident the targets could be met. Their achievements and style of operation were practical and mundane. While theologians might paint images of the Christian church in rich colours and poetic eloquence, the Church Commissioners’ preoccupation with the ongoing realities of money and bricks and mortar demanded a less exciting vocabulary. Chandler’s success is that he describes these unspectacular but necessary facets of the Church’s life with clarity, and conveys to the reader the sense of successes achieved.

But they were not allowed to boast. The Church of England’s leaders felt the ambivalence of an ever-more wealthy church, even if the resources were humanely spent. Such worldliness seemed to contradict the Church’s spiritual calling. And in part this reticence was responsible for the absence of any effective scrutiny of what the Commissioners, or more specifically its Assets Committee, were doing. Chandler lays some of the blame for the lack of interest in such matters on the shoulders of the later Archbishops, particularly Ramsay and Runcie, whose godly leadership was more directed to the devotional and missionary tasks confronting the Church, But the Synod was also at fault. Its preoccupation with the affairs of the Commissioners was more political than financial. Contention over their investment policies in countries with despotic regimes, such as South Africa, generated a great deal of heated debate. Simplistic and sweeping remedies were often proposed without fully realizing the consequences. But how to sort out the ethical issues in the complex and interlocking world of international banking was not easy. And satisfaction was rarely gained, or consciences eased by the results.

During the 1970s the economic climate improved. The Assets Committee now began to look for more ambitious schemes. They were already one of the largest institutional investors and major landowners in the country. They now drew up plans to advance considerable amounts of their capital to undertake large-scale developments, such as office blocks, shopping malls and entertainment complexes, including several in the United States, whose future looked so promising. And if investment cash was short, they were ready to borrow it from the banks to seize the opportunities offered. These were speculative tactics, but at first they succeeded. In Chandler’s view, the managers became over confident in their own abilities, and had no one to warn them of the potential dangers. They were not dishonest, but were misled by their over-optimistic partners, particularly in the United States. In the mid-1980s too many of these ventures fell apart as the economy went into recession.

The last quarter of the book takes on a much more dramatic tone. Chandler portrays the agonizing dilemmas of the church authorities. For the first time in decades, their commitments outstripped their resources. The value of their portfolio took a staggering nose-dive, as did the income derived from it. There were loud screams of outrage that the Church should have “lostä so much of its inheritance. It was not enough for the bureaucrats to argue that this was only a temporary setback, and that recovery would eventually happen. In the meanwhile, the pensioners had to be supported, the clergy’s incomes sustained and the whole apparatus re-examined. Alarm bells rang in the Church’s General Synod, and even in the House of Commons, where some percipient members knew enough to ask penetrating questions about the Commissioners’ investment strategies. The feeling mounted that for too long the Commissioners had been a secretive bureaucratic body making major decisions on their own. Reform was called for.

This was only one part of a wider assessment of where the Church of England stood. It was undeniable that its membership had declined, its position in society had weakened, its faithful attachment to historic traditions was no longer as accepted by the general population. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Carey, was a resolute Evangelical, but even his example could hardly settle the question of the Church’s future. Internally there was much dissension, even turmoil. What should the priorities be? Each diocese had its own opinion, each affected group its own remedy. As Chandler rightly points out, it was debatable whether all this discussion achieved anything fundamental beyond the generation of piles of new papers and an increasingly oppressive quality of self-absorption. It did not get the Church Commissioners out of their old binds.

The Archbishops established a new Commission to review the whole situation. It sought to clear the Church’s decision-making bodies of ambiguity and confusion, principally by amalgamating them under a new Archbishops’ Council. As for the Commissioners, their functions would be cut down, their authority transformed and their assets subjected to a powerful Audit Committee. Not surprisingly these suggestions gave rise to a “cacophony of debate”.

This all took time to sort out, despite the pressure for speedy action. Not until 1998 did Parliament approve what the General Synod had passed, namely the establishment of the Archbishops’ Council as part of the National Institutions Measure of 1998. Its responsibilities included the allocation and distribution of the Commissioners’ revenues, but still gave priority to the care of souls in parishes where such assistance was most required.

It is still too early to say how this new arrangement will work. But Chandler’s masterly account of the fifty years of the Church Commissioners pays tribute to their successes as well as acknowledging their shortcomings. His assessments are eminently fair, all the more because he recognizes that the historian’s duty is not to become overwhelmed by the weight of archival records. This study will certainly stand the test of time. It will not need to be done again. The clarity of Chandler’s descriptions, and the generosity of his sentiments are significant contributions to the book’s merits. Above all, he makes the intricacies of the Church of England’s internal affairs available to the wider audience. This is no small feat, and it is one for which we can be most grateful.

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2) Hansjörg Buss, Ein Märtyrer des Evangelische Kirche. Anmerkungen zu dem Lübecker Pastor Karl Friedrich Stellbrink. In Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, Vol. 55, no 7/8, July/August 2007, pp. 624-644.

Martyrs are usually defined as those who have been put to death by wicked men or oppressive rulers as witnesses to their faith in Jesus Christ. In the early church, the fate of these men and women at the hands of the Roman or pagan authorities was recognized as exemplary sacrifices whose blood built up the church. So too, in later centuries, Protestant martyrs were found amongst those who perished at the stake after proclaiming their confidence in God’s mercy. But in more recent times, this concept of martyrdom has been questioned. Is a public confession of faith at the moment of death mandatory? Or is it enough that the martyr should have lived a dedicated life in the service of the Church? Is the nature of the so-called crime for which he or she was executed by orders of the state a relevant factor?

Such were the questions raised in the 1990s when the decision was taken by the authorities of Westminster Abbey in London to commemorate ten Christian martyrs of the twentieth century with sculptures placed on the Abbey’s west portico. Amongst them was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the only Protestant German to be so honoured. But few of those who today visit this memorial could know that Bonhoeffer’s reputation was, for many years, a matter of dispute. At the time of his death, and for at least thirty years, he was seen by many Germans, including prominent members of his own Evangelical Church, not as a Christian martyr, but as a political traitor. His association with the organizers of the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, his imprisonment and subsequent execution in April 1945, were regarded as evidence of his disloyalty to the nation and its leader. His punishment was therefore deserved. Attempts to vindicate his conduct, and to elevate him to martyr status were therefore wrong-headed. The majority of the church conservatives could not understand, let alone condone, such treachery from one of their clergy. Only in more recent years has this pejorative verdict been revised, and Bonhoeffer’s status been fully rehabilitated both at home and in the ecumenical community.

But there is another case which is still more troublesome. Hansjörg Buss has written a masterly article about the fate of Karl Friedrich Stillbrink, who was a pastor of the Lübeck Evangelical Church. He has the unique distinction of being the one and only Evangelical Church pastor in the Nazi era to be arraigned before the Volksgerichtshof (the People’s Court), the Nazi agency notorious for its fanaticism and brutality, convicted of treason and sentenced to be executed under the guillotine. He was accused of engaging in “seditious acts undermining the military forces, linked with treacherous behaviour towards the nation through encouragement of the enemy by listening to forbidden radio broadcasts” (Zersetzung der Wehrkraft in Verbindung mit landesverrätischer Feindbegünstigung und Rundfunkverbrechen). The Gestapo’s case was straightforward. In April 1942 Lübeck was heavily bombed. On the following Palm Sunday Stillbrink had declared in a sermon that this was a divine punishment for the sins of Lübeck, its people and its government. He was denounced to the Gestapo by a member of the congregation, and shortly afterwards was taken into custody, never to return. His trial, in June 1943, was held together with three Roman Catholic chaplains, also from Lübeck, who were accused of similar crimes. All four were sentenced to death and executed six months later in Hamburg. Stillbrink left behind a sick wife and three children.

As could be expected, Stillbrink’s execution was an embarrassment to his clerical colleagues. The majority of the Lübeck pastors belonged to the “German Christians”, and were fervent supporters of the Nazi regime. They were predictably shocked by Stillbrink’s behaviour, and regarded his punishment as deserved. Public figures such as the clergy were expected to uphold the national cause, especially in war-time. If anyone deliberately engaged in forbidden activities such as listening to enemy radio broadcasts, and spread these defeatist views around, they could expect little sympathy. In addition Stillbrink had already isolated himself from most of his colleagues amongst the pastorate. His reputation was that of a brusque and uncooperative loner, consumed with the importance of his own ideas. His previous history was complex and idiosyncratic. He had been appointed to a German-speaking parish in Brazil, but returned to Germany in 1933 convinced that the Nazi takeover was a blessing from God. However, he soon became disillusioned and was to make no secret of his hostile attitude. He had never shown any sympathy for the Confessing Church, and later began to argue in favour of the “German Church movement” which advocated a “blood and soil” theology and sought to purge all non-German elements from the church, especially the Jews. He was known to hold strongly antisemitic views. And finally he had never hidden his vocal opposition to the Nazis’ aggressive conduct of the war. In short, his opinions, both theological and political, veered from one extreme to another. At every twist he defended his views with incorrigible dogmatism. He was indeed an odd man out. There could be therefore no expression of support for such a character.

In May 1945 the church situation in Lübeck altered radically. The surviving members of the Confessing Church immediately took over control, and ejected a quarter of the clergy on the grounds of their Nazi sympathies. But what to do about Stillbrink? While the Catholic authorities in the city made large-scale plans for the commemoration of these victims of Nazi injustice, the Protestants were in a virtually insoluble quandary. Stillbrink’s heretical and disloyal behaviour had made him a most unsuitable person to be commemorated for the sacrifice of his life. Was he a martyr? Even now, sixty years later, the Church in Lübeck, now incorporated into the North Elbian Church, has its doubts. Public commemoration is largely left up to the Catholics, while Stillbrink is remembered only as one who gave up his life for the truth as he saw it.

In the wider German public, let alone in the ecumenical fraternity abroad, it is safe to say that no one has ever heard of Karl Friedrich Stillbrink. Buss’ contribution is therefore a valuable addition to the rounding out of local church histories and filling in previously ignored gaps.

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Every best wish
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

October is the month when Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving. Although this is now a secular holiday, it obviously looks back to the earlier religious services of gratitude which the first European settlers held, and also to the traditions of Harvest Festivals which acknowledged God’s bounty and loving kindness. In Vancouver we have had a magnificent September, so we too have every inducement to be unfeigned thankful for all the blessings we have received. I trust that many of you also may feel the same at this time of the year, and send my greetings to all five hundred of you, scattered across the globe from Poland to Australia. I am always glad to hear from you if you care to write, but please only to my private address: Jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) Coupland, British Churches and European Integration

b) Schidtmann, German Catholic Students post-1945

c) Snape, God and the British Soldier

1a) Philip M. Coupland, Britannia, Europa and Christendom: British Christians and European Integration. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan 2006. ix + 284 pp. ISBN 1-4039-3912-8.

The contribution made by the Christian churches of Europe to the evolution of what has now become the European Union is little known. So Philip Coupland’s comprehensive and illuminating account of the role of the British churches, and especially of their leaders, in these developments over the past sixty years is a welcome addition to our knowledge. Little in their past had fitted these churchmen to be interested in the niceties of political structures or organizations, or to embrace ideas of European integration. Public and private morality not political science was their concern. The Protestant churches, created four centuries ago by individual rulers, had become established parts of their respective nations, providing religious validation for each state’s national identity. The Orthodox churches, at least until 1917, followed the same course. Only the Catholics could claim to belong to a supranational institution, but their image was heavily influenced by a nostalgia for the mediaeval past, when all of Europe belonged to Christendom, and owed allegiance to the Pope.

The traumatic and violent events of the early twentieth century, however, challenged European church leaders to reexamine their traditional loyalties. The catastrophes inflicted by two major wars were seen to be the result of unbridled national rivalries, heightened by political and totalitarian extremism. With the failure of the first attempts to solve these problems in the League of Nations, churchmen were obliged to recognize that they needed to think more deeply and `carefully about the problems of power, the nature of the nation state, and the role of the churches as the guardians of public morality. If the preservation of peace demanded an abandonment of traditional nation states, and their attendant ideological support systems, what should replace them? Should the reconstruction of Europe lead to new political structures rising above the existing national borders, and if so, what were the moral and ideological implications?

Philip Coupland provides us with a masterly description of the often intense debates conducted in Britain ever since 1939 on the subject of the future of Europe. These issues were an integral part of the planning for the post-war era. It was notable that leading churchmen, such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, Bishop George Bell of Chichester, and the ecumenical strategist William Paton, joined in these debates with academics and politicians. They were convinced that the international anarchy they were living through could be attributed to the misalignment of political power and moral authority. The churches too needed to overcome their internal cleavages which had added to national animosities. What was now required was a reborn Christendom in a reborn Europe.

The leadership given by these churchmen assured that their contributions were taken seriously and that the voice of the churches has continued to play a small but significant part in the on-going deliberations and planning for the integration of Europe. Coupland’s research into the intricacies of the various schemes adumbrated in the immediate post-war years makes clear that the churches’ moral impetus was an important factor. The church leaders learnt from their experiences after 1919 that naive idealism and wishful thinking were not enough. They needed to face the issues of power seriously and precisely. And on this basis they were often listened to. For their part the politicians also began to realize the advantages of having the moral backing of the churches. As the Cold War began, so the value of the Christian churches’ ideological support was recognized by all.

In 1945 Britain faced a variety of political choices. She could seek to uphold and rebuild her status as a world power either in association with a reborn Europe; or by recasting, on some new co-operative basis, the existing structures of her Empire and Commonwealth; or she could place her future alongside the growing power of the United States in some new Atlantic arrangement. Each alternative had its advantages and more pertinently its bloc of followers among the British electorate. The churches were equally divided, and so called on their leaders to provide guidance and expertise. The result was a period of vigorous and lively debates. The factors of history and tradition had to be weighed against the pragmatic necessities of a now much impoverished economy. By the end of 1947, however, the early hopes were to be disappointed for a co-operative relationship with the Soviet Union in rebuilding a democratic Europe, and thus maintaining peace in a disarmed continent. Instead, the menace of Soviet aggression limited the options and swung the balance to supporting western Europe as a Christian alternative to Marxist totalitarianism. The British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, himself called for “a spiritual union of the west” and saw the churches as indispensable partners in propping up an anti-Communist front.

The British churches had not yet achieved a sufficient degree of ecumenical harmony to speak with one voice, let alone to agree on practical details for any integrative ideas of European unity. But the politicians were equally divided. Churchill spoke warmly about European unity but made it clear that Britain was not to be included. Britain’s destiny lay elsewhere. What form of unity the continental Europeans would choose was their affair. Britons would watch from the sidelines.

For its part, the newly-created World Council of Churches, based in Geneva but heavily staffed by British churchmen, was also involved. While opposed to totalitarianism, the WCC sought to avoid becoming the religious auxiliary of any western crusade against communism. At its first Assembly in 1948, even though the participants were mainly European survivors of German nationalism and its evils, the WCC did not support any practical plans for European political integration but concentrated on the need to avoid any nuclear Armageddon.

These debates threw up the issue of whether Christianity was to be seen as the cement of the new post-war Europe, as it had been of the old. Churchmen naturally held the view that the moral force of the Christian tradition should be seen as a paramount factor, even a prerequisite for any rebuilt structure. On the other hand, such arguments met with vigorous opposition from anti-Christian secularists, in whose eyes the churches had played a sinister role in the past, especially in support of such regimes as those of Hitler and Mussolini. In their definition of the continent’s future, only a non-religious pragmatism was necessary. The ownership of the idea of Europe between these two groups was to become a potent source of friction, which has continued unresolved until the present.

The dramatic political events at the end of the 1940s, with the Communist seizure of Czechoslovakia, the institution of the Berlin blockade, the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and even the outbreak of the Korean War – all served to hasten developments. Paradoxically however, British opinion about European Union became even more divided. Whereas the churches could unite in supporting the spiritual but vaguely-defined dimensions of the movement, there was little or no agreement on practical matters, especially on the extent of British involvement. By contrast, the initiative for unity was surprisingly seized by the Europeans themselves, particularly the French and Germans, who led the way by starting with small but significant steps of economic co-operation. The leading advocates were Catholics such as Robert Schumann, Jean Monnet and Konrad Adenauer, but the impetus was explicitly pragmatic not ideological.

The result was that in Britain the relationship became deeply ambiguous, almost schizophrenic in its varying moods of enthusiasm and engagement, disenchantment and retreat. Ultimately, however, the disinclination by both the Conservative and Labour Parties to be drawn into any European commitments which might compromise wider British interests blocked any more positive steps. As one commentator noted at the end of 1951: “Individuals from Britain have done much to advocate this idea, but when it comes to action, both national parties begin to lean backwards” (p. 128-9). Indeed, under Churchill’s second government, the opportunity to take a leading role in European integration was finally discarded. The British churches raised no protests.

Coupland’s explanation for these developments is that the cause of European integration had never enjoyed popular confidence. Despite having several notable churchmen, writers and political pundits on its letterhead, support for the European movement in Britain was never more than an inch thick. Protestant suspicions that this was essentially a Catholic power grab were still evident and fears were even expressed that Britain’s Protestant identity would be compromised. In the 1950s, other concerns, such as the need for nuclear disarmament, or the evils of apartheid, captured the churches’ attention and focused awareness elsewhere. And for many Anglicans, the residual ties to the British imperial heritage proved stronger. As the general secretary of the British Council of Churches stated in 1964: “We British feel we only belong in a very partial way to Europe. It is not only our island state .`. . It is that our lines have gone out to Canada and Nysasaland, to New`Zealand and India every bit as much as across the narrow strait of Dover” (p.138).

If such traditional ties barred the way to joining any western European union, the barriers to establishing good relations with eastern Europe were even greater. The temporary sentiment of sympathy for the Soviet Union during the war was quickly replaced by the pronounced hostility of the post-war years. From Moscow’s point of view, the projects for western European integration inevitably appeared as anti-Soviet in intent. So too did the creation of NATO in April 1949. As Coupland rightly points out:` “for the Kremlin to see this bloc as defensive rather than a political threat would have required a miracle of faith and optimism which neither Marxist teleology nor contemporary Russian history made possible” (p.155). In addition the only British churchman advocating for the Soviet Union was the fellow-travelling Dean of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson. He enjoyed no support inside the Church of England, and less outside it. He was in fact the last ecclesiastic to share the illusion that Communism and Christianity were much the same thing. British Catholics were even more determined in their hostility. The containment of Communism was, for them, a sacred Christian duty.
In these circumstances, British churchmen cannot be acquitted of having contributed to the sterile political culture of the Cold War. Although only a few subscribed to the ideological extremism of American anti-Communists, those churchmen who sought to keep open the lines of communication to the churches under communist control found it difficult to establish credibility for their ecumenical and eirenic policies. For the majority of churchmen, prudence outweighed prophecy, and continued to do so until whole political scene changed in 1989.

The British churches therefore watched with hesitation the various moves taken in the 1950s and 1960s to promote European integration, and followed with even more ambivalence Britain’s belated attempts to join the Common Market after 1967. But by the 1970s the climate of opinion was more favourable than before. Churchmen were no longer persuaded that they need jealously guard British sovereignty from the ambitions of greedy foreigners. Instead the gradualist approach of small accretions gave the cause of European integration more credibility and hence support. No moral reasons could be found for continued abstention. Certainly the incredible success with which the western Europeans had dispelled the fateful legacy of their past played a significant role. International conflict between western European states was now unthinkable. Instead Europe could unite in undertaking new projects to bind up the wounds of the wider world. This was an agenda which all Christians could endorse.

