Tag Archives: Katarzyna Stoklosa

Conference Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Meeting, 2015

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Conference Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Meeting, 2015

By Robert Ericksen

“‘Ein neues Klima’: Rezeptionsgeschichte des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils in Ost- und Mitteleuropa”

A conference took place on December 3-4, 2015 at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in the premises of the Bundesinstitut für Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im östlichen Europa. This meeting, organized and hosted by Professor Andrea Strübind and the Institut für Evangelische Theologie at Oldenburg, met in conjunction with the Editorial Board of the journal Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte. The papers from this conference are expected to appear in the Fall 2016 edition of that journal.

This meeting took place in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Vatican II. The main focus, as explained in introductory comments by Professor Strübind, involved the assumption that the Second Vatican Council opened a new spirit of religious freedom within the Catholic Church as it faced the very changed circumstances of the Post-WWII world. Pushed especially by Catholics from the United States, in Strübind’s view, Vatican II created important changes within Catholicism—the mass in the vernacular, for example—and also changed the Catholic point of view toward other religions. Most famously, perhaps, Vatican II by way of Nostra Aetate dramatically modified Catholic teaching about Jews. This Council also opened to Protestants and to Eastern Orthodox churches new ways to understand and anticipate ecumenism within the Christian community.

Stanislaw Krajewski, a professor of philosophy at Warsaw University with an interest in Jewish-Christian relations and a connection to the Jewish-Christian institute at Cambridge, opened the conference with a paper on Jewish-Christian relations in Poland. One of the very few Jews growing up in postwar Poland, he noted that about ten percent of Polish Jews—some 350,000—survived the Holocaust, but that most of them, often returning from the USSR, fled the country as quickly as possible. Krajewski then gave his assessment on steps leading toward Nostra Aetate and the impact of that statement over time. Precursors, such as a Christian statement from the Seelisberg Conference in 1947, were so controversial they were not accepted by either Protestants or Catholics, and the Seelisberg statement itself could not be published at the time. Krajewski also noted John Connolly’s recent book, From Enemy to Brother, with its argument that primarily Jewish (and some Protestant) converts to Catholicism were the ones able to push in the direction of Catholic-Jewish reconciliation. This points toward a more deep-seated antisemitism among those born into Catholicism. Krajewski also suggested that the Holocaust would seem to have provided a strong push toward Nostra Aetate, but he claims that 2,500 bishops who responded with comments and advice never mentioned the Holocaust as a precipitating factor in this doctrinal change. Then, noting that Abraham Heschel called conversion “spiritual fratricide,” he argued that most Jews, even with Nostra Aetate,were suspicious of residual Christian hopes for conversion in the new Catholic stance. As for Polish reactions to Nostra Aetate, Krajewski pointed out the mono-ethnic nature of postwar Poland and suggested that most Poles were very pleased with this concentrated Roman Catholic Polish identity. Among other things it meant there were few Jewish partners for dialogue after Vatican II. In the 1970s, however, some young Poles, thinking their own culture somewhat insipid, began to look to the past and see pre-Holocaust Jewish culture as especially creative and exciting. Residual antisemitism lingered; yet now, Krajewski says, the atmosphere is very different. Since the 1990s, January 17 has been celebrated as a “Day of Judaism,” with clergy in some areas hosting inter-religious events. Jewish-Catholic dialogue takes place, though Krajewski thinks it still falls short of deep, doctrinal reconciliation, a situation he thinks true outside Poland as well. Finally, he says that antisemitism is unacceptable in today’s Poland, even though the depth of this change among the laity cannot be fully known.

Katarzyna Stoklosa gave a second paper on Poland, beginning with a description of the somewhat fraught relationship of Poland toward Vatican II. The Polish people seem to have been relatively unaware of and/or suspicious of this council. Some even considered any reconciliation with Judaism a “poisoning” of the Catholic faith. The government also was suspicious of Vatican II, fearing among other things, that any Polish priests who attended might not return. One bishop led a pilgrimage to Rome, which pushed the government into a limited cooperation. In the end, 250 Polish priests attended, rather than the higher figure of 1500 that once had been considered. Among the most important outcomes may have been the chance for Polish and German bishops to spend considerable time together and establish the basis for future contact.

