NEWS STORY: Pope meets a defiant flock on visit to Berlin

c. 1996 Religion News Service BERLIN _ It was meant to mark the peaceful reunification of Germany, but Pope John Paul II’s weekend trip to Berlin _ his first _ was anything but placid or unifying. As his vehicle was pelted by eggs and paint bombs and his entourage was greeted by demonstrators dressed as […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

BERLIN _ It was meant to mark the peaceful reunification of Germany, but Pope John Paul II’s weekend trip to Berlin _ his first _ was anything but placid or unifying.

As his vehicle was pelted by eggs and paint bombs and his entourage was greeted by demonstrators dressed as condoms, the pontiff ventured into one of the most hostile audiences of his well-traveled pontificate. The display horrified church traditionalists and embarrassed even those who wish for reforms in Vatican policy.”No matter what one’s opinion of the pope happens to be, it was an absolutely shameful and tasteless display of opposition,”said Josef Gruenwald, spokesman for Kritische Katholiken Berlin, a reform-minded group of Catholic Berliners.”There was a clear mood of displeasure among Berliners about the papal visit, but this was still not an appropriate way to express it.” Gruenwald added, however, that he believes the church itself was partly to blame for the protests.”The church was not willing to create an opportunity during the papal visit in which legitimate dissent could be properly aired,”he said.”It’s obvious that people are going to take to the streets if they feel they can’t be heard in any other way.” And take to the streets they did, as demonstrators protested everything from the Vatican’s rules on priestly celibacy to its rules on sexual abstinence and birth control.


At the historic Brandenburg Gate in the city’s center, where 70,000 spectators turned out, small but vocal groups of mostly young protestors chanted Gregorian hymns while a pope impostor with an entourage of would-be cardinals and men dressed as nuns weaved through the crowd, randomly blessing people and objects. Pushing and shoving matches erupted sporadically between protestors and riot police, who confiscated bottles and firecrackers from some in the crowd.

Police wielding truncheons and shields restrained individuals from rushing to the stage where John Paul, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and several German bishops stood.

The protests began when the popemobile was pelted while being driven along the elegant Unter den Linden Boulevard toward the Brandenburg Gate. A naked woman who attempted to jump in front of the pope’s vehicle was pulled back by police.

Detlev Kaiser, a Berlin police spokesman, said 33 demonstrators were taken into custody, 11 of whom will be charged with offenses ranging from disturbing the peace to vandalism.

Earlier in the day at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, built by Adolf Hitler for the 1936 Olympics, the pope beatified two German clerics, Dean Bernhard Lichtenberg and Karl Leisner, who died as a result of their opposition to Nazism.

Although 130,000 people were originally expected at the stadium, only 90,000 _ many of them bused in from outlying areas _ showed up. Organizers blamed the cold, cloudy weather.

During the three-day papal visit, John Paul met with Jewish and Protestant leaders to promote greater ecumenical dialogue. He also stated that he came to honor East German Christians _ Catholic and Protestant _ who continued to worship during more than 40 years of communist rule despite anti-Christian policies.


The protests late Sunday evening at the Brandenburg Gate capped off a week’s worth of critical debate in Berlin’s schools, media and other public venues examining the relevance of the Catholic Church in contemporary German society.

The Catholic Church, with 28 million members, is faring increasingly poorly in Germany. An average 150,000 members are officially quitting the church annually in protest of such ecclesiastical policies as a ban on female ordination, married priests and birth control, and also to avoid a state-administered church tax. Catholic dissenters collected 1.8 million signatures last year demanding church reform. “Everyone, including the church hierarchy, knew there would be demonstrations,”said Brigitte Loga, spokeswoman for Berlin’s Initiative Kirche von Unten, part of a network of 30 German-Catholic grassroots organizations.”The pope and his entourage came to a city where there’s a terrible economic situation since the fall of the Berlin Wall and arrogantly assumed that the population would not mind paying a few million deutsche marks to listen to some very outdated views on sexual morality.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall, state subsidies ended in both eastern and western Berlin, throwing the city into recession and pushing up unemployment to 12 percent.

Amid the pageantry and protests of John Paul’s visit, a recurring theme was the role of the Catholic Church in Germany under Hitler.

While delivering a sermon in the western German town of Paderborn, the pope omitted a section from an officially scripted Vatican statement that would have commended the German Catholic Church for opposing the Nazis. In Berlin, he also left out a passage during Mass at the Olympic Stadium that would have sought to vindicate the role of Pope Pius XII, the head of the Catholic Church during World War II. Pius has been criticized by many historians for not taking a strong enough position against the Nazis and their policies of genocide.

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said at a news conference that the omissions were due to scheduling difficulties. He added that many other passages had also been dropped because there was no time to read them. No final conclusion can be drawn about the role of the Catholic Church during the Nazi era until the Vatican’s archives are made public and thoroughly examined by historians, Navarro-Valls said.

But in an official statement after a papal meeting with leaders of the Jewish community, John Paul stated that even if there were many priests and other Catholics who resisted the Nazis,”there were still too few.”


MJP END MODRO

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