Even if British Christians for the last thirty years have maintained only a sporadic interest in the growth of the European Union, nevertheless no significant opposition has been voiced. The most recent attempts to give the Union a specifically Christian character in the proposed constitution have failed. The current forces of multiculturalism are now too evident to allow any one element to claim such a spiritual pre-eminence. But Christians can live in a pluralistic political world, and in Coupland’s view should welcome the opportunity to do so. Their task is not to try and recreate a unified Christendom in Europe, but rather to stress the Union’s continuing and world-wide ethical responsibilities. At the same time, the churches’ watchful eye will have to be focused on possible misuses of the power now enjoyed by this multinational Union. In an era when the churches no longer enjoy their former political or cultural influence, such tasks will require the witness of resolute individuals conscious of their opportunities and responsibilities. In Coupland’s opinion, in an increasingly fluid and multicultural situation, the Christian churches can provide the foundations for a strong and stable community, which can encompass differences and set generous margins of tolerance. This would be a fitting fulfillment of Europe’s Christian heritage.

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1b) Christian Schmidtmann. Katholische Studierende 1945-1973: Eine Studie zur Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2006. 535 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. EUR 69.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-506-72873-9.

(This review first appeared on H-German on September 6th 2007, and is here reprinted by kind permission of the author).

The volume under review is a revised version of Christian Schmidtmann’s dissertation. It fills a gap in the research of postwar German Catholicism while at the same time confirming scholarly trends established by Mark Edward Ruff in The Wayward Flock (2005) and other scholars of postwar German Catholicism.

In the introduction, Schmidtmann explains that his work is not a “coherent, stringent narrative of Catholic students and their organizations, but a postmodern analysis of a constructed reality” (p. 15). Katholische Studierende is not a typical organizational history–although there is much of that in this work–but rather an analysis of the way in which German Catholic university students defined their relationship with their faith, their social organizations, and their church hierarchy. The work itself is free of explicitly postmodern analyses; indeed, in the body of the work, Schmidtmann does not address the “constructed” nature of reality. Instead, he offers an excellent analysis of the ways in which German Catholic university students took ownership of their faith in ways the Church hierarchy found difficult to accept. When the Church, by means of the Second Vatican Council caught up, so to speak, with the students, they were already moving on to a new understanding of their faith that almost made the Church seem irrelevant.

The volume is divided into four larger sections and numerous chapters and sub-chapters. The first three sections are arranged chronologically, while the chapters and sub-headings are arranged thematically or by groups of students. Schmidtmann examines students organized in the Catholic student fraternities, who made up the majority of all organized Catholic students, and then students in other organizations, as well as women as a special category of Catholic student.Schmidtmann notes that the share of Catholic students formally organized in fraternities or other groups never was more than a third of all registered Catholic university students. In this regard, the book’s title is a little misleading, since Schmidtmann leaves more than half of all Catholic students unconsidered. In part, this is caused by the author’s reliance on the records of the Katholische Deutsche Studentvereinigung (KDSE), the umbrella group of Catholic student groups in Germany, in the historical archives of the Cologne archdiocese. Still, one would have liked to have learned more about the majority of Catholic students and their attitudes towards ecclesiastical and civic roles as well as towards student life and academic preparation.

Schmidtmann notes the crucial role the Catholic Church played in the immediate postwar years at the local level. As the universities resumed classes, Catholic chaplains often provided both material and spiritual support to a generation seeking new values and goals. Quickly, however, a development began in the student body that Schmidtmann, without explicitly acknowledging it, sees coming to its fulfillment in the radicalization of the Catholic student movement in the late sixties and early seventies. Catholic students no longer considered mass attendance and participation in exclusively milieu-driven activities sufficient or even necessary markers of their Catholic identity. In the wake of National Socialism, living a Christian life meant bringing Christ into one’s everyday life and work. As Schmidtmann himself puts it, Catholic students did not seek a restoration of a pre-national socialist order, but rather something qualitatively new (pp. 43-45). Although recognizing that the postwar generation desired a qualitatively different Catholicism is not a new scholarly insight, Schmidtmann’s research shows how this desire for Catholicism in and of the world extended to Germany’s future Catholic elites.

Indeed, Schmidtmann’s more original contribution is to demonstrate the difficulties younger German Catholics faced in their dealings with the older generations in preparing for future leadership in economic, political, and social life. The older generation included the Catholic hierarchy, whose efforts to control Catholic student groups lasted almost thirty years, until the bishops gave up their attempts in the early seventies. Schmidtmann shows younger Catholics who joined the student fraternities reshaped these according to their own values, often to the dismay of the fraternities’ alumni. For example, in the early fifties, when university rectors banned uniformed fraternity members from marching in university processions for fear of resurrecting nationalist attitudes that fraternities had demonstrated in the twenties, the students insisted on wearing their colors as equal members in a tolerant, pluralistic society (p. 129).

Schmidtmann traces carefully how, during the later fifties and throughout the sixties, Catholic student groups began to struggle with the same conflicts that their fellow students faced: confronting the Holocaust, the Cold War, and so on. Catholic students, however, increasingly questioned the KDSE’s alignment with the Christian Democrats, much to the hierarchy’s dismay. By the early sixties, KDSE functionaries rejected grass-roots requests for open dialogue about the political roles of Catholic students in the modern world. Functionaries, even lay ones, blamed the students for declining participation in Catholic student group activities. This attitude was particular noticeable in activities aimed at female students, for whom the dominant message that a Catholic woman should prioritize her role as wife and mother over her academic prospects became irrelevant, if not off-putting. Students increasingly went their own way, organizing their own groups that relied on the hierarchy only for considerable financial support.

By the late sixties, Catholic student groups in Germany were fully in the throes of the early excitement surrounding the implementation of the reforms introduced at the Second Vatican Council. Sermons on Marxism were the least of the bishops’ concerns. By the early seventies, the bishops decided to withdraw their financial support from the student groups, which led to the demise of many of them.

At this point, Schmidtmann unfortunately leaves the reader without a fully developed analytical conclusion. Instead, the reader isoffered the fourth section of the work, in which Schmidtmann presents the results of his interviews with members of Catholic student groups from the period in question. It would have been useful had the analysis of these sources been integrated better into the main body of the work, rather than left as a separate section. Furthermore, Schmidtmann notes much of the relevant literature in the footnotes and in his extensive bibliography, but one wishes that he might have engaged the scholarly context more directly. One wonders what Protestant student groups were doing during the same time and about the same issues? Furthermore, as mentioned above, one wished that at least some statistical data had been included about the activities of those Catholic students who were not formally members of Catholic student organizations.

All in all, however, Schmidtmann has offered an important contribution to our understanding of postwar Catholicism and the transition of German Catholicism to the supposed age of the laity. The Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Germany’s leading Catholic historical research organization, is to be commended for its increasing focus on postwar Catholicism and its movement beyond strictly institutional church history.

Martin Menke, Rivier College, New Hampshire

1c) Michael Snape, God and the British Soldier. Religion and the British Army in the First and Second World Wars. London/New York: Routledge 2005 xv + 315 pp. ISBN 0-415-33452 – 7 (Pbk).

Michael Snape begins his well-researched and sprightly account of religion and the British soldier by challenging the widely-held view that the de-Christianization of Britain in the last century was due to the violence and disasters of the world wars, particularly the first. Instead he seeks to absolve both the military leadership and the individual soldier from blame. He does admit that, over the century, there was an obvious decline in individual church attendance and a widening of the social oral parameters, including personal ethics. But he argues that Christianity continues to characterize British institutional life, from the monarchy down. Britain’s historic Christian identity, and the sacrifices made to uphold it by the soldiers of both wars, are stressed every year in well-attended Remembrance Day services. The military establishment, and its attendant chaplaincy branch, are still held with regard, even by those who are no longer observant Christians.

Snape acknowledges the corrosive impact of the post-1919 mood of remorse over the nationalism and blood-letting of the First World War, especially as interpreted by such writers as Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. Their attacks on the hypocrisy, self-serving and ultra-imperialism of the army brass, including the chaplains, found much resonance in the pacifist-inclined and repentant elite circles of the 1920s. But how representative were the examples they cited? Snape sets out to present a much more nuanced picture, which is sympathetic in tone both to the army establishment and to the individual soldier. The sources he uses were drawn from an extensive array of personal memoirs, reports and contemporary publications, which he has diligently researched to present an excellently rounded picture.

The British army has had a long tradition of adhering to an Erastian form of Protestant Christianity, when duty to God and King could be combined to form the essential bond of military service. Such feelings were only reinforced by the fact that virtually all of the regular army’s officers were trained in the public school variety of British Christianity, strong on personal morality and service to the community. Compulsory church parades stressed the morale-building unity of the army under God’s guiding hand, and drew upon whatever background its recruits may have had in popular hymn singing and prayer. In short,throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Christianity remained dominant in shaping the moral and spiritual horizons of the populace and hence of the vast numbers of young men who joined the army, whether as volunteers or conscripts.

Snape shows how, in both wars, several leading generals, such as Douglas Haig and Bernard Montgomery, were explicit and keen advocates of an evangelical form of Christian obedience. He rightly believes their faith in God’s leadership gave them added determination and consolation, though he admits it could also increase their sense of infallibility. In the aftermath of the first war, Haig’s confidence in God’s guidance came to be much criticized, whereas Montgomery escaped, largely because his successes in public relations and his victories were more evident. Whether either general’s religious devotion was taken as a role model by lesser ranks remains unclear. But certainly, their form of Christian commitment was widely seen as proof of the morality of the war effort, and of the conviction that God was indeed on Britain’s side.

The British army leaders regarded religion and religious agencies as important sources of inspiration and discipline. Indeed, as the recognition grew, especially in the second war, that large numbers of men needed to be inspired to fight rather than merely commanded, so the matter of morale came to be seen as vitally important. Both Haig and Montgomery saw the role of chaplains as essentially morale-builders, and encouraged those chaplains who best succeeded in such a prophetic and missionary task. Montgomery was himself a magnificent morale-booster who readily used Judeo-Christian imagery to claim that the Lord mighty in battle would be sure to give them victory. The evidence is that many chaplains followed his example, and were consequently appreciated by the men.

As Snape makes clear in his first-rate chapter on Command and the Clergy, the chaplains filled an important role in providing supportfor the soldiers, both collectively and individually. They developed a powerful moral and religious idiom, prepared the troops for battle, consoled and comforted them in their losses, and offered a vestige of dignity in death. Behind the lines, the chaplains, assisted by an enormous array of church-related philanthropic groups, led by the YMCA, were invaluable in providing recreational and rest facilities, looked after the wounded in hospital, and acted as welfare officers with the men’s’ domestic problems. The most famous of such services was given by Toc H and its ebullient pastor, Tubby Clayton. His witness was indeed to be carried forward and in part mitigated the post-war mood of disillusionment.

In attempting to assess the religious impact of such chaplaincy and welfare services, Snape points out that many of those who availed themselves were drawn from the church-attending constituency. But, particularly in the First World War, the devastating casualty rate wiped out most of that generation of young men and leaders. The introduction of conscription brought in a different sort of men with less enthusiasm and often less religious commitment. Nevertheless, in the extreme conditions of the battle front or in the grim condition of prisoner-of-war camps, religion and British loyalties combined as a moral force to enhearten and uplift.

Yet, as Snape admits, the conditions of war created moral problems, both collectively and individually, of a particularly intractable kind. The contradiction between the war’s conduct and Christianity’s call for love and peace posed for many men a crisis of credibility. As the brutalities of the wars escalated, so the belief in the “just war” theory, so rigidly held by their commanders, came to be subject to ever-increasing doubt. And the mounting toll of casualties and suffering confronted every soldier with the insoluble problems of evil and death. The chaplains’ responses to such challenges were closely observed, and any prevarication or evasion served only to discredit not only his ministry but the religion he supposedly served. The chaplains’ duty to uphold the image of a loving and merciful God presented many difficulties in the midst of ruthless and costly slaughter. Particularly the temptation to engage in hatred for the enemy had somehow to be resisted even in the bloody and bitter circumstances of battle. Many men lost their faith after such experiences.

But in Snape’s view, it was not so much the loss of faith per se as the widespread deterioration in moral standards which undermined the churches’ hold and esteem amongst the soldiers in the years of the two world wars. Indeed, the immoral behaviour of so many of their charges concerned the chaplains far more than the apparent disregard for church doctrine. The ubiquity of swearing, the widespread incidence of petty theft and gambling, the acceptance of drunkenness, the temptations of sexual promiscuity and its consequent venereal diseases, were evidence of the coarsening, even the brutalizing of a predominantly male society.

At a deeper level, the impact of mass slaughter in the trenches in the First World War, or the horrific effects of mechanized destruction in the second, did not affect religious attitudes as much as some commentators feared. In Snape’s opinion, the mores of Victorian religiosity remained largely entrenched in British Christianity. There was no widespread slide into atheism, even though the social and personal disruption of war-time experiences undoubtedly hastened the erosion of pre-war religious values.

Snape does not touch on the equally problematic issue of how British Christians could reconcile the readily apparent contradiction that both they and their enemy were praying to the same God The more militant zealots of the first world war easily demonized the enemy as anti-Christian, but in the second church leaders, such as Archbishop Temple and Bishop George Bell, were more circumspect. Snape could have said more about the costly lead such bishops gave in refusing to cut off hopes for a re-Christianization of Europe, including the defeated Germans and Italians, and their resistance to theories of their enemies’ collective guilt. The word reconciliation prevailed over revenge. This was an aspect of religious witness about which more needs to be said.

In conclusion, Snape contends that the experience of two world wars cannot be described as a secularizing influence in relation to British public life. Religion clearly remained close to the centre of British national consciousness. In terms of the historiography, Snape’s evidence goes a long way to refute the negative assessments of religion in army life, and expressly of the chaplains engaged in what he rightly sees as a difficult. but often greatly appreciated role. So too those church historians whose pacifist sympathies led them to regret the churches’ active involvement in the two wars should now be encouraged to revise their verdicts. Above all, military historians who are tempted to see the role of religion as an obsolete survival, and chaplains as dubious or peripheral figures, should also look again with greater sympathy and understanding. If this can be achieved, Snape’s forthright and excellently readable contribution will be vindicated.

JSC

With every best wish
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

 Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Contents:

1) Book review: J. Peart-Binns, Biography of Bishop Richard Harries

2) Journal Articles:

a) Studies in Christian-Jewish relations, Boston College issue on Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
b) Daniel, The Children of Perestroika

3) Obituaries: Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann, Raul Hilberg, Cardinal Lustiger

4) Conference Report: Elisabeth Schmitz (1893-1977)
1) John S. Peart-Binns, A Heart in my Head. A biography of Richard Harries. London: Continuum 2007, 275pp. ISBN 0-8264-8154-X

Bishops have always been an integral part of the historic Christian churches. So the writing of the lives of these bishops also has a long tradition. Such biographies are not in the same category as the biographies of other public figures, such as politicians. Politicians can be attacked, their mistaken policies criticized, their actions denounced and their characters reviled. The tone of such books is often highly critical. But bishops are expected to be upright and estimable men. (I have yet to read a biography of a woman bishop). So their lives must be depicted in a positive, indeed uplifting, tone since they stand as encouraging witnesses in the continuing life of the Church.

This puts constraints on biographers. If they paint the bishop as a saintly figure who cannot err, their portraits become too smug and hagiographic. Or else they become unbelievably dull. However unworldly the bishop may have been, he is still a man with faults. How to describe him, warts and all, is a delicate task. It is particularly so when dealing with the leading figures in the Church of England. The Church of England has a venerable, tradition-ridden history of nearly five centuries, which has seen many outstanding bishops of great renown. But it is also a complex institution with its own peculiar features accrued from ancient days and lovingly preserved. Furthermore it has its own vocabulary derived from the past which is often baffling to the outsider. How many readers can tell the exact roles of a suffragan bishop, an archdeacon, a prolocutor, or a perpetual curate, let alone the functions of synod, a general synod or a convocation? But all these details have to be known to any episcopal biographer.

Fortunately John Peart-Binns is a skilled practitioner of this art, having written several similar books before. His latest biography of Richard Harries, the bishop of Oxford from 1987 to 2006, is a masterly account, written with obvious sympathy but not entirely uncritical. Its value consists in the nice balance between an assessment of the man and a description of the multitasked functions of a modern bishop. As such it presents a revealing portrait of how the Church of England recruits its leaders and how it uses their talents.

Traditionally the Church of England bishops came from well-to-do families and were educated at either Oxford or Cambridge. Richard Harries followed this pattern. His father was a senior army officer, and he himself first went to Sandhurst and served for a while in the signals corps. But then he realized that his true calling was to be ordained. He went to Cambridge for that purpose, and later to Cuddesdon, the seminary for top-flight ordinands. He served six years as a curate in a lively parish in Highgate, an intellectually-active suburb in north London, followed by a short spell at Wells Theological College, and a fine period as Vicar of Fulham in outer London on the River Thames. Peart-Binns tells us that Harries was a genial friend to his congregation, conducted the services with reverence and dignity, carried out the parish business efficiently, adopted a liberal stance on wider issues, and was generally “laid-back”. In short, he was the very model of a modern Anglican vicar.

But one thing, Peart-Binns assures us, he was not: ambitious. But what kind of a career pattern was he to follow? Like the army, the Church of England has a hierarchical ranking of its officers, though age and service do not necessarily ensure advancement. But as a long-established and wealthy institution, the church has a number of plum positions for the higher ranks of the clergy, many of them in highly attractive cathedral cities. But appointments to the highest ranks, such a bishops, are – or were until last month – made by the Prime Minister of the day. A list of three names is submitted, and the Prime Minister’s choice is then forwarded for approval by the Queen.

As in any large institution, and as readers of Trollope’s novels will know, pursuit of such positions – or preferment as it is called in church circles – is not unknown. Indeed Peart-Binns declares: “Preferment is a contagious disease in the Church of England. Each week the ecclesiastical newspapers provide possibilities and hope: bishops retire, die or are translated to other sees; archdeacons advance to mitred status; deans resign or die. . . The temptation is for elevation-addicts in clerical collars to meet the ‘right people’, especially those who are deemed to have influence in high places.” It was by this rather arcane system that Harries – to his considerable surprise – was invited to become Bishop of Oxford at the end of 1986.

Oxford is one of England’s largest dioceses, encompassing over two million people in nearly six hundred parishes. For centuries the diocese has had an integral, if sometimes problematical, relationship to the University. Its cathedral is, in fact, situated within the walls of one of the Colleges. Despite having three area bishops under him, the diocesan bishop has an enormous burden of responsibilities. He naturally has to play a large part in the wider concerns of the Church, to attend synods, boards and endless committees, for many of which he has to commute to London at least once a week. In due course, his seniority will earn him a place on the bench of bishops in the House of Lords, where he will be expected to attend regularly and speak on issues of special concern.

Little prepares a clergyman to become a bishop. The majority are drawn either from the limited horizons of a local parish or from the classrooms of a university professorship. There are serious drawbacks. The bishop can no longer enjoy his regular weekly worship in his usual parish. He is cut off from the pastoral care of individual parishioners. He has to administer a large diocesan office, and is frequently called to make speeches or even give sermons on subjects about which he has virtually no time to prepare. If he has interests in such wider areas as the ecumenical or mission fields, he can be sent to far-off countries to represent the Church of England at such international gatherings. His frequent absences can and indeed do take a toll on his family life. Each bishop has therefore to consider carefully what should be his priorities, and where his individual contribution can best be made.