Other papers included one on Switzerland by Franziska Metzger of Fribourg. She described the Swiss postwar circumstances as a time in which social questions grew in importance, both in terms of how the churches could nurture the holding on to moral values and how they could adjust to modernization. Vatican II represented a moment of change, so that by the 1970s churches in Switzerland began looking toward questions of equality, pluralism, social change and social justice, a direction that has continued since then.

Gerhard Besier, speaking about Vatican II and ecumenism, noted that Catholics had been resistant to ecumenical efforts in the late-1940s and 1950s. The World Council of Churches finally got Catholics to participate in the 1961 meeting in Delhi. He sees an ongoing difference, perhaps especially in Germany, in which Protestants see ecumenism as a willingness to live with differences, but Catholics see in ecumenism the goal of eventual unity. This has led to a certain amount of “phantom” discussion, according to Besier, and a discussion not accessible to the laity. As for the laity, Besier sees a Germany in which most people are less and less concerned with the arguments and goals of church leaders as they seek contentment in this life. One example? In Germany today the children of mixed marriages are supposed to divide by gender, with boys taking the religion of the father and girls that of the mother. In practice, according to Besier, fathers are likely not to press their “advantage,” nor are any in the family likely to attend church on a regular basis.

Mikko Ketola, speaking about the reception of Vatican II in Finland, similarly described a very broad change, in this case from the early to the late twentieth century. Starting with the recognition of the nearly universal dominance of the Lutheran church in Finland, Ketola noted a population of only 999 Catholics in 1940, a similar number to Jews. In the 1920s a Lutheran bishop had described Catholicism and Bolshevism as “the two greatest threats” to Finland. An analysis of Finnish attitudes toward Catholicism in 1959 described a “prejudice resting upon a firm foundation of ignorance.” Suspicion greeted Vatican II in the 1960s. However, the rapid modernization of Finland which began about that time, along with specific leadership on these issues, resulted by the 1980s with a Finland transformed, by then a “model of ecumenism.”

Hans Hermann Henrix reported on the impact of Nostra Aetate in three Eastern European nations: Russia, White Russia, and Ukraine. In all cases this reception was influenced by 1) the impact of Soviet policy through 1989, 2) the small number of surviving Jews after the Shoah, and 3) the small number of Catholics in relation to the dominance of Eastern Orthodoxy. Nostra Aetate was first translated into Ukrainian in 1996, into Russian in 1998, and first published in White Russia in 2009. In each case the Catholic Church is a small part of the population, as few as 600,000-800,000 among the 140 million Russians, for example. Also, the post-Shoah Jewish population is very small, although Ukrainian independence led to something of a Jewish “rebirth,” with a population today of 400,000. In all cases there have been efforts at Jewish-Christian dialogue and at developing Catholic respect for the Jewish faith in line with Nostra Aetate. These efforts are quite recent and often center around attempts to celebrate January 17 as a “Day of Judaism.” St. Petersburg, for example, has held such a festival in 2012, 2014, and 2015. A similar Ukrainian celebration took place in 2013 and 2014, although it failed to take place in 2015, due to the political crises that year. White Russia has been a place of Jewish-Christian dialogue since a large international conference in Minsk in November 2009.

Robert Ericksen moved outside the Middle and East European orbit of this conference to give a report on the North American discussion of Nostra Aetate. American bishops considered themselves natural leaders in the post-Vatican II discussion, especially because of the large number of Jews living in the United States by the 1960s, and also because of certain American ideas about respect for religious freedom. In March 1967, the U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops published their “Guidelines for Catholic-Jewish Relations,” taking very seriously the radical nature of Nostra Aetate with its insistence that Catholics could no longer teach Christian supersession in God’s eyes or Christian contempt for Jews and Judaism. Ericksen showed the assertive nature of Jewish voices in the Jewish-Christian dialogue, voices of individuals such as Rabbi Irving Greenberg and Emil Fackenheim. He also described the increasingly substantive trajectory of change within the Christian-Jewish relationship to be found in the recent work of Catholic figures such as Father John Pawlikowski.