One of Harries’ main achievements in Oxford was the leadership he provided on the subject of Christian-Jewish relations. As a student, he had heard a lecture on this subject given by James Parkes, the maverick Anglican cleric who had long been ignored by his colleagues. Parkes had begun his pioneering attempts to overthrow the traditional anti-Judaic prejudices amongst Christians already in the 1930s. His vigorous campaigns to rescue Jews from the Nazis’ clutches, and to support the cause of the state of Israel, had however largely fallen on deaf ears. Not until the 1970s, when the events of the Holocaust and the complicity of the Christian churches in the underlying cause of antisemtiic intolerance had been extensively discussed, were Parkes and his teachings vindicated. Harries was particularly impressed by the need for a theological reassessment of Judaism in Christian eyes. Following the lead given by the Second Vatican Council, he consistently approved of the campaign to overcome Christian antisemitism, and in particular the long-held view that the Jews deserved their centuries of ill-fortune because they had put Christ to death. Similarly, he opposed the centuries-old calumny that Christians had superseded the Jews as God’s Chosen People, or that Judaism was nothing more than a religious fossil, as the noted Oxford scholar Anold Toynbee had once proclaimed. Instead Harries shared the opinion that Jews were the older brethren of Christians in the faith, and that Christians should acknowledge how much of their liturgical and prayer lives were drawn from Judaism. Repentance and a resolve to purify the Christian faith of all negative attitudes towards Judaism was and is a vital concern.

In 1987-8 Harries led the way in preparing guidelines on Jewish-Christian relations for the whole Anglican communion, showing how these should be more positively treated and stressing the need to see Judaism as a living and on-going religion, people and civilization. An understanding of Judaism, he stated, is fundamental to Christianity’s own self-understanding. In 1988 he was one of the hosts of a major international conference in Oxford, where several hundred scholars of the Holocaust debated the role of the churches during these traumatic events. (As one of the participants, I can recall Harries’ inspiring words of welcome).

Such a liberal stance was, however, to cause Harries difficulties. On the one hand, evangelicals were offended because the idea of mission to the Jews was deliberately omitted. On the other hand, many Anglicans were not prepared to follow the logic that affirmation of Judaism should include support for the state of Israel. Particularly after the turbulence of the 1967 War, when the new state of Israel seized possession of the entire West Bank, many, indeed most, churchmen were ready to support the people of Israel theologically, but at the same time supported their opponents, the Palestinians, on humanitarian grounds. Harries’ book After the Evil: Christianity and Judaism in the Shadow of the Holocaust (2003) is a masterly summary of the issues, and a strong plea for mutual understanding.
Harries obviously excelled as a convenor, facilitator, and chairman of numerous groups engaged in inter-church or inter-faith dialogue. But overcoming entrenched stereotypes of other people’s religions is a time-consuming business. Inevitably the task was not completed by the time he retired. More rewarding was his support for the ordination of women. He was sure the Church would be greatly enriched by the ministry of women, and so it has proved. By the time of his retirement in 2006, the diocese of Oxford had more than two hundred women priests. Their gifts have been much appreciated.

In 2003 Harries became involved in a far more controversial issue which was to overshadow the remainder of his episcopate. After some consultations, he decided to offer the post of the area bishop of Reading, part of his diocese, to Dr. Jeffrey John, an open advocate of the view that homosexual relationships should be accepted and blessed by the Church. There was an immediate outcry from conservatives and evangelicals. Unwisely, in Peart-Binns’ view, Harries chose to ignore this, believing that once Dr. John was installed, it would all blow over in a couple of months. How wrong could he be?

The timing of this announcement was also unfortunate. Only a week later, the Canadian bishop of New Westminster, Michael Ingham, authorized a liturgical rite for the celebration of gay and lesbian covenants in six parishes in the Vancouver area. And ten days after that, the first openly gay priest was elected Bishop of New Hampshire in the Episcopal Church of the United States.

`In Oxford the response to all these startling measures was a wave of outrage and protest by many of the senior clergy and laity, who sought to defend the traditional orthodoxy of Christian doctrine on this matter. Similar opinions were voiced around the country. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself stepped in and ordered Dr. John’s nomination to be withdrawn, much to Harries’ dismay. But the issue itself was not resolved, and indeed, as Peart-Binns rightly notes, the Archbishop of Canterbury continues to be mired in the morass of fruitless controversy concerning human sexuality.

Writing the biography of someone still alive is a problematic venture. But Peart-Binns knows how to avoid the pitfalls. One of his difficulties was that Harries was and is a shy man, who did not display his emotions, and could appear cold. So Peart-Binns is left on occasion to speculate about the bishop’s motives, or why he should have taken up one or other of the many endeavours in which he became involved. On the other hand, Peart-Binns knows the Church of England expertly from the inside. So he always gets the context right, and is able to assess and evaluate Harries’ numerous contributions. As a bishop, Harries was not an institutional manager. Nor was he a remote scholar, even of theology. Rather he was a motivator, whose wide human sympathies were matched with an eirenical and ecumenical Christian understanding of society and history. Oxford was therefore an ideal place for such a diocesan leader. And this is why he was also so successful in the House of Lords. It was a notable acclamation that, after he retired in 2006, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, made him a life peer, and hence enabled him to return to the House of Lords. He still sits there on the cross benches, independent of party but intensely loyal to the tradition and the institution. This can also be taken as an appropriate assessment of Harries’ place in the Church of England in the later twentieth century. We owe Peart-Binns our gratitude for this intelligent and perceptive biography.

JS

2) Studies in Christian-Jewish relations, an electronic journal published at Boston College, marked the 100th aniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s birth with a special issue dedicated to his memory. The following are abstracts of important articles, which can be downloaded in their entirety from the Boston College site:: http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr

a) Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Relevance for Post-Holocaust Christian Theology

The Protestant theologian and resistance figure Dietrich Bonhoeffer is often portrayed as a hero of the Holocaust, particularly in popular films and literature. Much of the academic literature also assumes a clear relationship between his concern for the Jewish victims of Nazism, his theology, and his participation in the German resistance. A counter-narrative exists, however, which focuses on the anti-Judaism in his writings and contends that a heroic portrait of Bonhoeffer is simplistic and that Bonhoeffer’s significance for post-Holocaust thought is tenuous at best. A key problem here is the volume and complexity of the relevant historical and theological material. The thesis of this essay is that only an in-depth understanding of his theology as a dialogue with the historical complexities of his times can offer insights into his potential contribution to post-Holocaust thought. This essay will review the most salient theological and historical points, focusing on two often overlooked topics: 1) his actual role not only in the German resistance but in the larger ecumenical resistance network that helped Jews across Europe and 2) his own very concrete reflections on guilt, leading to his conviction of the necessity for a different self-understanding among Christians — and a different kind of Christianity — in a post-Nazi world. His experience under Nazism and in the resistance led to a radical reformulation of Christian identity that may be relevant for post-Holocaust theology.

Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

b) The Church Struggle and the Confessing Church: An Introduction to Bonhoeffer’s Context

This article traces the German church struggle form 1933 to 1945 with particular emphasis on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s role. Although Bonhoeffer’s status in the world today is that of a great theologian and courageous opponent of the Nazi regime, he did not have much of an impact on the direction of the Confessing Church during the church struggle. Bonhoeffer’s striking albeit marginal role in the German church struggle and his inability to affect significantly the direction of the Confessing Church was due to many factors, including his young age, his liberal-democratic politics, his absence from Germany from October 1933 to April 1935, his vacillating and at times contradictory positions on central issues, his radical theological critique of the Nazi state, his friendship with and family ties to Christians of Jewish descent, and ultimately his willingness to risk his life to destroy Hitler’s regime.

Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

c) Bonhoeffer, the Jewish People and Post-Holocaust Theology: Eight Perspectives; Eight Theses

Over the years since his death, dozens of interpreters – scholars, novelists, dramatists, filmmakers and devotional writers- have offered a variety of perspectives on Bonhoeffer’s relationship to the Jewish people. This article describes eight distinct, though overlapping and largely compatible, perspectives on this question. It then identifies the author’s own view of this important relationship by presenting and developing eight theses. The author concludes that the desire to portray Bonhoeffer as a guide for post-Holocaust theological reflection is based less in Bonhoeffer’s theological achievements than in the compelling nature of his witness and the dire need for Christian heroes from the Nazi era.

Stephen R. Haynes, Rhodes College

(This article is a shortened version of Haynes’s latest book The Bonhoeffer Legacy, reviewed in this Newsletter, September 2006).

b) Wallace Daniel, The Children of Perestroika, Two sociologists on religion and Russian society, 1991 – 2006 in Religion, State and Society, June 2007

Professor Daniel’s review of the resrearches undertaken by two Russian sociologists surveys the changes in Russians’ religious understanding in the last fifteen years. The rapid breakdown of boundaries and ways of thought in Russia lend themselves to new sociological investigations by these two leading scholars, Furman and Filatov. They provide data for the sudden reinvigoration of interest in religion at the end of the 1980s, the time of ‘sobering up’, 1996-1997, and the present relationship between faith and power, 2000 – 2006. While sociologists look at church affairs through different lenses than historians, nevertheless, in Daniel’s view, they have important perspectives to contribute. Daniel is the author of The Orthodox Church and Civil Society in Russia: Texas A and M University Press, College Station, Texas 2006.

3) Obituaries:

a) It is with regret that we learn of the death in May of Wolf-Dieter Zimnmermann at the age of 95. Zimmermann was one of Bonhoeffer’s early students, and participated in eager theological debates in the period before and after the Nazi seizure of power. He later went on to become an “illegal” Confessing Church pastor. In the immediate post-war years, Zimmermann played a significant role in the Unterwegskreis, a group of reform-minded clergy in Berlin’s Protestant churches who sought to incorporate Bonhoeffer’s ideas, even though he was no longer with them. Zimmermann made many contributions in the area of radio and television communications during his long and productive career in the service of the Berlin church. He is probably best known to English-speaking readers through the four chapters he contributed to the book I knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which he edited along with Ronald Gregor Smith.

I am glad to tell you that one of the few surviving contemporaries from that era, Rudolf Weckerling, now 97, is still active and busy writing and speaking about his friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He recently wrote to me asking for a reprint of one of my articles so that he could translate it into German!

b) We are also sorry to hear of the death in August of our colleague, Raul Hilbert, emeritus professor of the University of Vermont, one of the leading scholars of the Holocaust. His book The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) with its thorough examination of the documentary sources, and its sharp analysis of the perpetrators, the victims and the bystanders, established the standard for all such accounts of this terrible tragedy. In our field he will be remembered for his epigrammatic comment on the complicity of the Christian churches in the tragic history of the Jewish people:

The missionaries of Chrstianity had said in effect: you have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: you have no right to live among us. The German Nazis at last decreed: you have no right to live.

c) We also learn with sorrow of the passing of the French Cardinal Lustiger who was converted from Judaism as a boy, and later rose to become Cardinal Archbishop of Paris. He contributed much to the improvement of relations between Christians and Jews, and upheld the view that, where Christian anti-semitism existed, it was a consequence of the infidelity of Christian nations to Biblical Judaism. In 1997 he prompted his fellow French bishops to issue a public apology for their predecessors’ failure to protest theVichy government’s anti-semitic laws – a move which strengthened the campaign led by Pope John Paul II.

4) Conference Report: A forgotten heroine of the Church Struggle: Elisabeth Schmitz.

In the historiography of the Church Struggle against the Nazis, very little has ever
been written about the role of women. One of those largely forgotten figures was Elisabeth Schmitz, who was the author of a significant memorandum in 1935/6 on the plight of the Jewish Christians in Germany, and who urged the Confessing Church to take measures in their defence. Unfortunately all too little was done to follow up her suggestions, and her initiative was forgotten. Recently a conference on her life and work was held in Berlin under the auspices of Prof Manfred Gailus. The following report was kindly supplied to us by Hansjorg Buss, the archivist of the North Elbian Church in Kiel.

Tagungsbericht: “Konturen einer vergessenen Biographie: Elisabeth Schmitz (1893-1977)”, (7.05.2007, Berlin), veranstaltet von der Evangelischen Akademie zu Berlin in Zusammenarbeit mit Professor Dr. Manfred Gailus, Berlin. – Erstveräffentlichung der Langfassung: ULR: http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungdsberichte/id=1592

Elisabeth Schmitz wurde 1893 als Tochter eines Gymnasialprofessors im hessischen Hanau geboren. Von 1914 bis 1920 studierte sie, anfangs in Bonn, seit 1915 in Berlin Geschichte, Theologie und Germanistik. Ab 1929 arbeitete sie als Studienrätin in Berlin-Mitte, bis sie 1935 ob ihrer ablehnenden Haltung gegüber dem NS-Staat versetzt wurde. Nach der Einführung neuer Lehrpläne, in denen die Erziehung zum “nationalsozialistischen Menschen” als Bildungsziel ausgegeben wurde, und unter dem Eindruck der Reichspogromnacht bat sie Ende 1938 um ihre Versetzung in den Ruhestand, der ihr unter Einschluss einer Pension auch gewährt wurde. Nach Kriegsende trat Schmitz in Hanau erneut in den Schuldienst und arbeitete bis zu ihrer Pensionierung im Jahr 1958 als Lehrerin. Am 10. September 1977 starb sie unbekannt und vergessen im Alter von 84 Jahren.

Die historische Bedeutung von Elisabeth Schmitz liegt vor allem in ihrem Eintreten für die so genannten “nichtarischen” Christen und anderen “rassisch” Verfolgten. In Korrespondenz mit führenden Theologen und Repräsentanten der Bekennenden Kirche (BK) setzte sie sich wiederholt für eine konsequente Stellungnahme der evangelischen Kirche zur “Judenfrage” ein. Einen hervorragenden Platz nimmt dabei ihre ausführliche Denkschrift zur “Lage der deutschen Nichtarier” aus dem Jahr 1935/36 ein, in der sie ausführlich die innere und äußere Not der verfolgten Juden beschrieb und eine scharfe Anklage gegen das Schweigen der Kirche, insbesondere der BK, führte. “Die Kirche macht es einem bitter schwer, sie zu verteidigen.” Daneben setzte Schmitz sich auch konkret und mit hohem persönlichen Einsatz für verfolgte “Nichtarier” ein, denen sie Zuflucht in ihrem Wochenendhaus gewährte oder die sie mit Geld und Nahrungsmitteln unterstützte.

Elisabeth Schmitz gehört zu jenen Frauen, die nach 1945 über Jahrzehnte in Vergessenheit geraten sind. In einleitenden Worten hoben sowohl Ludwig Mehlhorn (Evangelische Akademie) als auch Gailus hervor, dass dieser beklagenswerte Zustand der Vergessenheit ein Anlass für die Tagung war, um die “biographischen Konturen dieser in Berlin weithin unbekannten Frau” nachzuzeichnen. Dass dieses Anliegen auch im Interesse der Kirche liege, bekräftigte Präpstin Friederike von Kirchbach im Namen der Evangelischen Kirche Berlin-Brandenburg-schlesische Oberlausitz.

In einem ersten Beitrag gab die Pfarrerin a.D. Dietgard Meyer — sie kannte Elisabeth Schmitz seit ihrer Schulzeit und publizierte 1999 erstmals den Nachweis ihrer Urheberschaft der genannten Denkschrift — eine persänlich gehaltene Einführung zu Leben und Werk. Sie hob die Konsequenz ihrer Handlungen hervor, die sie in einer zutiefst christlich-humanistischen Grundhaltung begründet sah. Auch nach Kriegsende habe Schmitz ihre Weitsichtigkeit bewiesen und unter Einbeziehung der Opferperspektive eine schnelle Aufarbeitung der NS-Zeit, vor allem die Erforschung der Ursachen angemahnt.

Manfred Gailus setzte sich anschließend mit der wissenschaftlichen Ausbildung von Elisabeth Schmitz auseinander. Er wies dem Historiker Friedrich Meinecke, vor allem aber dem bedeutenden Kirchenhistoriker Adolf von Harnack einen prägenden Einfluss zu. Im liberal-aufgeklärten Umfeld der beiden republikanisch eingestellten Professoren bildete Schmitz letztendlich jene ethische Wertebindung aus, die auch in der NS-Zeit für sie handlungsleitend sein sollte. Zuletzt machte Gailus die starken theologischen Interessen Schmitz` geltend. Nur auf Grund der Tatsache, dass ein theologisches Examen für Frauen zu dieser Zeit keinen “Brotberuf” bot, entschied sie sich für das Lehramt.

Zu dem beruflichen Werdegang und Schmitz` Wirken als Lehrerin sprach anschließend der Berliner Schulpsychologiedirektor Rolf Hensel.

Nach der Mittagspause referierte die Journalistin und Pfarrerin a.D. Marlies Flesch-Thebesius über die Korrespondenz von Elisabeth Schmitz mit Karl Barth, die hauptsächlich in den Jahren 1933 bis 1936 stattfand. Während Schmitz schon im April 1933 ein kirchliches Eintreten gegen Antisemitismus forderte und schwere Vorwürfe gegen die evangelische Kirche erhob, war für Barth die “Judenfrage” nur eine Teilfrage in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem NS-Staat. Eine äffentliche Stellungnahme lehnte er ab. Neben der Korrespondenz sind auch mehrere Besuche bei Barth in seinem Schweizer Exil dokumentiert. Hier wies die Referentin darauf hin, dass der theologische Gedankenaustausch mäglicherweise ein Umdenken bei Karl Barth ausgeläst bzw. dieses bestärkt haben kännte, das ab 1936 auch in seiner wissenschaftlichen Arbeit Niederschlag fand.

Im Anschluss referierte der Jurist Gerhard Lüdecke über einen überraschenden Dokumentenfund – eine Tasche von Elisabeth Schmitz mit persänlichen Dokumenten – in den Kellerräumen einer Hanauer Kirchengemeinde im Jahr 2004. Von besonderem Wert ist eine handschriftliche, mehrfach überarbeitete Fassung der Denkschrift, die letzte bestehende Zweifel an ihrer Urheberschaft endgültig beseitigt.

Die Vorgeschichte der Denkschrift beleuchtete der Berliner Kirchenhistoriker Hartmut Ludwig in einem instruktiven Beitrag. Er warf die These auf, dass es sich bei Denkschrift, um eine (falsch verstandene) “Auftragsarbeit” für die Berlin-Brandenburger BK gehandelt habe. In seiner Analyse unterstrich er nochmals deren weitreichenden theologischen Ansatz: Schmitz bezog sich nicht allein auf getaufte “Nichtarier”, sondern weitete ihre Forderungen nach kirchlicher Solidarität auf alle Verfolgten aus. Hierin sah Ludwig einen der Gründe, warum Schmitz’ Denkschrift durch die BK kaum rezipiert wurde.

Martina Voigt von der Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand beschäftigte sich in ihrem Beitrag “Vernetzungen und Parallelbiographien” mit zwei Frauen, die in engem Kontakt mit Elisabeth Schmitz standen: Die Biologin Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Schiemann und die Studienrätin Dr. Elisabeth Abegg. Vorbehaltlich weiterer Untersuchungen machte Voigt deutlich, dass alle drei aus unterschiedlichen Positionen heraus sich in Schrift, Wort und auch der konkreten Tat für verfolgte “Nichtarier” eingesetzt haben und auf Grund ihres Engagements berufliche Nachteile bzw. den Verlust ihrer Stellung in Kauf nehmen mussten. Religiäse Beweggründe scheinen hier trotz großer Unterschiede — Schiemann engagierte sich innerhalb der BK, während Abegg der Minderheit der Quäker angehärte — bei ihren Entscheidungen ausschlaggebend gewesen zu sein.

Im letzten Beitrag beschäftigte sich der Bonner Theologe Andreas Pangritz mit den persänlichen Konsequenzen der Reichspogromnacht vom 9./10. November 1938. Auch er betonte die Radikalität ihrer Forderungen, die sich fundamental von anderen kirchlichen €ußerungen abhoben. So mahnte Schmitz eine namentliche Fürbitte für alle verfolgten “Nichtarier” an, unabhängig von ihrer Religionszugehärigkeit oder der konfessioneller Bindung. Zudem forderte sie die finanzielle Unterstützung der bedrängten jüdischen Gemeinden und die Bereitstellung von Kirchen für jüdische Gottesdienste. Mit ihrer Betonung der jüdischen Wurzeln als unabdingbarer Grundlage des Christentums ging Schmitz auch in theologischer Hinsicht weit über die gängigen zeitgenässischen Interpretationen hinaus.

Auf Grund der fortgeschrittenen Zeit verzichtete Manfred Gailus auf seinen resümierenden Beitrag zum Thema “Nachkriegszeiten: Die große Vergessenheit und späte Erinnerung”. Zugleich kündigte er einen Tagungsband mit sämtlichen Beiträgen an und stellte eine Folgekonferenz in Aussicht. Er verwies zudem auf die Notwendigkeit der Erarbeitung einer wissenschaftlich fundierten Biographie dieser “unbesungenen Heldin par excellence”. Es bleibt zu wünschen, dass beide Vorhaben einen ähnlich erfolgreichen Verlauf nehmen werden.

Wishing all of you in the northern hemisphere, a profitable return to your teaching duties,
and hoping you all had a good holiday, despite the turbulent weather conditions in so many parts of the world.
Sincerely,

John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Contents:

1) Reactions to Dick Pierard’s review of The Theocons
2) Book reviews:

a) K-J Hummel and C Kösters, Kirchen im Krieg
b) ed. Austin and Scott, Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples

3) Rolf Hochhuth Reassessed

a) Feldkamp, Hochhuth Exposed
b) Ritzer, Alles nur Theater?

4) New publication

a) Representation of the Holocaust in Literature and Film
b) Mark Noll, What happened to Christian Canada?

1) a) William Doino writes: As a long-time reader of your newsletter, which I greatly admire and appreciate, I just finished reading the June issue, especially the reiew of Damon Linker’s book, The Theocons. With all due respect, I think this review falls well short of your journal’s usually high standards. The review, like the book itself, is not a thoughtful Cjhristian critique, but rather – in my opinion – a diatribe – overly-partisan, and marked by caricature. And it is written as if the only thoughtful Chriistians in the world are those who agree with the reviewer. For a much different persepctive on Fr Richard John Neuhaus and his journal First Things – and one I think far closer to the truth – I suggest two other reviews, one by Michael Uhlmann in the Claremont Review of Books (http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1342/article_detail.asp), or alternatively Melinda Henneberger’s review from last October in Commonweal.

1b) Bob Doll writes: I found the latest issue, June 2007, particualrly enlightening and useful. Thank you for the work you continually do with these compilations.

2a) Karl-Joseph Hummel and Christoph Kösters, ed., Kirchen im Krieg: Europa 1939-1945 Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007, 614 pp.

In the last several years, historians and theologians have increasingly turned their attention to the role of the European churches during the Second World War. For decades, the relationship between Christianity and antisemitism and the churches’ response to the Holocaust dominated historical controversies. The newer emphasis on the churches’ conduct between 1939 and 1945 marks, in fact, less of a new beginning than a return to questions raised already in the late 1950s by the American sociologist, Gordon Zahn – what was the relationship between the European churches and the Second World War?

This extensive collection of essays, edited by Karl-Joseph Hummel and Christoph Kösters of the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte in Bonn, is the fruit of an interdisciplinary and interconfessional conference, “Kirchen im Krieg, 1939-1945” held in October 2004 at the Catholic Academy in Bavaria, an event sponsored by the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte and the Marburger Lehrstuhl für Kirchengeschichte under the aegis of Jochen-Christoph Kaiser.

The size and scope of this collection alone is impressive. The 23 individual chapters draw upon a variety of historical and theological methodologies, examine more than one dozen countries and look at both the responses of both Protestant and Roman Catholic (but unfortunately, not the Orthodox) churches to the war. As such, this volume provides a sweeping survey of the current scholarly landscape, as many of the contributors stem from younger scholars.

It is, of course, impossible to summarize 23 individual chapters in a brief review. The volume itself, however, is divided into four major parts. In the first section, the reader will find excellently nuanced summaries of the responses by the churches in nations that were occupied by the Nazis, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Norway, France, amongst others. The chapter by Lieve Gevers, a Belgian historian, is particularly well crafted, comparing the responses by the Roman Catholic and Calvinist churches to the persecution of Jews, the deportations and the larger occupation in the Netherlands and Belgium, two nations whose religious and historical traditions differed significantly. She shows that the protests against the Jewish deportations in the Netherlands were far more vocal than in neighboring Belgium, but the Roman Catholic’s quieter approach in Belgium paradoxically succeeded in rescuing more Jews.

Part II of this volume contains three chapters that examine the changes in what might be termed war theology. Wilhelm Damberg’s chapter argues that the church returned to its traditional understanding of war, which maintained that war is a punishment for having fallen away from God. Subjects had a duty to obey authority. . The experiences of the Second World War, however, shattered this traditional understanding, and many Catholic leaders were at a loss to give any sort of convincing meaning to this six year period. In his chapter, Jochen-Christoph Kaiser noted a significant transformation in Protestant theology as a result of the experiences during the Third Reich. Many Protestants learned that they could no longer rely on the generosity or neutrality of state authority, a shock which indelibly influenced debates after 1945 over how to restructure the Evangelische Kirche Deutschland (EKiD).

The third and most extensive section of this volume, which includes ten chapters, analyzes Christian society in Germany during the war. Individual chapters focus on the seizure of monasteries, on the leadership of the Catholic military chaplains, the use of forced laborers in the Protestant and Catholic churches, and gender relations in the Protestant church during the war, the churches’ efforts for Christians of Jewish descent, amongst others.

Part IV turns to an area which has become the focus of significant historical attention during the last ten years – memory and the creation of what have been called ãcultures of memory.ä Of the four chapters, the most extensive Ð nearly sixty pages – was penned by Karl-Joseph Hummel. This chapter “Geschichtsbilder im deutschen Katholizismus,” focuses on the controversies since 1945 regarding the relationship between the Roman Catholic church and National Socialism. Hummel is clearly very critical of many of the critics, as he points out the dark side of many of their own positions and personalities. Walter Dirks, the co-founder of the Frankfurter Hefte, published an article on July 7, 1933, claiming: “(the youth) recognizes with passion the historical task in National Socialism, which has moved closer by one epoch with the overcoming of liberalism and liberal-parliamentary democracy.” Finally, Franziska Metzger’s concluding chapter on Catholic discourses of memory about the Second World War in Austria and Switzerland successfully integrates newer approaches of cultural history into this volume.

For scholars in the field, this volume will be indispensable, as it brings together some of the most important research of the last decade. It is also worth pointing out that this volume contains a brief summary in English, adeptly translated by the German-American historian, Christof Morrissey.

Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

2b) Edited by Alvyn Austin and Jamie S. Scott, Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: representing religion at home or abroad. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. 330 pp. $65.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

This review appeared in Church History, Vol. 75, March 2007, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.
Lately, Canadians have become ashamed of their missionary past. High profile court cases involving abuse by missionaries in institutions and in Aboriginal communities, or the public reaction to an exhibit on Canadian missionary work in Africa at the Royal Ontario Museum in the early 1990s, tended to give Canadians the sense that they knew all there was to know about Christian missionaries in Canada’s past, and what they knew was that they were bad. Fortunately scholars, like those whose work is included in Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous People: Representing Religion at home and abroad, have begun to bring this past out of the dark corners of Canadian consciousness and to subject it to more probing and nuanced analysis.

This collection of essays shows that the history of Canadian missions is both more complex and more significant internationally than many recognized. The book is divided into three sections dealing with home missions, the foreign field and material histories of mission work. Certain themes dominate, including the involvment of Christian missions with imperialism, the tensions surrounding indigenizing Christianity and the prominence of Canadian missionaries on the world stage. This latter point, along with the quality of the scholarship presented herein, and the importance of its subject matter, recommends this volume to a broad audience.

The role that missionaries played in imperialism is an obvious theme and one that emerges most clearly in the first section on home missions to Aboriginal people. Here is where many Canadians feel most uncomfortable and the first three articles, by Scott, Rutherdale and Edwards will confirm that discomfiture. Collectively, these articles explain the discursive formations of missionary work to Native Canadians that led to the invasive practices of residential schooling and forced cultural change. Gail Edwards’ article, in particular, explores the limits of the category ‘missionary’, one that excluded Aboriginal converts, even (or Edwards argues especially) when they married white missionaries and were the principal representatives of Christianity to their own people.

Neylan’s article in the same section, offers another view one from an Aboriginal perspective that simply refused to accept the Christian mantel that colonialism wore on the North Pacific coast. Rather, Neylan’s subject, Tsimshian Christian Arthur Wellington Clah, challenged the local agent of government control by asking: “Did you ever see a Christian take land from another Christian, and sell it, not letting him know anything about it?” Incorporating Christianity into Tsimshian culture, Clah drew conclusions about the Christianity of white people that defied the standard rhetoric of savagery and redemption.

Indigenizing Christianity was a process that preoccupied missionaries the world over. In written texts, the tendency remained to make the white missionary the hero and the convert the subject of shifting descriptors serving the needs of larger missionary narratives. Margo Gewurtz’ article analyzes the story of “Old Blind Chou” and reveals how gender and race were deployed to shape the story of Christian missions by ‘writing out’ the agency of women as well as that of non-white converts. By contrast, Brouwer’s article foregrounds the work of women but complicates our view of that work. While some women missionaries still embraced ‘motherhood’ as their activating metaphor (in this volume Rutherdale demonstrates this among missionaries in Canada’s arctic), Brouwer’s subjects, working between the two world wars, rejected the restrictions of ‘women’s work for women,’ and focused on preparing Christian men to claim power within emerging Indian, Chinese and Korean nations. Ironically, this connection between masculinity, indigenized Christianity and nationalism may have paved the way for secularism’s ascendancy. Austin’s study of Edward Wilson Wallace in China and A. Hamish Ion’s analysis of Christian missions under Japanese Imperialism furthers our understanding of the complex connections between Christianity and nationalism under imperialism.

For some time historical studies have explored the dialectic between headquarters and periphery in missionary circles, how policy developed in Toronto was transformed in remote locations like Kitamaat or Pangnirtung, Kangra or Vanuatu. The place of missionary narrative in shaping public opinion in Canada about imperialism, subaltern or indigenous peoples, however, remains largely a mystery. The third section of this volume, which examines ethnographic research and collecting by missionaries, offers opportunities to examine this question. Articles by France Lord, Barbara Lawson and Arthur Smith study ethnographic collections, demonstrating how these artifacts display the complexity of mission contact zones. France Lord shows how Jesuit collecting was oriented towards their own history and has had a profound impact on the writing of Canadian history. Lawson and Smith using Oceania collections offer us intriguing glimpses into how gendered colonial agendas influenced the science of collecting. The last chapter by Linfu Dong on the remarkable scholarship of James Mellon Menzies brings home the international importance of Canadian missionary work. Menzies’ archaeological study in Chinese history, language and theology, though directed to finding a monotheistic Chinese past, established scientific archaeology in China.

Canadian missionaries engaged in important work abroad. Whether establishing medical schools and teaching hospitals, systems of education or making important discoveries in Chinese history, Canadian missionaries worked with post-colonial agendas as well as with imperial ones. Interestingly, this appears to be less the case at home with Aboriginal people than on the international stage but further work may reveal more parallels. Nonetheless, the complexity of missionary relationships with subaltern peoples, with the creation of knowledge around gender, colonialism and nationalism indicate that far from a parochial preoccupation, Canadian mission history has much to say to an international audience.

Mary-Ellen Kelm, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia

3) Rolf Hochhuth Reassessed The following two contributions are paired in their reassessment of the German playwright Rolf Hochuth and his impact on literary and political culture in the 1960s.

a) Michael Feldkamp, Hochhuth Exposed.

This article appeared in the German edition of In The Vatican, and is here translated by John Jay Hughes, and reprinted by permission of the author

For over 40 years Rolf Hochhuth has been surrounded by scandal. He drew attention most recently with his expression of sympathy for the British historian and Holocaust denier, David Irving, in the journal Junge Freiheiton 18 Feb. 2005, managing to provoke indignation not only from the Chairman of the Central Jewish Council in Germany, Paul Spiegel (who called Hochhuth “an intellectual arsonist”), but also from Hochhuth’s fellow travellers on the Left.

Hochhuth’s notoriety stemmed from his provocative attacks on well-known and respected public figures. Examples from his often mediocre plays and stories are his charge that Winston Churchill arranged a murder, his attacks on the pharmaceutical industry, superficial tirades against “Ossies” [inhabitants of the former East Germany] in Hochhuth’s work “Wessies [West Germans] in Weimar,” slanders against business consultants in “McKinsey,” and back in 1978 his claim to have “toppled” the Minister-President of Baden Württemberg, Hans Filbinger. Hochhuth has repeatedly used self-invented legends to manipulate public opinion. After the fall of the Berlin wall we learned that at least in the case of Hans Filbinger, Hochhuth had used reports from the secret police of the German Democratic Republic. Now we learn that in his 1963 work, The Deputy, which catapulted its previously unknown author to worldwide fame overnight, Hochhuth used forged reports from Eastern European police sources.

The Pope’s “Silence”

Hochhuth’s play about Pope Pius XII and his supposed silence about Nazi Germany’s murder of millions of Jews won its author a place in the canon of the twenty most important literary works in German. ãThe Deputy,ä first performed on Feb. 20th, 1963, and published simultaneously in book form, sold over a million copies in the original German. It continues to shape the prevailing negative image of Pius XII as a man who, out of indifference to European Jews, fear of Communists, and for financial reasons, not only remained silent, but remained a cowardly spectator of Adolf Hitler’s murder of Europe’s Jews.

When Hochhuth made these charges, he said that he was availing himself of an author’s ãliterary license.ä He also claimed that he had received documents from priests in the Vatican, whose names he had promised not to disclose. A claim of this kind opens the door to unlimited speculation. Even Pius XII’s’ longtime secretary, Fr. Robert Leiber SJ, was charged with betrayal. Others suspected that Bruno Wüstenberg, a German priest in the papal Secretariat of State whom Pius XII had refused to promote because of homosexual tendencies, had sought revenge.

Soviet propaganda

One can speculate endlessly about Hochhuth’s informants. But his charges were clearly not new. They had been launched long ago by communist propagandists in the Soviet Union. As early as the winter of 1944-45, shortly before the end of the Second World War, the Soviet newspaper Pravda called the Pope a fascist and an ally of Hitler. On Jan. 9, 1945 Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, called such charges “completely laughable.” A few months later the Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow charged that the Vatican had protected Nazi Germany and engaged in light hearted attempts to evade its responsibility for crimes against the Jews. Finally historians in the Soviet Union, under a pretense of objectivity, made selective use of the sources, which they interpreted in one direction only.

It was in the interest of the Soviet Union to undermine the open and worldwide regard for the Pope and the Catholic Church, in Germany especially. For it was Pius XII who, as Nuncio in Germany after its loss of World War I, helped the new Weimar democracy to achieve worldwide respect. Later, as Pope, he rejected the charge of German collective guilt for the Second World War and the Holocaust. And he intervened successfully with the victorious western allies to free Germany quickly from the bonds of military occupation, so that it could get on its feet economically and emerge from political isolation.

The Vatican’s reaction to Soviet slanders was prompt. In 1959-1960, at the very time that Rolf Hochhuth was in Rome carrying on his research for The Deputy, Alberto Giovannetti, a priest on the staff of the papal Secretariat of State and subsequently papal observer to the United Nations in New York, was permitted to make use of extensive documentation for his book, The Vatican and the War, which was published in Italian in 1960 and the year following in German. He emphasized the Pope’s efforts for peace, which had brought him worldwide recognition during his lifetime, as well as thanks from the State of Israel and from numerous Jewish organizations both in the United States and in Europe.

The year 1963 brought a radical change. Hochhuth’s dubious and scurrilous charges are still being discussed today. In the summer of 1963 the Vatican pointed out “numerous similarities” between Hochhuth’s play and “the usual communist propaganda against the Church and the Pope,” among them the charge of a “common crusade with Hitler against the Soviet Union,” and the claim that the “enormous economic power” of the Holy See and the Jesuit order explained their abandonment of Christian moral principles. The West German government expressed its “deepest regret” for such attacks on Pius XII, since he “had on various occasions protested racial persecution by the Third Reich and had thus saved as many Jews as possible from the hands of their persecutors.”

Pope Paul VI summoned a group of scholars who produced a collection of more than seven thousand documents which is a model of its kind. The work remains essential reading today for anyone studying Vatican policy during the Second World War. However, scholarly works find little interest in comparison with ever new slanders. In 1999 John Cornwell used falsified citations to convict Pius XII of anti-Semitism. In 2002 the American historian Suzanne Zucotti made use of one of Hochhuth’s fictionalized scenes in a scholarly book. In 2003 Daniel J. Goldhagen, then a faculty member at Harvard, disseminated further historical falsehoods through the book market. These authors made no secret of their hope that their “revelations” would block the beatification of Pius XII. It has still not been possible to conduct a serious scholarly discussion of these matters “sine ira et studio.” Debate remains on the level of politics.
On January 25th, 2007, Mihai Pacepa, a former double agent for the Romanian secret service and the American CIA, who for several months had been reporting about his activities in the National Review, disclosed that immediately after Pius XII’s death the Soviet KGB had launched an extensive campaign of defamation against the Pope, in order to undermine his moral authority. Pacepa wrote that he was put in charge of this effort, and that he had sent Romanian agents to the Vatican disguised as priests. They gained access to the archives and copied documents which, carefully falsified, were made available to Hochhuth, who was then conducting research in Rome.

The widespread infiltration of West German journalists and the distribution of forged documents by the KGB and the security police of East Germany, was known long before the fall of the Berlin wall. Pacepa’s report is wholly credible. It fits like a missing piece in the puzzle of communist propaganda and disinformation aimed at discrediting the Catholic Church and its Pontiff. That Paceba is unable, after forty years, to remember just which Vatican archive was the source for the falsified documents does nothing to destroy his credibility.

For more than forty years the Pope’s “silence” has supplied headlines for the media. The same media however have never questioned Hochhuth’s silence, even though he still refuses to identify his Vatican contacts. While Hochhuth is clearly concerned for his own good name, and that of his Roman informants, he has never hesitated to defame others. But his readers should know that his readiness to tamper with historical veracity is by now well established. They can’t claim that they haven’t been warned against such a long-term manipulator of the facts. Scholars know well that the only answer to bad history is better history. But it certainly seems that Rolf Hochhuth has had a long innings with his inferior product.

Michael Feldkamp, Berlin.

b) Nadine Ritzer, Alles nur Theater? Zur rezeption von Rolf Hochhuths “Der Stellvertreter” in der Schweiz, 1963/1964 (Fribourg: Academic Press Fribourg, 2006).