Tobias Weger completed this conference with a presentation on new church architecture in Poland and Germany and its reflection of Vatican II. One aspect involves a greater emphasis on lay participation along with a less rigorous assertion of the priest’s authority as the voice of God. This can be seen in the placement and style of furnishings in relation to the altar. Another emphasis is upon local history and aesthetic preferences, so that there is no single style to which a Catholic church must conform. In all cases, the discussion of Vatican II at this conference involved a recognition that it pointed in the direction of significant change. Furthermore, these changes continue to mark the Catholic Church and the Christian world in our day.

Journal Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History 27, issue 2 (2014)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Journal Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History 27, issue 2 (2014)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

The latest issue of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History (Volume 27, Issue 2, 2014. See http://www.v-r.de/en/magazine_edition-0-0/kirchliche_zeitgeschichte_2014_27_2-1010266/#section_inhalte) is devoted largely to the publication of papers presented at the conference “Myths – National Borders – Religions,” held at the Akademie Sankelmark, Flensburg, Germany, in September 2014. Several articles will be of interest to our readers.

In “Myths of Religious Reconciliation,” Andrea Strübind of the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg explores the aftermath of the 1965 reconciliation ceremony in which Roman Catholic Pope Paul VI and Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras mutually revoked the excommunications of their predecessors. Through this act of “brotherly love,” the Great Schism of 1054 was to have been set aside. Strübund asks the important question of whether this event had any actual historical influence on the church-political relations between the two churches. Simply put, did it lead to greater unity? In her analysis, she finds that there was little theological consciousness of the events of 1965 in either church, and she notes that tensions even increased after 1989, when the two churches found themselves in competition with one another in post-communist Eastern Europe. In fact, in its year 2000 declaration “Dominus Iesus,” the Roman Catholic Church reiterated its self-understanding as the “mother church,” while Greek metropolitans recently signed a profession of faith in which Roman Catholicism is described as the “womb of heresies and fallacies” (p. 253-254). In other words, the 1965 gesture was a singular event which Strübind interprets as a reconciliation myth, just as the 1999 joint declaration on the Doctrine of Justification between the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation seems to be turning out to be (p. 255).

Anders Jarlert of Lund University has written an interesting article entitled “The Myth of Sweden as a peace-power state and its religious motivations.” In it he explores the history of Sweden’s self-identification as a peace-power state, an identity taken up forcefully by Archbishop Nathan Söderblom of Uppsala during his years of service from 1904 to 1931. Söderblom himself and Sweden more generally were to be mediators between churches and even states during and after the First World War. Söderblom understood “Sweden’s task and position as a God-given vocation” (p. 258). During the Second World War, however, Sweden was largely unable to use its neutrality for any purpose other than to stay out of the fighting, save that the country served as a site for international meetings and that Swedes took in the roughly 7000 Danish Jews rescued during the Holocaust (p. 259). Instead, a series of Swedish “modern martyrs for peace” (Count Folke Bernadotte, Dag Hammarskjöld, Raoul Wallenberg, Olaf Palme and Anna Lindh) served as heroes and “secular saviours,” becoming in the process the new basis for Sweden’s ongoing self-understanding as a country of peace and justice.

In his article “Norwegian National Myths and Nation Building,” Dag Thorkildsen of the University of Oslo explores the role of national religion in Norwegian identity. He describes the creation of the Norwegian national myth as a “secular salvation history” mimicking the story of ancient Israel, complete with migration story, founding myth, golden age, period of inner decay, and promise of regeneration (p. 269). Along the way he explains how both the cult of St. Olaf in Trondheim and the Cathedral of Nidaros have become components of Norwegian national identity.