The German playwright, Rolf Hochhuth, is back in the news. After the Miniserpräsident of Baden-Württemberg, Günther Oettinger, gave a eulogy for his predecessor, Hans Filbinger, earlier this month, Hochhuth attacked both Oettinger and the deceased Filbinger, calling Filbinger a “sadistic Nazi,” who had carried out death sentences after the formal cessation of hostilities in 1945. In 2006, the conservative American journal, The National Review, printed an article by the Rumanian defector, Ion Mihai Pacepa, alleging that the work that launched Hochhuth’s career, The Deputy, was the product of a KGB disinformation campaign that had also succeeded in smuggling hundreds of documents out of the Vatican archive and library. While the reality in both cases is most likely much less dramatic (the accounts of both Hochhuth and Pacepa contain significant inaccuracies and are likely to be largely untrue), they underscore the pivotal role that Hochhuth played in cementing German discourses on “overcoming the past,” or Vergangenheitsbewältigung, to use the German term.

In this highly polarized and ideological context, the wonderfully sober and balanced first book by the young Swiss historian, Nadine Ritzer, comes as a welcome relief. This readable account is refreshingly free of polemic. Focusing on the reception of Hochhuth’s play, The Deputy, in Switzerland in 1963 and 1964, this book casts Hochhuth neither as a heroic crusader seeking to expose the truth about the Catholic past nor as a craven villain beholden to ideological interests. Instead, her book represents one of the first recent significant efforts to historicize the entire Hochhuth controversy. In his play, Hochhuth alleged that Pope Pius XII maintained an icy silence in the wake of the Holocaust. Ritzer places the charged discussions surrounding this work and these claims within the larger contexts of the discussions regarding Christian anti-Judaism, the confrontation of Catholics with the recent past during the years of National Socialist hegemony in Europe and finally, the coming to terms with a darker chapter in Swiss history, the turning away of more than 4000 Jewish refugees between 1942 and 1943 under the pretext that “the boat is full.”

To many North American readers unfamiliar with the history behind Hochhuth’s production, it might seem something of a stretch to devote an entire book to the reception of Hochhuth’s play in Switzerland, a nation that has often lived in the shadow of its larger German speaking neighbor to the north. After all, there are sundry books and articles devoted to the controversies that Hochhuth’s play engendered in Germany, many penned in the immediate wake of these controversies between 1963 and 1965. Ritzer is, of course, Swiss, her book the result of her Magisterarbeit written at the bilingual university in Fribourg. Her archival materials newspaper articles, the records from the relevant theater companies and not least the papers of Hochhuth himself all stem from her home country.

But as Ritzer shows, there are compelling historical reasons to look at the response to The Deputy in Switzerland as a critical and until now, long overlooked and overdue chapter in a much larger saga. Following its initial run in Berlin beginning in February 1963, The Deputy was next produced on the stage in Basel long before performances in Paris, London and New York or even in other German cities. It was also produced in the smaller locales of Zofringen, Olten and Aarau. The militancy of the protests before and during some of the productions in Basel rivaled and even dwarfed those of Berlin. Young Catholics set off stink bombs during the productions and picketed the theater waving inflammatory signs. One Italian group even threatened the bomb the theater, the synagogue and Free Masons’ Center, claiming that all three groups stood behind the production in a perfidious conspiracy. As Hochhuth was to comment in February, 1964: “I experienced the largest and also the most angry demonstrations against the Deputy in Basel, but at the same time such kindness, so much heartfelt sympathy as at no other location.” Finally, Hochhuth relocated to Switzerland, where he still resides, to coincide with the production of The Deputy, a move which triggered intense debates about his residency permit.

Ritzer convincingly shows how the often bitter Catholic reaction to The Deputy reopened, at least temporarily, longstanding fissures in Swiss society. This play by a German Protestant reawakened Catholic anxieties regarding the Kulturkampf, which was waged not only in Germany but also in Switzerland, in which the Catholic minority in the second half of the 19th century had been subjected to repressive and illiberal measures by the liberal Protestant majority. The Deputy reactivated the Catholic milieu. Catholic leaders took pains to appear as a united, monolithic front, even if Catholic public opinion was not completely in accord on how to respond to this apparent danger to confessional peace in Switzerland. But at the same time, she makes clear that this call to arms was little more than a convenient device with which to rally the faithful, since the specter of a renewedKulturkampf bore little resemblance to the realities of Swiss society in the 1960s, an era in which the religious subcultures were eroding.

Perhaps most interesting for American readers is the skillful manner in which she weaves the reception of The Deputy into the discussions about the complicity of the Swiss government in the genocide. Hochhuth’s work moved the focus of the public away from the perpetrators to those of the bystanders, and it was only logical that in Switzerland, not only Pius XII but the Swiss nation would come under critical scrutiny. The Swiss government refused to rehabilitate Paul Grüninger, the Swiss policeman from St. Gallen who had procured papers for more than 1000 Jews to entire Switzerland, a step which triggered critical debate once Grüninger was honored abroad for his efforts. The official rehabilitation took place only in 1995, 23 years after his death.

Early in her work, Ritzer provides a brief sketch of earlier attempts to examine the Catholic past under National Socialist rule. She correctly points to the pivotal role played by individuals such as Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde and others in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This is a subject worthy of monographs in their own right and to date, at least three historians, including this reviewer, are preparing significant scholarly treatments of the examination of the Catholic past in the Federal Republic. But Hochhuth was the culmination of the process, the individual who left his indelible thumbprint on the discussions for the next forty years. In this respect, Ritzer’s adept historicization of Hochhuth’s work serves as a pioneer work for others charting these turbulent waters.

Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

4 a) One of our members, Marc Raphael, of the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, draws attention to a new book he has edited: The Representation of the Holocaust in Literature and Film. This is a second volume, and is published by the Department of Religion, College of William and Mary. See http://www.wm.edu/religion/publications.php

b) The perceptive article “What happened to Christian Canada?” by Mark Noll, which appeared in Church History last June (see note in December issue of this Newsletter) has now been republished as a separate pamphlet by Regent College Publishing. This insightful essay makes timely observations about the shifts in church support in Canada, and would be most valuable as a study guide for church discussion groups everywhere. The ISBN is 1-57383-495-X, see www.regentbookstore.com, 5800 University Boulevard, Vancouver B.C. V6T 2E4 Canada

With all best wishes for the summer holidays
John Conway jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Contents:

1) Book reviews

a) Linker, The Theocons: Secular America under siege
b) ed. M. Gailus and W. Krogel, German Protestants and Nationalism 1930-2000.

2) Journal articles:

a) Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Volume 19, no.2, 2006
b) Steigmann-Gall’s response in the Journal of Contemporary History

1a) Damon Linker, The Theocons: Secular America under Siege, New York: Doubleday, 2006. 272 pp. $26.00.

We are deluged with books on the religious right. A few of them are serious studies but most are journalistic polemics, and they acknowledge that President George W. Bush has consciously blurred the line between religion and politics. He courts the support of the “Christian” right for his policies, proudly affirms its “social issues,” channels government funds to its charities through his “faith-based initiative,” and has drawn heavily on its personalities and academic institutions to staff his administration. The election of 2004 seemed to cement this process. Conservative Republicans gained firm control of the Congress and Mr. Bush was busily packing the Supreme Court and Federal judiciary with like-minded jurists. The U.S. seemed inexorably headed toward becoming a one-party state.

Many feared that the conservative resurgence with its close ties to the religious right would result in a theocratic system. Damon Linker’s insightful study of the sources of the Bush administration’s religious advocacy helps us to understand what had happened. Most importantly, he shifts the focus from the televangelists, megachurch preachers, and religion-political pressure groups. Although the Protestant “evangelicals” played an important role in the rise of theological politics, its overtly religious policies and rhetoric actually were inspired by an ideology derived from Roman Catholicism. It provided Bush and the Republicans with a nondenominational language and morality that had a wide appeal and did much to unify the conservative movement. They also recognized the ideology’s potential to permeate American political culture and eventually bring an end to the separation of church and state as we have known it.

In other words, a comprehensive religious ideology drives the Bush administration, one that Linker labels “theoconservatism.” It maintains that a secular society is both undesirable and unsustainable, since the US for most of its history was a thoroughly Christian nation. It was founded on absolute moral principles that made no sense outside of a religious context. However, liberal elites in the nation’s educational system and media were responsible for the secular drift of American culture since the 1960s, as they consciously foisted their corrupt views on the nation. The practical results of this “secularization” are a sex-saturated popular culture, the collapse of important social institutions such as traditional marriage, a separation of law from religiously-based moral principles, and the rise of a “culture of death” (abortion and euthanasia). The only solution is to bring America “back” into line with the moral strictures of biblical religion, and this can be achieved through the political process, by the election of “Christian” politicians who will advance religion in public life, by conservative judicial appointments, constitutional amendments, and popular referenda like anti-gay marriage initiatives.

Linker traces how 1960s radicals like Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak moved to the right in the 1970s and early 1980s. Novak theologically grounded democratic capitalism in a synthesis of conservative Catholic religiosity, liberal democratic politics, and free markets. Neuhaus adopted a revolutionary populism that called for the overthrow of the nation’s liberal secularist elite in the name of the traditionalist Judeo-Christian piety supposedly affirmed by ordinary Americans. This would be achieved by “reclothing” the “naked public square” with a reinvigoration of religiosity, one that adopted the “public language of moral purpose.”

With the publication of The Naked Public Square in 1984 and its enthusiastic reception both in the evangelical and Roman Catholic community (in the interest of full disclosure I should state that I was one of the few Christian scholars at the time who called attention to its specious argumentation in a review published in the New Oxford Review), Neuhaus had equipped the newly politicized Protestant evangelicals (i.e., the new Christian right) with arguments and rhetoric that enabled them to contend more effectively for political power. In the next decade the theoconservatives engaged in a stealth campaign to build the institutions and form the alliances that would provide them with the means to capture cultural and political power and ultimately propel their ideas into the White House. They founded magazines, institutes, and think tanks as well as secured reliable funding for their work, allied their movement with powerful conservative forces within the Catholic church, and engineered a potent theological and ideological alliance between these conservative Catholics and Protestant evangelicals. To put their ideas into action they followed the example of their ideological cousins, the neoconservatives, and piggy-backed on the neocon network.

A critical event was the founding of the journal First Things in 1990 (Linker was its editor from May 2001 to February 2005 and thus brings an insider’s perspective to the discussion. He would now appear to be distancing himself from his former colleagues). Also significant was attracting Catholic neocon George Weigel to the cause and Neuhaus’ own conversion from Lutheranism to Catholicism and reordination as a priest in 1991. They made excellent use of Pope John Paul II’s opposition to abortion to attract both evangelicals and Catholics, and through careful diplomacy carried on by both Neuhaus and evangelical luminaries Charles Colson and Carl Henry, a manifesto entitled “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: A Christian Mission for the Third Millennium” was issued in 1994. It set out an ambitious political agenda using concepts, terms, arguments, and rhetoric derived from the writings of Neuhaus, Weigel, Novak, and the current pope.

The ECT joined together the intellectual heft of Catholicism with the zealous religiosity of the evangelicals, overcame much of the mutual suspicion and animosity of the two communities, and empowered the ideological agenda of the theocons. Catholics and evangelicals became allies and friends in an “ecumenism of the trenches” (Colson) in the culture war against moral anarchy. Their vision of a political future in which the most orthodox and traditionalist Christians would set the public tone and policy agenda was to find fulfillment in the election of George W. Bush.

Then follows a long and fascinating account of the rise of the theocons to political prominence and their enormous influence within the Bush administration. For one thing, they were staunch supporters of the “war on terror” and George Weigel in particular marshaled arguments from the “just war” tradition to give Bush the moral and theological encouragement to launch the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Interestingly, theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas spectacularly dissented from the war policy and resigned from the First Things masthead (not mentioned in the book), but his was the lone voice of reason within the theocon community. Related to this (also not mentioned) is the statement issued by 60 prominent neocon and theocon intellectuals in February 2002, “What We’re Fighting For: A Letter from America,” that enthusiastically defended the war on terror and the response in May signed by 103 German academics, “A World of Justice and Peace Would Be Different,” that pulled no punches in rebutting it. It is strangely reminiscent of the German and British academics and theologians who hurled statements at each other in 1914 justifying their countries’ action in World War I. How little our modern-day conservatives have learned from history.

Linker has much more to say about the theocons’ activities that space limitations preclude discussing, but fortunately they were not able to achieve their entire agenda. Bush’s fumbling administration and the Democratic electoral resurgence in 2006 have put major roadblocks in the way. He also suggests ways to combat the movement. He exposes its numerous historical fantasies, shows how its rationalistic moral absolutism is incapable of being the unifying ideology for a liberal democratic nation, and explains how theoconservative public religion damages the American nation and its place in the world. Moreover, it is harmful to the church as well, as its moral ambition gets corrupted by political ambition and the political authorities will manipulate Christians to gain their support

He concludes with a statement that every reader should take to heart: “The privatization of piety creates social space for every American to worship God as he or she wishes, without state interference. In return for this freedom, believers are expected only to give up the ambition to political rule in the name of their faith.” It is what he labels the liberal bargain that secures social peace and freedom for all Americans.

Richard V. Pierard, Hendersonville, North Carolina

1b) Manfred Gailus and Wolfgang Krogel (ed.), Von der babylonischen Gefangenschaft der Kirche im Nationalen: Regionalstudien zu Protestantismus, Nationalsozialismus und Nachkriegsgeschichte 1930 bis 2000. Berlin: Wichern Verlag, 2006. Pp. 550.

Behind the long German title of Gailus’ and Krogel’s edited volume hides a fact-filled, detailed study of regional German church history from the beginning of the Nazi era until the end of the twentieth century. (Both men are historians: Manfred Gailus at Berlin’s Technische University, and Wolfgang Krogel at the archive of the Provincial Church of Berlin-Brandenburg.) The 19 substantive contributions, framed by an excellent Introduction and Epilogue by Manfred Gailus (who seems to be the intellectual driving force behind this volume), all fall into the particular field of “Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte.” A literal translation would render this phrase as “contemporary church history,” but that would misname its specific character: It refers to the study of the impact of Nazism on the German (Protestant) churches, including the postwar history of church and theology.

What distinguishes Von der babylonischen Gefangenschaft from earlier studies is its focus on the history of different regions, or better, on the specific contexts of the various Protestant Provincial Churches (Landeskirchen). It offers the reader an in-depth view of the complex interactions between divergent groups and individuals within each “Landeskirche” and the way in which these groups vied for power and influence during the Nazi dictatorship and the postwar years. This volume moves away from the earlier grand designs that tried to present the entire “Kirchenkampf” (Church Struggle) across the national spectrum (e.g. Meier and Scholder). What is emphasizes instead is the importance of finely-tuned local and regional histories.

It needs to be stated that in the last few decades German scholars have produced a plethora of local and site-specific church studies. Yet, most have remained unnoticed because they are buried in small regional publications, booklets, or newsletters of archives, churches and professional organizations. Von der babylonischen Gefangenschaft makes their accumulated findings available to an interested public. The material is worked into narrative overviews for each Provincial Church, deepened by new and original research, and generously footnoted for the experts. For this accomplishment alone, the present volume is worth having in one’s library.

The long German title which, at a first glance, rather looks forbidding indicates a refreshing departure from more conventional “Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte.” The main title, “Of the Babylonian Captivity of the Church in Nationalism,” suggests a close link between German nationalism and Protestant mentality. Substantiating this thesis is part of a larger project Manfred Gailus has been pursuing (see, for example, his Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus [Köln 2001] and his co-edited volume with Hartmut Lehmann, Nationalprotestantische Mentalitäten [Göttingen 2005]). As a modern historian (rather than church historian), Gailus argues that a fuller picture on the role of the Protestant churches can only be gained by understanding and incorporating the influence of larger social forces–the “Protestant social milieu,” as he calls it. Given the general mentality of national Protestants in the early parts of the twentieth century – monarchic, conservative, state-loyal and obedient–it is no small wonder that parishioners and their spiritual leaders were ill-prepared to resist the ideology of National Socialism and were, instead, swept up by the (messianic) promises of national renewal.

Gailus’ suggested approach requires moving away from depicting the “Kirchenkampf” solely in terms of an internal church struggle, in which members aligned with the Confessing Church fought against the German Christians and against the intrusions of the Nazi-State. The volume’s subtitle also reflects these changes. Its seemingly inconspicuous listing of the three terms, “Protestantism, National Socialism and Postwar History,” points to two insights: First, we need to focus on continuity (not discontinuity) between the war and postwar years and not interpret the year 1945 as a clear break with the past; second, no study today should disregard the history of the field of “Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte” itself. The various waves of “coming to terms with the past” and memory politics (which Norbert Frei has so aptly called “Vergangenheitspolitik“) within the Protestant churches and theology after 1945 are as important to study as the years between 1933 and 1945. In other words, when scholars pour over archival materials, memoirs, and secondary work, they need to be aware of how“Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte” has presented its “case” in previous decades. Gailus argues that one has to “historicize” the research itself. Eye-witnesses and scholars of earlier generations have certainly advanced our knowledge of the German Church Struggle, but today one has to be aware that their work itself was an expression of the social conditions and theological paradigms of their time and that, not too seldom, they were guided by personal interests. The field itself, hence, needs critical introspection.

Von der babylonischen Gefangenschaft is a far cry from earlier works on the Church Struggle, especially if one travels as far back as to the 1950s, when people like Wilhelm Niemöller portrayed the Nazi era in the stark terms of a righteous Confessing Church on the one hand and, on the other, a corrupted and fallen church. Niemöller, as Norbert Friedrich points out in his chapter on the church of Westfalia, was not only a motor behind the early “Kirchenkampfforschung,” but also a “decisive interpreter of his own family history,” especially with regard to interpreting favorably the role of his brother Martin in the Confessing Church (p. 273f). Other publications on the “Kirchenkampf” were guided by hagiographic interests (lifting the few righteous resisters on pedestals at the expense of a more accurate description of the silence of the majority) or were apologetic in character, especially among those men who had been complicit with the Nazi regime. Gailus summarizes well the new departure he envisions: “Das Plädoyer für mehr Historisierung der Kirchenkampfforschung meint vor diesen Hintergründen, die um 1933 akut werdende schwere Identitätskrise des Protestantismus in längere Zeiträume einzubetten . . . . Die politische Zäsur von 1945 markiert in dieser Langzeitperspektive keinen wirklich scharfen Bruch mit der herkömmlichen national-protestantischen Mentalität” (p. 17). His plea for the broadening and historicization of the research on the German Church Struggle is put to test in the volume’s nineteen individual studies on the Provincial Churches.

Appropriate for a volume that emphasizes regional studies, the contributions are arranged according to regions: the North (with churches like Schleswig Holstein, Hamburg and Hanover), Prussia (Berlin, Saxony, Westfalia, Rhineland), the Center (Thuringia) and the South and Southwest (Hessen-Nassau, Bavaria, Württemberg). Originally intended to include more “Landeskirchen,” the editors regret that neither the churches in the Eastern provinces (Ostpreussen [East Prussia], Silesia and Pomerania) nor some heavily Nazified churches like Braunschweig and Mecklenburg could be covered. This indeed might be regrettable. However, given the size of the current volume (over 500 pages), striving for completeness may have simply overwhelmed the reader. As it stands, wanting to read all entries (as this reviewer did!) is already a daunting task. Clearly, this book is not meant for a general audience, not even for a lay audience with a general interest in the German church struggle, since it is too detailed, too rich in information and too complex in presentation. But one may want to purchase it simply for its value as a reference work for select churches–and that, too, would be money well spent.

Von der babylonischen Gefangenschaft is an invaluable book for anyone interested in getting a more precise and accurate picture of how messianic expectations and national renewal variously tempted, blinded and convinced so many Christians in the 1930s. The various chapters trace individual people as well as church networks and associations (from the “Bruderräte” to Nazi-sympathetic “Glaubensbewegungen“) through the years of the Nazi regime. It shows how Christians became compromised and complicit and how, after the war, they tried to exculpate, excuse or explain themselves. Along the way, the reader will also meet individual church leaders, synods, parishioners and theologians who resisted the Nazis from the very beginning. Others had a change of heart and mind at critical turning points of the Nazi dictatorship (for example, after the public performances of the Deutsche Christen, which turned off many churchgoers, or after the introduction of the Aryan Paragraph). Yet others remained loyal to aspects of Nazism until the end of the war, when German war fortunes had indisputably turned sour.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of these regional studies is the contributors’ unflinching look at what I would call the “gray zone” of human behavior: Christians made all kinds of compromises with the regime, steering a middle course that did not commit them too strongly either way. They became guilty more through passive silence than active participation (though plenty had actively participated as well, as these studies demonstrate). To the “gray zone” belong the uncountable and small day-to-day moral failures and betrayals: a head turned when neighbors disappeared; a public sermon not delivered when it would have been necessary to speak out; compassion not extended to those deemed ãotherä and “enemy” by the regime. In the churches, too many parishes, synods, bishops and theologians were caught up in their self-referential, unproductive, internal fights–their Babylonian captivity! And when the war ended, Christian communities concerned themselves with the task of self-purification. Gaining permission from the Allies to purge themselves, their denazification efforts quickly pushed aside questions of guilt and complicity.

The individual contributors to this volume refrain from making explicit moral judgments and from entering theological and ethical discussions. This is due to their shared training and interest as historians, whether they are employed at universities, in archives or parishes, or as church administrators. Depending on one’s perspective, one may welcome such restraint or find it unsatisfactory. However, despite the professional distance that the contributors maintain, the presentation of the material itself raises a number of moral dilemmas. Why were the Nazis greeted with such high expectations by so many Protestant Christians? Why did so much of the church discussions during the 1930s focus on preserving of one’s own rights and autonomy, while one’s fellow citizens disappeared? Why such a myopic, largely self-interested view? Why did the churches after the war not speak out more strongly for justice (that would have put perpetrators on trial) rather than trying to whitewash the culpability of individual members and the collective church body? What happened to antisemites in the church after 1945? These are relevant questions a perpetrator society needs to ask itself, especially as it considers the collapse of those cultural and religious institutions that, ideally and in principle, should have upheld standards of morality in times of crisis.

That religious institutions often do not move beyond the interests of their own in-group (at the neglect of the socially excluded) no longer surprises today. But it would have been good to occasionally address these issues head-on and to explore the contemporary relevance of the particularities of regional studies. Individual chapters come close to such a discussion only when they address particularly virulent antisemitic church leaders or the postwar German church debates on the Schuldfrage, the question of guilt (e.g. Björn Mensing for the Bavarian church, Gerhard Lindemann for Hanover, and Rainer Hering for Hamburg).

The nature of this edited volume makes it impossible to summarize, let alone critically assess each contribution. But it is important to commend the editors for pulling together chapters that are consistently of high scholarly quality. Equally important is the fact that none of the chapters centers on the grand moments of the “Kirchenkampf,” on the well-known confessional debates (like Barmen), or on the hagiographic portraiture of such towering figures like Wurm and Meiser, Dibelius and Niemoeller. Thus, this volume thankfully avoids repetition of information available elsewhere. What the various contributions share in common, instead, is their focus on the many small groups of ministers and parishioners that formed in alliance with or in opposition to National Socialism; they focus on the biographies of lesser known figures in the Provincial Churches as well as on the debates among laity and clergy that form the backbone of parishes and church life. The big themes and recognizable figures do not, of course, disappear from view, but they function in these texts as markers and background to the new materials introduced here.

For example, the reader will learn about the church of Lübeck (which, in 1976, was merged with two other small churches into the “Nordelbische Landeskirche”) and its “Hauptpastoren” Helmuth Johnson (NS-compromised), Axel Werner Kühl (chair of the “Jungdeutsche Orden”) and Wilhelm Jannasch, an outspoken critic of the NS-regime. The chapter on Berlin, for example, does not focus, say, on Dibelius, but presents Karl Themel, a pastor who had embraced nationalist notions of race research. Joachim Hossenfelder, the Reichsleiter of the “Deutsche Christen,” is put into the context of the small Eutiner Landeskirche, which, in 1954, reemployed him despite his blemished past. With respect to the Hamburg Lutheran church, we hear, for instance, about pastor Wilhelmi, who, by 1960, had finished a critical book on the church’s past, and how then- bishop Karl Witte prevented its publication because it shed unfavorable light on Franz Tügel. Tügel, bishop of Hamburg during the Nazi regime, had displayed open sympathies for the NSDAP and the German Christians. Wilhelmi died before his work was posthumously published in 1968. Or–to mention one last example–attention is not paid to Martin Niemöller, but to the biography of his lesser known brother, Wilhelm. We hear about Wilhelm’s odd protest against the decision to cancel his NSDAP membership in 1933; in 1934, when the decision was rescinded, he rejoined the Nazi party, and from 1939 to 1945 he served as a soldier on the Eastern Front.

Gailus offers suggestions on how to think about the larger issues and themes that emerge within this kind of specialized research. Envisioning a new direction for the study of the contemporary history of German Protestantism, he lists four ideas: ãhistoricizationä as a way of investigating the field of “Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte” itself and of re-conceptualizing historical periods; ãcontextualizationä as a means of embedding official church proclamations and theological/confessional statements into their larger social milieu; ãregionalizationä as a way of taking into account geographical and local differences in order to better understand attitudes and behaviors; and finally, “interdisciplinarity” as a multi-faceted approach to drawing a comprehensive picture. The few examples Gailus employs to illustrate these categories show him to be open to such new perspectives as gender studies, discursive analysis and auto/biographical research.

Gailus’ vision, however, is not fully realized in this edited volume since these categories are employed unevenly by the individual contributors. With respect to “regionalization,” there is remarkable consistency among the chapters, and this is the true strength of this volume. But in terms of “historicization” and “contextualization,” most contributors pursue a rather conventional approach: They provide historical frameworks to the particulars of their research and survey briefly the relevant literature. Only a few authors address the kind of broader methodological issues relating yo ãhistoricizationä (e.g. Thomas Großbölting, Peter Noss and Norbert Friedrich) and “contextualization” (e.g. Thomas Seidel and Markus Heim) that Gailus has in mind. When it comes to reaching out to “interdisciplinarity,” there is a striking lacuna. Although sociological data are sometimes incorporated, other approaches, like gender analysis, appear only in Rainer Hering’s piece on the church in Hamburg and briefly in Thomas Seidel’s contribution to Thuringia.

Given the chronic underrepresentation of women in this field, and given the domination by men in the German (regional) churches, the absence of critical reflections on male discourse, male biographies, masculinity and the disappearance of women is regrettable.
It is fair to say that the framework of Von der babylonischen Gefangenschaft points to a new and welcome direction for re-conceptualizing contemporary German church history, but that the individual contributors do not yet fully realize the promise of such a refreshing approach. Still, the volume is a significant contribution to the field.

Björn Krondorfer, St Mary’s College of Maryland

2) Journal articles:

a) The most recent issue of the most notable journal in our field of Contemporary Church History, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, in Göttingen, breaks new ground in seeking to be as bilingual as possible. The latest issue, Volume 19, no. 2, is devoted to “New American Perspectives on the History of the Churches in Germany at the End of the 19th and in the 20th Century”, and contains six articles in English by younger American scholars, several of whom are already subscribers to this Newsletter. It is therefore good to see these contributions, which demonstrate that interest and research into contemporary German church history continues to flourish in North America. It will also be a signal to our colleagues in Germany not to allow themselves to believe that only German scholars can approach this subject. Hopefully it will encourage them to welcome the help they can get from the different perspectives from across the Atlantic. As the journal’s editor, Professor Gerhard Besier, now based in Dresden, rightly remarks: “It is particularly interesting to see the plurality of methodological approaches, such as found in gender studies, the history of ideas, as well as the more traditional political or church political studies”.

Martin Menke of Rivier College, Nashua, New Hampshire contributes a study of German Catholic identities during the Weimar Republic, when they shared the Protestant view that each nation has a special place in God’s plan of salvation. The secular chauvinistic nationalism of the war period was rejected, but rather a stress was laid on the German Catholics’ cultural mission linked to the mediaeval past, instead of the discredited Prussianism of the Wilhelmine Empire. In this sense, Menke suggests, German Catholics, like their brethren in France’s Third Republic, became the defenders of historic values and Christian traditions. This provided the impetus for the European union movement after the second world war.

Beth Griech-Pollele’s book on Cardinal Galen appeared in 2002. She now adds to this account with a short study of Galen’s kind of nationalism, with its strong hostility to any left wing views. In this belief, Galen had some sympathy for National Socialism’s decisive battle against communism, and also against excessive Jewish influences on society. He went on believing that Nazism could be ãrescuedä to be a Christian bastion against such subversive forces. He did not protest the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews, and was led, as she has already shown, to protest the so-called “Euthanasia” programme, principally because it affected good Catholics. But once the Nazis were overthrown, Galen could urge the reconstruction of Germany – and Europe- on Christian Democratic lines, even while silent about the Nazis’ crimes.

Maria Mitchell examines the political activities of German Catholics in the Rhineland after 1945, and shows how the basis was laid for a partnership with Protestants to form the new Christian Democratic Party. Both Catholics and Protestants had to deal with their discredited past during the inter-war years, as well as confront the danger presented by Soviet Communism.

Susanne Brown-Fleming has recently produced The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience which is a study of the American-German Cardinal Aloysius Muench, who was apppointed to be the Vatican representative in Germany after 1945, and later became Nuncio. She now extends her survey to cover more about his support for the convicted Nazi war criminals in the 1950s. His opinion was that these men were the victims of a deliberate campaign of revenge launched by Americans of Jewish origins – an opinion shared by too many Germans. She does not however assess how significant Muench’s views were in influencing policy. American leniency was politically advisable even without the counsel of this turbulent priest.

Lisa Zwicker of Indiana University gives us a short account of the Catholic students in fraternities in the pre-1914 German universities, and their clash of loyalties between their religious beliefs and their ardent nationalism. Like many other students, they were drawn to take up duelling or other supposed masculine sports, which were frowned on by the church. But too many of them perished in the trenches anyway.

JonDavid Wyneken of Concordia University, Portland gives us an excellent account of the nationalistic stances of Bishop Theophil Wurm, the Protestant leader of Württemberg, who like Galen in Münster, also resented the Allied military occupation, and sought to alleviate the sufferings of his German followers, and thereby to avoid confronting their often Nazi pasts. It is small wonder that Wurm should have turned to such movements as Moral Rearmament, which urged an anti-Communist pan-European reconstruction, and reconciliation at the expense of justice for the victims.

Amongst the German-language papers is one by Matthias Kroeger on Bonhoeffer’s continuing and prophetic influence, which he believes goes beyond his witness as a martyr of the German resistance. His call for Christians to become mature and autonomous, and his criticism of ecclesiastical claims to authority, continues to have wider relevance. So too his plea for new vocabularies to proclaim the Christian faith continues to be of value. This was a fitting tribute on the occasion of Bonhoeffer’s 100th anniversary in February of last year.

b) As forecast in our February issue, Richard Steigmann-Gall has now written a full response to the critics of his book The Holy Reich in the April issue of the Journal of Contemporary History, (published in England) in which he comments on the weaknesses of these critics’ approach, and also addresses the larger issue of political religion theory. Those interested should follow up this debate in full This journal is readily available on line. Steigmann-Gall’s address is rsteigma@kent.edu

With every best wish to you all
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Please note that your comments on the contents of these Newsletters are always welcome. But please also note that you should NOT press the reply button, unless you want your views to be shared by all 500 subscribers. Instead, please send them to me at my own address = jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) Bishop George Bell. A portrait in letters
b) Protestants in East Germany
c) Munro, Hitler’s Bavarian Antagonist
d) Theologie und Vergangenheitsbewältigung

2) Book chapter: Mensing, A Lutheran pastor’s resistance
3) Archive Note: The Vatican archives
4) Journal article, Coppa, Papal biographies

1) Book reviews:

a) Peter Raina, Bishop George Bell. The greatest Churchman. A portrait in Letters, London: Churches together in Britain and Ireland 2006, 377 pp. ISBN 085169 332 6

It is now generally acknowledged that Bishop George Bell of Chichester was one of the foremost protagonists of the Church of England in the first half of the last century. His leadership in the Ecumenical Movement, resulting in the establishment of the World Council of Churches, his championing of the anti-Nazi forces in the German Evangelical Church, his sympathetic assistance to refugees, interned aliens and pacifists, his resolute calls for moderation in war aims or the practice of aerial bombing, were all notable achievements. They led to the recognition that here was a churchman who rightly insisted that the policies of governments should be brought to the bar of moral conscience, and that the Church should take a leading role in raising public and political ethical issues.

Unfortunately Bell died shortly after leaving office in 1958, and so never wrote his autobiography. But he left behind a meticulously arranged archive. consisting of the thousands of letters he wrote or received during his long life of ministry in the church. His authorized biographer, Canon Ronald Jasper, used many of these letters but rarely quoted them in full. His well-received account appeared in 1967, but has never been republished. Forty years later, Peter Raina, who is obviously a great admirer of Bell’s character and witness, has now compiled a further selection of Bell’s letters, both in print and facsimile, which provide a closer picture of the bishop’s activities, all the more since we are given the full texts to read. Necessarily his choice has to be limited. Principally he covers Bell’s involvement with the German Evangelical Church after the rise of Hitler, his contacts with German representatives during the war, and his struggle with the British government over war aims and the proposed treatment of Germany after victory was achieved.

In these endeavours, Bell’s main contacts were with a Swiss church leader, Alfons Koechlin, and with two Germans, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law, Gerhard Leibholz, a lawyer, who was forced into exile and came to England with Bell’s help in 1938. These three men’s letters provide Bell with information and advice about the German church, and about the political scene, which was of the utmost value to Bell in the formation of his own views, and in the preparation of his numerous and outspoken speeches and public utterances.

Peter Raina does not tell us that many of the letters he quotes have already been published before. In fact, the very extensive correspondence between Bell and Koechlin for the period 1933-1954 was first published in German by a Swiss publisher in 1969, while his exchanges with Leibholz – although all written in English – are to be found, translated into German, in the book An der Schwelle zum gespaltenen Europa. Der Briefwechsel zwischen George Bell und Gerhard Leibholz (1939-1951), which appeared in Berlin in 1974. Bonhoeffer’s letters to the bishop and his replies are included in full in Bonhoeffer’s collected works, of which the relevant volume in English translation will appear shortly.

Raina’s selection of Bell’s letters is accompanied by an excellent commentary, filling in the history principally of the German Church Struggle. Bell’s concern was aroused early on by the machination of the so-called “German Christian” party seeking to impose its pro-Nazi views on the whole church, and by the suppression of alternative opinions. Already in June 1933 Bell was writing to the Times to express his concern and alarm – the first of many such missives. Since Bell also held the chairmanship of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work, he felt an obligation to his international partners to alert them to the dangers of these German developments. Bonhoeffer was at this point a close and valued advisor. Both he and Koechlin gave Bell suggestions as to how he could use his position to good effect. By discreet interventions with the political authorities, Bell was able to achieve some modification of the repressive actions taken against the dissenting pastors in the German Evangelical Church.

The outbreak of hostilities in 1939 of course greatly distressed Bell. His hopes that Germany’s nationalist passions, as aroused by Adolf Hitler, would not lead to another disastrous war, were now proved illusory. But he became equally concerned lest the same passions might lead in Britain to a climate of hatred of everything German. His letters reflect his valiant campaign to draw a distinction between the Nazi regime and the German people. He went on believing that the “good Germans” were only being intimidated by their evil Nazi masters. He was therefore enormously encouraged by his final meeting with Bonhoeffer in Sweden in May 1942. when he was give the details about the German resistance movement, and about the proposal to overthrow Hitler and his entourage. He hoped that he could get the British government to issue a statement of war aims which would encourage these resistance plotters. But Churchill and Eden refused. And the subsequent failure of the 20 July 1944 conspiracy, and the execution of so many of those taking part, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was a profound grief.

The facsimile reproduction of letters to and from Bell gives this volume an attractive immediacy. Raina’s selection and interpretation is sound, though not novel. But at a time when other issues threaten to supersede the events of two generations ago, it is certainly most helpful to have this compilation to show us how Bishop Bell played a significant, responsible and highly valued part in the public life of the Church of England during his long career.

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b) Protestants in East Germany (This review appeared first in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol 58 no.1, 2007)

Christliche Frauen in der DDR. Alltagsdokumente einer Diktatur in Interviews. By Sonja Ackermann. Pp. 376. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2005. ?19.80. 3 374 02325 8.

Gratwanderungen einer Freikirche im totalitären Regime. Die Gemeinschaft der Siebenten-Tags-Adventisten in der DDR von 1945 bis 1990. By Manfred Böttcher. (Friedensauer Schriftenreihe Reihe B Gesellschaftswissenschaften, Band 9). Pp. 220. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006. £25.50. 3 631 54797 8; 0947 2339.

Der Protestantismus im Osten Deutschlands (1945-1999). By Rudolf Mau. (Kirchengeschichte in Einzeldarstellungen IV/3). Pp. 248 incl. 2 maps. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2005. ?28. 3 374 02319 3.

The three books reviewed here all deal with the experience of Christians in eastern German dictatorship from 1945 to the implosion of the German Democratic Republic in 1990. The book by Sonja Ackermann may well appeal to adherents of oral history. It is a study based upon 97 interviews carried out with Christian women between 1999 and 2001. Excerpts from these interviews (taken from four typescript volumes being held by the Archiv der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte in Bonn) are presented systematically, not chronologically. There are virtually no dates, place names or personal names in the text. The focus appears to be on life in the early phase of the GDR and, in particular, on the Christian experience in schools and the Communist youth organisations. There are sections dealing with workplace experiences, parental perspectives, elections and conscientious objectors. In each chapter a number of quotes are presented, then paraphrased and commented upon. For slow learners the main points are summarised again at the end of each chapter. A good many quotes are repeated verbatim elsewhere in the text (though not necessarily with the same punctuation). As a result this reviewer found the book a rather tedious read. The book purports to be a ‘history of resistance’ to a dictatorial system of government, yet the author’s definition of ‘resistance’ is rather weak. Many of the interviewees record how their complaints and petitions to the authorities actually led to the rescinding of allegedly anti-Christian decisions – for example, excellent pupils being told they would not be able to take their Abitur. In a surprising number of cases parental protests seem to have brought about changes. As a result the anecdotes provide some interesting glimpses at the unofficial side of life in the GDR and, if anything, cast doubt on the ‘totalitarian’ nature of East German socialism. For every girl who was kept back from joining the Young Pioneers or from taking part in the youth dedication rite, there were ninety-nine children whose future studies and careers were not jeopardised by such ‘resistance’ to state policy. Indeed, from the evidence Ankermann presents, it is clear that not a few church-going teachers and headmasters were zealous collaborators of the regime. There remains the question of the historical value of the anonymous and subjective recollection of events that took place thirty, forty or even fifty years prior to an interview. It was not Ankermann’s goal to verify any of the accounts she analyses.