Along similar lines, Inge Adriansen of the Museum Sønderjylland in Sønderborg, Denmark, analyzes the national-religious myth of Dannebrog (the Danish flag) in her article “The Danish national flag as a gift from God.” Formerly a symbol of the Danish monarchy, in the course of the nineteenth century Dannebrog was adopted by middle class Danes as a national symbol. According to tradition, the flag saved Danish King Valdemar II “the Victorious” during the 1219 crusade against heathen Estonians. As the Danish archbishop knelt in prayer for flagging Danish troops, Dannebrog floated down from heaven into his arms as a gift from God. Not surprisingly, the battle turned and the Danes were victorious (p. 277-278). As Adriansen points out, this Dannebrog myth is very like other ancient and medieval myths of flags and crosses in the sky leading to miraculous military victories (p. 279). She goes on to explain how Dannebrog became woven into Danish national identity, in school textbooks, as a royal and military symbol, as the people’s flag, in art and poetry, and on Valdemar’s Day—a civil-religious flag day. Two interesting aspects of Adriansen’s article are the special role of the flag in the Danish-German border region and as a tool for recruitment during the Second World War.

Kyle Jantzen of Ambrose University in Calgary, Canada, explores the relationship between German Protestantism, traditional religious nationalism, military patriotism, and National Socialism, in the construction of the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin-Mariendorf between 1933 and 1935. One of over 900 churches constructed or renovated during the Nazi era, the Martin Luther Memorial Church contained physical elements which fused Nazi, nationalist, and Christian ideology, including a crucifix portraying Jesus as an Aryan hero, a baptismal font ennobling the ideal Nazi family type, a pulpit depicting the Sermon on the Mount as an expression of the Nazi ideal of Volksgemeinschaft, and a triumphal arch comprised of ornamental tiles which included Christian, cultural, and National Socialist symbols. In analyzing the process by which this church was constructed, Jantzen finds that it was the product of a collaborative and largely local decision-making process that demonstrated the penetration of Nazi values into German Protestantism and the eagerness of German Protestants to work with the new Nazi state, from which they sensed little, if any, hostility.

In “Legendary Martyr: Maximilian Kolbe,” Christian Pletzing of the Akademie Sankelmark in Flensburg, Germany, has written a fascinating assessment of the problematic legacy of this Roman Catholic priest, editor, monastery director, and martyr. Kolbe is most famous for offering to take the place of a Polish family man sentenced to death in Auschwitz, in reprisal for an escape from the camp. In dying this way, Kolbe became “Poland’s martyr” (p. 365). He was subsequently beatified in 1971 as a “flower of Polish Catholic religiosity” and canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982 (p. 366). It would be hard to overstate the symbolic importance Kolbe came to hold in Poland. He was “an essential link between Poland’s national and religious identities;” the nexus of Catholic pilgrimage to and understanding of Auschwitz; the inspiration for the naming of well over a hundred churches, chapels, altars or other memorial sites; the symbol of resistance to dictatorship adopted by the Solidarity labour movement; and a general spiritual emblem of the vindication of death by sacrifice and the conquering of hate through brotherly love (p. 366-368).

Lost in this appropriation of Kolbe’s heroic act of martyrdom was the fact that his career as writer and editor for two papers, the monthly Rycerz Niepokalanej (Knight of the Immaculate) and the Catholic tabloid Mały Dziennik (Small Newspaper), included numerous antisemitic articles. Under Kolbe’s editorial watch, these papers portrayed Jews as “Poland’s cancerous ulcers” and “a threat to the Polish state.” He himself wrote an article in which he “accused the Jews of striving for world domination.” Other articles warned of Jewish conspiracy, noted the economic rivalry between Jews and Catholics in Poland, described Jews as “vermin” and called for a boycott of Jewish shops (p. 370). This legacy is counterbalanced somewhat by the fact that Kolbe’s monastery took in 1500 Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. Still, “most of the biographies and collections on the lives of saints about Maximilian Kolbe published in Catholic publishing companies essentially conceal his anti-Semitic publishing activities,” even as they highlight positive contributions he made as a publisher (p. 370-371). Pletzing also explains how Kolbe grew to become a symbol of German-Polish understanding, particularly in the years after 1971.

Finally, Katarzyna Stokłosa’s article, “Nationalism and the Church in the German-Polish border region after World War II,” explains the nature of the compulsory integration of the northern and western regions of Poland regained in the settlement of the Second World War. She describes a strongly nationalistic policy of Polonisation amounting to the “comprehensive destruction of all evidence of foreign elements that were reminiscent of the German era” (p. 375). This affected all manner of objects, including “pictures, maps, ash trays, plates, packaging, graves, crosses on the roadside, chapels, churches, religious images, etc.” in every kind of public space, including schools.(p. 375). Stokłosa demonstrates how the Roman Catholic Church played an important role in integrating these new territories into the rest of Poland. Indeed, “the Polish Catholic Church belonged to the strictest anti-German forces as it aimed to extinguish all remnants of German-ness in the new western and northern areas” (p. 381). The German language was forbidden for masses, in religious education, and at the cemeteries. Poles replaced Germans as parish priests, and the position of even Polish Protestants was so tenuous that many converted. In ways like these, the Polish Catholic Church played an important role in the Polonisation process of the post-war era.

Conference Report: “Resistance Revisited and Re-questioned: Church and Society in Scandinavia and Europe”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Conference Report: “Resistance Revisited and Re-questioned: Church and Society in Scandinavia and Europe”

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

A conference hosted by the Royal Academy of Literature, History, and Antiquities met in Stockholm on September 18-19, 2014, focusing on the topic of church resistance to an unjust state. Professor Anders Jarlert of the University of Lund served as organizer and host. This conference also coincided with the annual meeting of the Board of Editors of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, with the papers expected to appear in that journal in the fall of 2015.

A total of nine presentations looked broadly at the question of church resistance, especially against the Nazi state, and then focused more narrowly on Scandinavian responses to that regime. The first paper, presented by Gerhard Besier of Dresden, described the difficulty of assuming that Christian morality and resistance to the Nazi regime were naturally congruent. Though this idea dominated early postwar church historiography, and though it remains a default position for some even today, scholarship in recent decades has complicated that picture. While some Christians in Germany resisted the Nazi state and considered this a natural outcome of their religious faith, others attributed support for the Nazi state to their Christian beliefs. Hitler’s frequent references to “Providence,” for example, were designed to nurture such a connection. Besier advised against attempting to ascribe resistance to entire confessional groups or theological stances. Rather, one must consider individual circumstances and motivations as locate and interpret actual examples of resistance. Robert Ericksen of Tacoma, WA, stressed the importance of recognizing the widespread postwar condemnation of Nazi crimes and the nearly total loss of respect for the Nazi state as we try to assess church resistance to that state. Christians in Germany and their co-religionists abroad were eager to separate Christian values from Nazi crimes, with the result that the complex story of Christian behavior in Nazi Germany tended to get distorted. As we now ponder the reality of Church responses to the Nazi state, we recognize that resistance was hardly widespread. Ericksen also stressed the importance of acknowledging national identity and national experience in our analyses. We should not expect to find a typical “Christian” response to Hitler across national borders. It was far easier for patriotic Christians in Scandinavia, for example, to question and oppose Nazi policies than for patriotic Germans to contemplate treason against their own national government.