Equally subjective in the treatment of events if Manfred Böttcher’s study of the balancing acts forced upon one section of the Christian population: Seventh Day Adventists. His book is not really a scholarly history, but rather a personal account of life as a free churchman seeking to come to terms with government by atheists. Bttcher, president of the Seventh Day Adventist community in the GDR from 1969 until 1982 and then director of its seminary in Friedensau, has written a poorly structured book. At least he warns the reader in his introduction that repetition could not be avoided. A chronological table provides some clarity about historical developments. Whereas Ackermann provides very little background information on the GDR for the reader, Böttcher errs in providing too much. Where detail would have been welcome (on Adventist theology, the history of Adventism in Germany, particularly with regard to Church-State issues) Böttcher either fails to deliver or relegates material to a footnote. It is unfortunate that only a handful of archival sources have been exploited by the author. The tone is often apologetic and at times devotional, even propagandistic. Böttcher is bold enough to proclaim that the Adventist free church had never been guilty (as had, say, the mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches) of accommodating itself too easily to, let alone currying favour with the regime. Yet he has to admit that the East German security services managed to infiltrate their ranks. Böttcher makes it clear that, as a matter of principle, Adventists did not consider resistance or even criticism of government policy to be amongst their God-given tasks.

This was not the position taken by the institutional embodiments of mainstream Protestantism in the GDR. For those without the energy to plough through the three volumes penned by Gerhard Besier on Der SED-Staat und die Kirche there is now an excellent alternative. Rudolf Mau, professor emeritus at the Humboldt University in Berlin, has produced an eminently readable survey of Church-State relations during the post-war period. The emphasis throughout is on the church institutions and, in particular, the leadership elites. Neither evangelical sub-groups nor inter-denominational organisations are Mau’s concern. Free Churches are only mentioned in passing (those interested in that subject can consult the volume written by Karl Heinz Voigt in the same series). Within these confines Mau analyses the forty-year struggle for allegiance, from the government-supported campaigns in the 1950s to propagate “scientific atheism” to the “Protestant revolution” of 1989, when churchmen became honest brokers between a regime in decline and a population increasingly impatient with the absence of basic freedoms and rights. The role into which East German Protestantism was manoeuvred in the 1980s certainly made the institutions temporarily more relevant and attractive to various groups with a political agenda, but it was soon recognised that the witness of the churches had been seriously compromised by collaboration with the East German intelligence services. The majority of the population in the east of Germany had long had no ecclesiastical affiliation or even interest in religious matters. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the institutions analysed by Mau failed to generate the necessary spiritual power to alter that state of affairs.

Nicholas Railton, University of Ulster

c) Gregory Munro, Hitler’s Bavarian Antagonist. Georg Moenius and the Allgemeine Rundschau of Munich, 1929-1933. Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press 2006. ISBN -13: 978-0-7734-5735-5. 510 pp.

The historiography of the German resistance movement against Nazism over the past sixty years has been mired in complexity and controversy. The failure of its efforts to prevent the Nazi wars of aggression or to impede the subsequent mass murders of millions of their fellow citizens, makes for sombre reassessments. Religious factors, whether individually or institutionally, are highly ambiguous. The record of the churches’ complicity or even collaboration is undeniable. Only a handful of German churchmen and women declared their unequivocal opposition to the unbridled nationalism and racism of the Nazi regime, and many of them paid a heavy penalty for doing so. They were often vilified during their lifetimes, and forgotten afterwards.

Among them must be numbered Georg Moenius, a priest of the Bamberg diocese and editor of the outspokenly critical weekly newspaper, the Allgemeine Rundschau, for the brief period of 1929 to 1933. Gregory Munro’s careful study of this largely unknown anti-Nazi combatant is therefore a welcome addition to our knowledge, all the more since most histories of the resistance movement only begin in 1933. But the point is very well taken that the previous decade of the 1920s was the more pivotal. Had adequate barriers against Nazi extremism been erected at the time, the results might well have been very different. So this analysis of the public attitudes, particularly amongst Catholics, in these crucial years is significant in showing how easily Germans were seduced by Nazi propaganda, and how the counter-efforts proved ineffective. Munro shows how Moenius undertook a veritable crusade, using his newspaper as a vehicle to attack the noxious heresies and virulent racist policies of the Nazis. It was a vain if valiant endeavour. Only a few weeks after the Nazi take-over of power Moenius was forced into precipitate flight from Munich and had to spend long years in exile. It is small wonder that until now his achievements have been overlooked.

Moenius was born in 1890 and was in training for the priesthood throughout the traumatic years of the Great War 1914-1918. But even if he did not share the fate of so many of his contemporaries, he was clearly affected by the traumatic climate which forced reconsideraion of so many established verities and institutions. According to Munro, Moenius had an extremely petulant and headstrong character, though endowed with fervent idealism. This factor was undoubtedly encouraged by his friendship with Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, a leading champion of Christian ethics in the political sphere, who taught at Munich during Moenius’ university years. F.W.Foerster was to have a significant impact on Moenius’ career, and like him was also forced into exile.

With this temperament, and at such a revolutionary time, it is not surprising that Moenius’ period of service as a junior cleric in rural parishes was of short duration. He soon enough expressed his dissatisfation with the politically reactionary and even obscurantist views of his superiors, and sought new paths of service in the literary field.

Moenius’ opportunity came in 1929 when he acquired the part-ownership of the reputable Catholic weekly in Munich, and at once set out to make it a vital contributor to the lively debates over Germany’s present and future policies. Together with a group of Catholic intellectuals and journalists, and much influenced by Foerster’s ideas on federalism and pacifism, the Allgemeine Rundschau became a hard-hitting combative newspaper, whose editor was ready to charge into the fray of debate and resolutely defended his ideals.
In essence, almost all of Germany’s intellectuals in the 1920s were engaged in a similar search. The previous political structures and habits of mind had been discredited by the loss of the war. In the years of disillusionment and frustration after 1918, new images, new ideologies, new patterns of political behaviour struggled to gain widespread support. Weekly newspapers of the Allgemeine Rundschau’s sort were one of the chief vehicles for this undertaking, as they were in other countries. Moenius’ originality lay in his determination to rethink the whole basis of received German national opinion.

In particular, Moenius led the way in seeking to combat the popular interpretation of German history, for at least the past one hundred years. He sought to show that the unification of Germany, under the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty, as led by Bismarck and justified by Protestant theologians and historians, had been a ghastly error. Indeed the imposition of a Prussian hegemony over all of Germany, and its encouragement of the vices of authoritarianism and military aggression, were directly responsible, so Moenius claimed, for the disasters of the Great War. Furthermore, the Protestant character of this rule had changed the place and cultural power of Catholicism. Catholics had been reduced to second-class citizens, attacked in the Kulturkampf as Reichsfeinde, and their
ideas for Germany’s future disregarded and despised. Now was the time to challenge the whole idea of the historical mission of Lutheranism, as intertwined with the destiny of Germany. In its place Moenius sought to set up a new idea of the Reich, asserting the need for a peacefully-oriented Germanic nation with a genuine federal constitution. This would assist in the rejuvenation of Europe under the core of its intrinsic culture – an attachment to the Universal Church, to the Roman legacy of the Papacy. and to other nations under the imprint of the somewhat hazy idea of Romanitas. It was a religious and romantic dynamic which offered new life for both Germany and Catholicism.

The Allgemeine Rundschau’s indefatigable and uncompromising feud against the Borussian view of German history soon spread to other aspects of the practical politics of the day. Its fervent support of Catholic ideals left no room for co-operating with Protestant elements, who, in turn, with a few exceptions, were captivated by their desire to synthesize with popular nationalism as a means of restoring German Protestantism’s shattered credibility Indeed the more German Protestants became a conduit for radical conservatism and všlkisch ideologies, the more bitterly they were attacked by Moenius and his associates.

The unique religious and cultural mission of western Christianity in its Catholic form, which had reached its maturity in the High Middle Ages, was a constant theme of the Allgemeine Rundschau. Such a force could offer a vital spiritual foundation for Germany’s much needed reconstruction. The somewhat mystical overtones and admiration for bygone examples was reinforced by a belief that such an ideal needed to be defended against the forces of militaristic aggression and extremism, which Moenius and his associates saw as being derived over the centuries from the wastelands of northern Europe.

Central among such forces was National Socialism. Moenius rightly regarded Nazism as the deadly enemy of Roman Catholicism, but paradoxically argued that Hitler, despite his Austrian origins, had sold out to Prussia and its military tradition. In Moenius’ view, Hitler’s categories of racist and všlkisch thought followed in the line Luther-Fichte-Hegel-Bismarck. “He had to have a Protestant with an anti-Roman passion like Rosenberg as his court philosopher”. Nazism was an instrument of vengeful Prussianism against the more civilized tradition of Catholic Bavaria.

But the mood of the late 1920s, and the Nazis’ electoral victory of 1930, particularly in Munich, made Moenius’ struggle more problematic. The articles in the Allgemeine Rundschau became more strident as the crisis worsened. Moenius sought to warn his fellow Catholics not to be tempted by these exponents of contemporary militarism and racism, with their pursuit of a German supremacy through Lebensraum. The Allgemeine Rundschau launched an unremitting critique of both the Nazi Party and its ideology. Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century was denounced as a pagan attack on Catholicism. Catholics should not be fooled by the Nazi Party’s claim to be supporting “positive Christianity”. Germans should recognize that Nazism was driven by an anti-Roman, anti-liberal, anti-Judaic and anti-Christian ethos, incorporating the principal destructive strands of a creed based on Blood and Soil. The dangers of any accommodation with such radical extremism were regularly stressed in the weekly’s pages.

Such attempts aroused much hostility. But so did the journal’s advocacy of a universal peace, based on the renunciation of national power politics. In particular, the campaign led by Moenius and Foerster to have Germans acknowledge their guilt in causing the Great War, and their condemnation of the German invasion of Belgium, were resented by many conservatives. They thereby lost much support from the ranks of German Catholicism. Such a head-on attack on the view that Germany had been dragged into the war by her enemies’ nefarious tactics, and that the invasion of Belgium was a strategic necessity, was a risky undertaking. Moenius probably did not want to acknowledge that such views had become almost universal among all sections of conservative opinion, or the extent to which this was a necessary alibi for their subsequent participation in the bloodletting of the war. Indeed, in many cases, this was the only consolation adopted for the terrible losses suffered. To challenge this widespread feeling of self-justification could open up drastic wounds and memories which Germans had spent ten years or more in trying to suppress. But it was part of Moenius and Foerster’s ideology that only such repentance could clear the air in Germany’s relations with other nations. Without such a stance the poison of international rivalries would be continued and remain unresolved. But this counsel seemed to be wildly unrealistic, and only fell on deaf ears amongst the majority of Germans, including Catholics. (Munro could have made the point that the same phenomenon re-occurred after the second war, when German conservatives were equally reluctant to heed those prophetic voices calling for national repentance and self-scourging.)

Moves were then made to curb Moenius’ influence, through both political and ecclesiastical channels. The weekly’s controversial stances were becoming problematical at a time of recurrent political crises. The Nazis’ success in projecting an image of political stability and the promise of restoring Germany’s economic and national greatness, outweighed the resolute warnings the Allgemeine Rundschau provided. Too many people who should have known better took no steps to prevent the installation of an avowedly dictatorial regime.

The Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 led soon enough to the suppression of all critical journalism. In March Moenius fled from Munich in disguise and was eventually deprived of his German citizenship, and suffered the confiscation of his property. He was not to return from exile until 1948, but was unable to resume his career in either the church or in journalism. The Allgemeine Rundschau struggled along for a few more months, during which a Reich Concordat was concluded between the Vatican and the new Nazi government. Once it was ratified, there was no further need for discretion, and the Allgemeine Rundschau was forced to cease publication. Moenius’ direst predictions now became true, but the leaders of German Catholicism indulged in much wishful thinking and failed to heed his warnings.

Munro’s service is to place this combative priest and his controversial journal in their wider setting by outlining the intellectual milieu of the time, and by describing the debates over Germany’s identity, its political structures and the war guilt question, which so much engaged the public attention of the day. Moenius’ career can only be judged a failure. But Munro rightly points out that the ideas he propagated, especially the need to overcome and abandon the national obsession with Machtpolitik, were to find a much more receptive climate after Germany’s second defeat. The debt of post-1945 West German Catholicism to Moenius and his associates is rarely mentioned, but Munro successfully makes the case that it should now be fittingly acknowledged.

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d) As a counterpart to the book reviewed here in the March issue, Mit Blick auf die Täter,
we draw attention to a similar compilation of essays dealing mainly with the Catholic church’s response to the issue of coming to terms with the Nazi past: Theologie und Vergangenheitsbewältigung, (Paderborn: Schöningh 2005) edited by Lucia Scherzberg, includes several valuable contributions analysing the Catholic theologians’ reactions to Nazism, both during the Nazi years and afterwards. Antonia Leugers is highly critical of the German Catholic bishops of the time, while Keith Spicer recounts the sad story of a fanatical pro-Nazi priest and his fervent admiration of the Führer. Lucia Schezberg herself gives a first-rate description of the pro-Nazi stances adopted by leading Catholic theologians, which certainly cannot be excused by the claim that they were intimidated by Gestapo pressures. Rather these men claimed to be leading the church in affirming the new dispensation brought on by Hitler, and as such saw themselves as the leading edge of reform. Hitler’s own alleged “theology” is analysed by Rainer Bucher, pointing out that his adoption of a religious vocabulary was not just a matter of political opportunism. Rather Hitler’s views of “Providence” were a genuine part of his belief system, which also extended to the idea that he had a divine call to fulfill his mission to rejuvenate Germany by eliminating the Jews and thereby to cure the world of its defects, With the help of this idea of God, Hitler could find a universal legitimation for his aggressive racial policies. His deification of the German Volk as having the supreme value over all aspects of life, and demanding a total faith from each individual, were constituent components of this “theology”. Rainer Kampling follows with an examination of Catholic attitudes after 1945 towards Judaism, as found in the speeches of Romano Guardini, the highly influential theologian of the 1950s. Here much was said about Guilt and Responsibility, but little about just who were the guilty or responsible actors. To be sure, this lack of concretization ran parallel in other academic disciplines, but this hardly excuses the shortcomings of these theologians. Norbert Reck, who also contributed to Krondorfer’s book reviewed in our March issue, is perhaps overly judgmental about the proponents of post-Holocaust theology in Germany, Moltmann, Sölle and Metz. Whatever their personal shortcomings, they did at least play a significant role in gaining acceptance for the ideas propounded at the Second Vatican Council, and in ensuring that the evil shadows of Nazi racism were banished from the German churches. On the other hand these essays raise interesting questions about Nazism as a modernizing force, and the readiness of some theologians to believe this was a more attractive option than dying in the last ditch of conservative and seemingly outdated positions.

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2) Indvidual articles in collected essays can easily get lost, especially if the tome is weighty. But, for our readers, here is one that should be noted:

Bjorn Mensing, “Nicht nur ein priesterliches, sondern auch ein prophetisches Amt”. Von der fränkischen Kanzel ins KZ Dachau. Das “vergessene” Zeugnis von Pfarrer Wolfgang Niederstrasser. in Frömmigkeit – Theologie- Frömmigkeitstheologie. Contributions to European Church History, ed. G.Litz et al., Leiden and Boston: Brill 2005, pp. 763 – 779.

This is a short but well-deserved tribute to a young country Evangelical pastor whose ethical and theological rectitude led him to adopt a highly critical attitude towards Nazi church policy. After various stiff warnings, he took refuge by joining the army in occupied Norway, but was pursued there by the wheels of Nazi “justice”. Early in 1945 he was transferred to the Gestapo’s hands, and as late as 12 April 1945 was sent to Dachau. There he was ordered to join a forced march away from the approaching Allied forces. Luckily he survived and returned to his former parish. Here was a staunchly uncompromising supporter of the Confessing Church. But there is no mention of any sympathetic word or action on behalf of the Jews.

3) Archive note: Further opening of the Vatican archives.

Pope Benedict XVI has authorized the further opening of the Vatican archives, principally the Vatican Secret archives and the archives of the Second Section of the Secretariat of State, for the pontificate of Pope Pius XI (1922-1939). . This complements the previous opening of the papers relating to Germany for the same period. Material contained in these archives should shed new light on such topics as the Catholic Church’s relations to Fascism, Nazism, Communism, the Civil War in Spain and the persecution of the church in Mexico.

4 ) Journal articles:
Frank J,Coppa, The Contemporary Papacy from Paul VI to Benedict XVI. A bibliographical essay. in Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 92 no 4, October 2006 pp 597 – 608. This is an excellently comprehensive and valuable guide to the numerous biographies of the three popes covered.

With every good wish,
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

An Easter greeting to you all

Whether we be young or old,
Our destiny our being’s heart and home
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be

From The Prelude William Wordsworth

Contents:

1) Book reviews :

a) James Parkes: “Recasting Christian-Jewish relations”
b) ed. T. Kushner and N.Valman, Philosemitism, Antisemitism and the Jews

1a) (This review first appeared in the American Jewish Congress Monthly, Vol 73, no 5 (September-October 2006) pp 12-18. I believe it appropriate for the Easter season)

Campaigning against antisemitism. By Colin Richmond. London/ Portland: Valentine Mitchell, 2005. 312 pages. $ ??
He also spoke as a Jew. The Life of the Reverend James Parkes. By Haim Chertok. London/Portland: Valentine Mitchell, 2006. 516 pages. $ ?? End of an Exile. Israel, the Jews and the Gentile World. By James Parkes. 3rd edition. Marblehead, Mass: Micah Publications Inc., 2005. 341 pages. $ ??

The most significant revision in Christian theology during the twentieth century in both the Roman Catholic and Protestant communities was undoubtedly the forging of a new relationship with Judaism. After so many centuries when the dominant Christian tradition was one of denigration, the teaching of contempt and frequently of persecution, this alteration has involved not only the abandonment of entrenched dogmatic beliefs but also the growth of a new and still-building relationship. The classic Christian belief was that Jews were no longer the Chosen People of God because they had crucified their Messiah, that they deserved banishment into a wandering exile endured since the first century AD, and that their spiritual destiny was to be superseded by Christianity. The obstinate refusal of Jews to accept this fate only reinforced the kind of intolerant prejudice amongst Christians, which so easily turned to hostility and violence. Even in more recent centuries, the part played by theologically-based concepts in generating the evil disease of secular antisemitism cannot be denied.

The principal cause for the alteration in Christian attitudes was undoubtedly the horror and the shame felt by many Christians at the mass murder of so many Jewish lives by the Nazis during the Second World War. The impact of the Holocaust, though not immediately appreciated in many Christian circles, was however only a negative shock which forced a reconsideration of earlier preconceptions. Equally important was the more positive contribution made by a few notable individuals in preparing the way for a fresh and creative alternative on which to base a revived dialogue between Church and Synagogue. Such a person was James Parkes, a Church of England clergyman, who was the author of a large number of books on this topic in the middle years of the last century, and is now the subject of two biographies, which have just appeared within months of each other, both from the same publisher.

It is often the fate of pioneers that their fame, and the struggles they went through to fight the good fight, are forgotten once the cause they espoused has become victorious, or at least widely accepted as “normal”. By the end of his life, in 1981, Parkes was acutely conscious that he was becoming a forgotten figure, even while his ideas for a new and creative stance towards Judaism and Israel were being more widely understood, often without credit to their author. So it is timely that his contributions should be refreshingly acknowledged by two biographers, one British, and one Israeli-American, both of whom successfully restore this valiant, if sometimes flawed, character to life, and soberly evaluate his remarkable intellectual achievements. At the same time, these large-scale studies make clear that Parkes’ career should not be treated hagiographically. He had too many faults, not least the high esteem he held of his own abilities, and his scorn for others whose ideas he held to be patently in error. Both authors give a rounded portrait, emphasizing the path Parkes followed for fifty years in reformulating the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, and in unfailingly commending this new vision to all who would listen.