Katarzyna Stoklosa of Sønderborg, DK, mirrored Ericksen’s concern about the importance of national borders and national perspectives. Studying churches in Eastern Europe under communism, she has found no simple relationship between Christian faith and political resistance. For example, when Germans started to flee the GDR toward Poland, the Polish Catholic Church provided shelter and assistance. By contrast, the Reformed Church of Hungary did not, almost certainly due to its greater willingness to support the communist views of the national government. Recent events in Ukraine, according to Stoklosa, show a similar divide. The Greek Orthodox Church has shown sympathy toward the demonstrators who eventually produced the present government in Kiev. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, on the other hand, has tended to follow the Russian line, condemning the new government in Kiev. In none of these examples does one find a simple Christian stance in terms of values and politics. Andrea Varriale of Weimar presented the final paper within this broad focus on Christian resistance. Examining the Italian resistance during World War II, he described a postwar tendency to create an image of resistance unified in values and in class consciousness. A closer look, however, shows internal conflict within the Italian resistance and disagreements on the question of values. Varriale argued that popular culture, especially film, proved willing to acknowledge these internal conflicts more readily than professional historians.

The balance of this conference devoted itself to Christian responses to the Nazi presence in wartime Scandinavia. This too presented a varied picture. Palle Roslyng-Jensen of Copenhagen described a complicated response within Denmark, and a response that conflicts somewhat with Denmark’s positive reputation for its rescue of Jews in the fall of 1943. The complication began upon the German invasion, when the occupiers provided both the Danish government and the Danish Church a good deal of autonomy. This resulted, naturally, in a careful avoidance of harsh criticism toward German policies, for fear that the benefits of considerable normality in Danish life would be undercut by a clear critique of Nazi attitudes and policies. Beneath this official layer of Danish society, however, local pastors and laypeople grew increasingly critical of the Nazi occupation, based upon their pride in Danish attitudes and values and leading, among other things, to their defense of Danish Jews. In this case, a Danish population homogeneous in ethnicity and religion, still divided to a considerable extent on the question of cooperation with or resistance against Nazi Germans. Svante Lundgren of Lund described the case of Finland, allied with Germany for much of the war. The Lutheran Church in Finland worked to protect its flock and its prerogatives within this setting, including some resistance against the Nazi ideology. However, Lundgren described a small group of 150 Jewish refugees in Finland who failed to receive support or assistance from that church. Anders Jarlert of Lund also dealt with a nation never under direct German occupation. Swedish neutrality, however, did involve many connections with Germany that could prove complicated. Jarlert described how the Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935 could create problems in cases of intermarriage between Swedes and Germans. The response of the Swedish Lutheran Church was marked more by bureaucratic muddling and uncertainty than by a moral defense of Swedish citizens of Jewish descent.

Roslyng-Jensen’s paper on Denmark had already identified the Norwegian example as a model to Danes of a more heroic way to respond to Nazi occupation. Torleiv Austad of Oslo then presented that story, a story much less marked by the ecclesiastical vacillation found in Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The Norwegian government, taken over by Vidkun Quisling with German backing, was of course a willing puppet of the Nazi occupation. The Norwegian Lutheran Church, however, resisted the Nazi hope that this official institution would become a counterpart to the sycophantic Quisling government. Bishop Berggrav and clergy throughout Norway risked their comfortable and safe positions by taking up resistance. This included a pastoral letter read in churches in early 1941 in support of justice and human rights. Then, in February 1942, seven bishops resigned, with 93 percent of the clergy following that example and resigning their positions on Easter that spring. Bishop Berggrav prepared the ground for these responses by taking on Romans 13 and the standard Lutheran belief in obedience to state authority. In a paper of 1941, “When the Driver is Out of His Mind: Luther on the Duty of Disobedience,” Berggrav established a theological basis for resistance. The Norwegian Lutheran Church then produced a document for Easter 1942, “The Foundation of the Church: A Confession and a Declaration,” clarifying a doctrine of the two kingdoms that could allow for resistance to state authority. This statement included these words: “As long as the above mentioned conditions exist … the church and its servants must live and act in accord with their pledge to God’s Word and their Confession and accept all the consequences that may follow from that.” That statement marked the day when Norwegian bishops and clergy resigned their positions rather than collaborate with the German occupation.

This conference concluded with a visit to the lovely Sigtuna Foundation buildings and grounds outside Stockholm, allowing those present to appreciate the setting where Dietrich Bonhoeffer met Bishop George Bell in his effort to secure British support for the German resistance as it attempted to overthrow Hitler.