Parkes was unique in being one of the earliest writers to challenge head-on the historical record of Christian injustice towards Jewry, and moreover to show an unwavering determination to make the Christian churches repent for such centuries of misunderstanding and hatred. Both biographers rightly stress Parkes’ moral impetus. He sought to make the Christian world atone, in order to make the world safe for Jews to live in. His attacks on theological obscurantism, as also on racial prejudice, were part of his moral vision to remedy the dehumanizing impact of such deplorable influences whenever or wherever they occurred. At the same time he combined this campaign against the evils of antisemitism with a highly evocative belief in the goodness of humanity, the centrality of (eventual) progress and the need to revise all religious insights accordingly. His strong support for rationalism led him to affirm his conviction that, if men could see the unreasonableness of their preconceptions, however long-held, they would prefer to adopt a more enlightened view. He proudly called himself a rationalist. But at the same time he had a lively sense of humour which saved him from too much smugness about the rightness, or righteousness, of his opinions.

In his seventies, Parkes wrote an autobiography, Voyage of Discoveries, which both the present biographers find problematic. Richmond describes it as disastrous, Chertok as unreliable. But both are inevitably beholden to it for many reference points. Richmond seeks to deflate the self-satisfaction displayed in this volume, and repeatedly affirms his inability to share Parkes’ confidence in the rational progress of human society. Chertok subjects the memoir to a far-reaching process of deconstruction in order to excavate the subtext. In particular he focuses on those portions of Parkes’ life about which Parkes is silent, such as his unhappy and lonely boyhood, or his lacklustre performance in the trenches during the First World War. This leads Chertok to engage in some unseemly, even prurient, speculations for which he has no evidence. But the objective for both authors is clear: they seek to establish a critical distance from their subject, even while expressing admiration for his intellectual brilliance, his writing talents and his significant achievements in championing the fight against antisemitism.

Parkes was born in 1896 and hence was old enough to join his older siblings in thee First World War- both of whom lost their lives in the conflict. He survived, and in his memoirs claims that when he returned “it was with a fairly clear idea that I wanted to be ordained”. He then belonged to the generation of young men, whose very survival made them precious, and who were expected to fulfill the promise of all those who had been slain. Particularly those who proceeded to complete their studies at the most prestigious universities of Oxford and Cambridge were often admired for their heroism as “the golden generation”. But at the same time they were burdened by the expectations laid on them by their elders, who now believed that their own failings – especially their failure to prevent the descent into war – would now be remedied by the idealism of these battle-scarred veterans. Certainly in Parkes’ case, the combination of idealism, intellectual talent and a commitment to devote oneself to the service of others, was responsible for his decision to seek ordination in the Church of England. Undoubtedly too, his war-time experiences propelled him to recognize the need to rethink and revitalize the role of the Church in the post-war world. His theological studies led him to adopt the views propounded by Oxford’s Modernist movement, which was the cutting edge of liberal Protestantism of the day. Modernism challenged orthodoxy’s traditional doctrines by subjecting them to the light of reason and research, and promising a spiritual renewal based on social relevance. For Parkes this creed was to become formative and was the basis of much of his later thinking. It led him to reject much of the Christian tradition, including such venerable beliefs as the Virgin birth, while struggling to reinterpret the doctrine of the Trinity, and stressing the significance of a religion of righteousness and justice.

It was this readiness to adopt a critical approach to traditional Christianity and to challenge the received wisdom of the Church which prepared the way for his ground-breaking revision of Christian attitudes towards Judaism.

At Oxford, Parkes was easily attracted by the programmes of the Student Christian Movement., which was then at its apogee. The SCM had left behind its earlier pietistic evangelicalism and now advocated the full flush of the social gospel. It embraced other churches with ecumenical enthusiasm, was ready to question all inherited traditions and authorities, and was eager to enlist the idealism of the young to reform the world on Christian humanist lines. Parkes so closely exemplified this spirit that it was small wonder that he was recruited, immediately after graduation, by the SCM’s national officers to join their team in London, mainly to organize conferences and discussion groups to promote these goals amongst the students of British universities.

At the same time, Parkes found time at Oxford to become a leading light in the University’s League of Nations Union. Here too the idealism of the young was mobilized to work for a world in which war would be impossible. In fact, as one wit said, “the League of Nations enjoyed the support of all organized religions; for those who had no religion, it formed a very adequate substitute”. This gave Parkes an international dimension to his thinking, and led him in 1924 to accept readily enough the SCM’s offer to second him to their parent organization based in Geneva. Here Parkes took up the work of organizing student conferences for the whole of Europe, and even wrote a manual on how this should be done.

It was in this work that he first became aware of what was then called “the Jewish question”. His encounters with Jewish students taught him about the scandalous discrimination and harassment practised against Jews in many universities and about the widespread virulence of antisemitism even amongst Christian communities in many parts of Europe. This provided Parkes with the impetus to seek out the roots of such prejudice. To his dismay, he soon realized the fact that much of this entrenched hostility stemmed from centuries of anti-judaic teaching by the Church, particularly from the polemics of the Church fathers. It was largely his awareness of the vulnerability of Jews throughout the centuries which propelled him, not only into a philosemitic stance, but also to devote his intellectual talents to challenge these pernicious teachings head-on.

This was to prove no easy task. For one thing, he had first to prove his credentials amongst those he wanted to help. The long history of Christian prejudice had made most Jews wary. They were often suspicious that these supposedly friendly Christians had missionary motives and were still basically intent on “rescuing” Jews from their “fate”. So Parkes set out to write a short book The Jew and his Neighbour: a study in the causes of antisemitism, which was subsequently published in 1930 by the SCM Press in London. He sought to outline the consequences of Christian treatment or mistreatment of the Jewish people, and to argue that true Christianity was incompatible with this kind of dark and malignant evil He could not accept that antisemitism was intrinsic to Christian belief, but called for Christian atonement for the past sins against the Jews. This was to be the first of the majority of Parkes’ writings acknowledging Christian guilt for centuries of misrepresentation and intolerance, and pleading for a new awareness of what Judaism really stood for.

It is striking that Parkes’ commitment to recast Christian-Jewish relations took place in the 1920s, i.e. even before the menace of Nazi antisemitism became so powerful after 1933, and long before the Holocaust. His campaign was in fact prophetic, but it was accompanied by the firm belief that the Church could and must adopt a new relationship in order to root out the evil of antisemitism not only within its own ranks but in the wider secular society as well.

Parkes’ second book The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue, for which he gained an Oxford PhD in 1934, was a masterly and scholarly account of the origins of antisemitism from the earliest days of the Christian community through the Dark Ages up to the mediaeval period. Both biographers rightly see this pioneer work of re-evaluation as having great merit. Here, for the first time, a clergyman of the Church of England questioned the commonly-held assumption that Judaism had come to the end of its course, and should now be replaced by the more up-to-date and progressive force of Christianity. The most prominent British historian of the day, Arnold Toynbee, had recently lent his prestige to this view, by pronouncing existing Judaism to be no more than a fossilized religion. So Parkes had to contend with influential currents of thought.
It made for a long haul.

By 1935, when the violence of Nazi antisemitism was already sending shock waves across Europe, Parkes decided he must devote himself full-time to combating this evil. But, despite his academic qualifications, he had no university position, and his subject was still regarded with suspicion in such circles. So too, he had no position in the Church, and was extremely reluctant to be tied down by accepting a parish with its attendant duties. Instead he sought independence and the freedom to express his controversial views as he saw best.

In this predicament he turned to a wealthy Jewish business man, Israel Sieff, who had earlier helped with some of his student projects. Both biographers are rather coy about Sieff’s motivations. He certainly was encouraging and recognized that any commitment would have to be of considerable duration. But the actual sums granted were not large. Parkes’ other income from his writing or lecturing was minuscule. So in fact he was obliged to live for years on a very Spartan scale. His only luxury was to purchase books on Judaica, for which he got special grants. But in order to house his collection and to have room to work, Parkes bought a dilapidated manor house in the rural village of Barley, not far from Cambridge and an easy train ride to London. This became his base for nearly thirty years, from which he sallied forth to give lectures, attend conferences and to participate in meetings relevant to his studies.

Parkes saw himself as a historian. His books from this period were thoroughly researched and have indeed stood the test of time. But they also had to have relevance to the more immediate political currents of his day. The rise of Nazism proved to Parkes the necessity of mobilizing opposition to its totalitarian ambitions. He increasingly saw himself called to lead the campaign against these wider secular forms of antisemitism, as Richmond rightly acknowledges. The increasingly disastrous news about Jewish sufferings in Germany, and after 1939 throughout Europe, caused him terrible anguish, but only reinforced his belief that not enough was being done by Germany’s opponents to rescue and relieve these “poor dear Jews”. In fact, in retrospect, he could only deplore the failure of imagination and the indifference of the Christian world. Had the Christian churches possessed sufficient spiritual strength to mobilize opposition to Hitler, he believed, this might well have led to a myriad of martyrs but would surely have prevented the mass murder of six million Jews and probably twice that number of other victims of Nazism.

By the end of the 1930s, his former Jewish friends from student days in central Europe found themselves in dire peril. Some managed to escape to England and were sympathetically received in Barley. Others came to make use of his library resources, so the house was continually filled with refugees and students. Only his skillful cultivation of a vegetable garden provided food for all these guests. Increasingly Parkes lived for his work and produced some notable volumes with a strong historical base.

But, as Richmond points out, the impact of his writings was not large. Parkes’ name was not known: He lacked the influence he might have gained as a professor or a bishop. But he refused all such attempts to find him a suitable platform, even, under the post-1945 Labour Government, the offer of a seat in the House of Lords. Such a pedestal in such a historically outdated anomaly would have been remarkable, but in any case Parkes refused, saying that traveling to London would preclude his concentration on his work in the (near) solitude of Barley.

At the same time his horizons widened. Although still concerned to call the Christian community to repentance for its history of intolerance, he now took up the more immediate cause of campaigning on behalf of his “poor dear Jews” in a practical way. He became a leading member of the Christian Zionist cause, which advocated the return of Jews to Palestine as the most positive means of providing a refuge for the persecuted European communities. His biographers seem not to know that Christian Zionism has a respectable history of its own. In England it was particularly strong in the nineteenth century. Parkes brought its theology up-to-date, adding to its existing humanitarian tradition. He was strongly supported by other theologians, notably Reinhold Niebuhr in America, and in the 1930s and 1940s he wrote a series of significant works espousing this cause, and subsequently arguing the case for the newly-established State of Israel.

One of thes,e End of an Exile. Israel, the Jews and the Gentile world, appeared first in 1954 and has recently been reprinted, presumably because it most capably makes the case for, and explains the meaning of a Jewish state. Several more recent essays written by Parkes’ disciples have been added to this new edition in order to bring its message up-to-date. It bears all the marks of Parkes’ indefatigable scholarship but also of his ardent advocacy. As a historian and a theologian, he mobilized his material to give background and depth to the contemporary scene. The early chapters recapitulate some of his previous writings on the history of the Jews, but he stresses the necessity of linking both religion and politics with their historical background. Thus he disputes the view that the new State of Israel is a modern secular invention. Rather he seeks to claim that this is in accordance with the true and ancient tradition of being Jewish. To be sure, his view that twentieth century Zionism was largely the result of the mistreatment of Jews in eastern Europe has been questioned. But his insights into the formative Jewish influences defining the newly-created state are excellently presented. Above all, Parkes rightly asserted the inherent relationship in Judaism between land, people and religion, which now for the first time in centuries could find free expression. He sought to convince his Christian readers that they must understand Judaism on its own terms, not merely through the lenses of Christian apologetic. The same message was conveyed in the chapter on Jerusalem, where he sought to demolish the beloved sentimentalities of so much Christian rhetoric and instead insisted on the harsh factuality of the city’s Jewishness, even if, at the time he was writing, it was politically divided.

This book was all part of his campaign to oblige the Christian churches to recognize that the creation of the State of Israel was more than just a political adjustment of boundaries in the Middle East. In fact, Parkes, asserted, this event had tremendous theological significance, and should be regarded as a historical sign of God’s continuing faithfulness to his people. The republication of this book, fifty years after it was written, is presumably due to the sad fact that some Christian communities are still reluctant to accept Parkes’ arguments, even today.

Critics of Parkes’ numerous writings often claimed that, despite his assurances to the contrary, the fine line between objective history and unilateral partisanship frequently got blurred.. Others, who knew about the source of his funding, accused him of having sold out his intellect to the Jews. Others again wondered why, since he was so obviously partial to Judaism and its representatives, he did not himself convert. But, as Chertok rightly points out, this misses the whole point. Parkes never wavered in his allegiance to Jesus Christ. But since his mission was to bring the Church to admit its culpability and to reach a better and healthier appreciation of Judaism, this could only be done from within the Christian community. Only a practising Christian could advocate the necessary work of atonement. His credibility would have been lost by conversion.

In his later writings, Parkes’ firm conviction grew that both Jews and Christians need each other. Each should recognize that neither yet possesses the final totality of truth. Both should follow the common task of pursuing a “theology of equality” in creative tension and dialogue. He argued that Judaism, Christianity and Humanism were three “channels” through which the experience of God was being revealed to humankind. Their differences of emphasis should be seen as mutually enriching rather than as exclusive of each other. There should be no denial of the peculiar nature of each religious contribution to humankind, or any suggestion that one “channel” was more significant than another. All were equally divine, as revelations of God’s revelation. Christians should abandon their view that Judaism was a dead or incomplete religion. Judaism is part of God’s overall plan for creation, and needs to survive intact as a valid demonstration of God’s power. This pluralism of view reflected very well Parkes’ early training in the modernist rationalist school, but inevitably upset those Christians whose Christology led them to make exclusive claims or whose missionary zeal still saw the Jews only as potential converts.

In the 1950s Parkes became increasingly concerned about his legacy. His splendid library was unique and growing daily. What he wanted was a custom-made building and if possible an established Institute where scholars could be welcomed. Both preferably in Barley. But his benefactor, Israel Sieff, prevaricated. Neither biographer explains why. In the end, the library was sold to a small new university on England’s south coast, at Southampton, which faithfully kept its promise to preserve and maintain it intact. It took another forty years before a separate Parkes Institute could be founded. But today both flourish, and provided the raw materials for these comprehensive biographies.

Seemingly neither Richmond and Chertok were brought up within the ambiance of the Church of England, nor are they familiar with the idiosyncrasies of that institution, which shows on occasion. More seriously, this background is really necessary in evaluating Parkes’ enduring influence. In his final years Parkes was increasingly aware that he was becoming a forgotten man. The explanation is two-fold, neither of which is fully taken up by his biographers. On the one hand, Parkes was a “loner”. He had never sought to fit into the Anglican establishment, was often scornful of its bishops and its outdated ceremonies, and was outspokenly critical of its missionary endeavours towards Jews. In fact, his early commitment to a highly unorthodox and seemingly reductionist theology had already made him an isolated figure. His writings demonstrated his sympathy with the intellectual western members of the Reformed Jewish community, who praised him loudly for his sympathy and understanding. His ability to talk as a Jew did not however lead to popularity in the wider Christian ranks. The Church of England never saw any need to lead in the reformation or reformulation of Christian attitudes towards Judaism. Only one, now retired, bishop, Harries of Oxford, carried forward Parkes’ work for the next generation.

More significantly, however, Christian attitudes did change, but primarily due to German Protestant and Roman Catholic initiatives. The striking alterations of Catholic doctrine promulgated during the Second Vatican Council under John XXII and Paul VI, and carried forward by subsequent popes, were exactly in line with Parkes’ repudiation of theological antisemitism. But his influence on the Catholic scholars can only be attributed as indirect. Equally important, but again indirectly, were his writings on Israel for the wider Protestant community, especially in Germany. In 1948, the establishment of the State of Israel caused a major theological shock to reverberate throughout Christendom. The reassertion of Jewish nationhood put paid to the supersessionst theories of Jewish perpetual banishment or of Judaism’s imminent demise. But the equal shock and shame among Christians in Germany, as they began to come to terms with their failure to prevent the Holocaust, were even more effective in sponsoring a new and much more creative relationship with Judaism. But few German Protestants had heard of, or read, Parkes.

In more recent years, the kind of dialogue based on a theology of equality, for which Parkes argued, has been carried forward – unequally – around the world. In Europe, Jews remain a minority and somewhat unready to engage in dialogue. In Israel, the Christian community has been reduced almost to vanishing point. Only in the United States where the communities can and do meet on equal terms have Parkes’ ideas found a ready reception, as can be seen both in the Jewish scholars’ statement Dabru Emet of September 2000 and the later Christian statement A Sacred Obligation of September 2002, the majority of both groups being resident in the United States.

On the wider scene, it may be confidently asserted that Parkes’ campaign against theological antisemitism is close to victory. It is now inconceivable that the Vatican authorities would reverse the teachings of Nostra Aetate, issued in 1965. And similarly, the bold declaration of solidarity with Judaism, with its explicit renunciation of proselytism, issued by the German Evangelical Church’s Rhineland Synod in 1980, has come to be widely accepted and adopted in Lutheran communities. The classical Christian pejorative definitions of Judaism and the Jewish people are no longer heard from Sunday pulpits. To that extent, Parkes’ campaign has been vindicated far more quickly than he expected.

When Parkes first turned to Israel Sieff for financial help, his host asked how long the work would take. He gave as his honest answer: “Three hundred years”. In fact, great strides have been made in the past seventy years since the appearance of The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue. Much is due to Parkes’ pioneering research and provocative thought. He regarded his life’s work as “reversing the stream that has flowed in the wrong direction for 1900 years”. His true, if often unacknowledged, legacy is that this revolution is now taking place. We are therefore indebted to his biographers for their lucid description and analysis of James Parkes’ significant contribution in this epoch-changing process.
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1b) Tony Kushner and Nadia Valman, eds., Philosemitism, antisemitism and the Jews. Perspectives from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, Aldershot, Hants, U.K.:Ashgate 2004. 272 pp. ISBN 0 7546 3678 X

This collection of essays arose out of a conference held at the University of Southampton to mark the centenary of James Parkes’ birth, but has been worth waiting for. Gavin Langmuir leads the cohort of distinguished British and American scholars in tracing out many of the early features of both philosemitism and antisemitism. The work thus provides an excellent introduction to the career of James Parkes, as well as providing new insights into aspects of Christian-Jewish relations from the Middle Ages to the present. Several hitherto perspectives, such as those of the seventeenth century Quakers in England, or the limits of enlightenment sympathy for Judaism as seen in the writings of Lessing and Goethe, make this a helpful if widely-diversified collection of essays. Readers should take note and file the contents away in the appropriate computerized index, so that the individual contributions do not get lost to sight. In the final essay by Prof. Tony Kushner, he points out that Parkes’ influence was in part limited because it was not until the late 1950s that the enormity of destruction inflicted upon the Jewish people came to be recognized, and the word Holocaust began to be used. In the immediate post-1945 climate of opinion, in Britain, not many people were concerned about these terrible events. The survivors were few and marginalized. Other Jews avoided the subject as a result of their own insecurity. The British war memory was being highly and successfully cultivated, but the British government’s failure to rescue Jews did not feature in these accounts. And the antipathy towards the new Zionist state of Israel after the turbulent experiences of the British Mandate in Palestine, all affected how Parkes’ magnificent campaigns were received. But Kushner rightly gives him the credit for his work in combatting all forms of prejudice, and the book as a whole seeks to carry on his courageous witness as the most resolute philosemite of his generation.
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Correction: By error in the last issue, p. 3, Prof. Dr Georg Denzler was referred to as a layman. He has actually been a priest of the Bamberg diocese since 1955.

With best wishes
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca