Chasms & Bridges

On Munich's Konigsplatz, where storm troopers once goose-stepped, 40,000 Christians assembled last week in a gathering that dramatized for Germans both a saddening split and a heartening healing. The meeting was the ninth Congress of the

German Evangelical Church Day, known as Kirchentag, and the split that showed was the growing division between West Germany and the Communist East Zone.

A Different Kind. In 1954 Kirchentag was held in East Germany's Leipzig, and in 1956 15,000 East German Protestants got exit permits from the Communists to travel to the Kirchentag in Frankfurt. But this year the Communists had other ideas.

As the prayers began to rise last week around the 200-ft. steel cross in Konigsplatz, only about 1,000 East Germans were on hand. As a group they were beginning to look like a different kind of German. It was a difference that could be seen in little things--the nervous eagerness with which the director of the Reds' reception center greeted new arrivals, his small embarrassment at having to give them 30 marks' pocket money, the East Germans' skittishness at the approach of a Western newsman. Both East and West felt the urgency of the widening gap and tried to bridge it with words; white-haired Kirchentag President Reinhold von Thadden-Trieglaff, 68, of West Germany, spoke awkwardly in his opening speech of "the very special naturalness with which we greet our brothers."

A Community of Interest. But if the chasm between the two Germanys was growing, the gap between Catholics and Protestants was closing. In Munich Kirchentag delegates found themselves in the heart of Catholic Germany. It was the largest body of Protestants to descend on Munich since the armies of Gustavus Adolphus captured the city in 1632, and their advent was a great success. Munich's Joseph Cardinal Wendel took in Danish Bishop Frode Beyer and his wife as house guests, and many a Catholic family followed the cardinal's example. All over the city, for the Kirchentag's five days, Catholics and Protestants explored areas of common religious interest in a tone that was far different from the bitter polemics of past centuries. Germany's top Protestant leaders were on hand, including Bishops Otto Dibelius of Berlin and Hanns Lilje of Hannover. Each day of the Kirchentag began with Communion in 16 churches, went on to Bible classes and lectures in ten great halls.

Germany's Lutherans are strong for reunification of Germany, and in order not to rile the Communists against their Eastern brethren, they refrained from anti-Communist talk in speeches. Instead of bitterness at the Red regime, Lutherans displayed a tendency to look upon its repressions as divine punishment. Said Director Johann Schonherr of the Pastoral Seminary in East Germany's Brandenburg: "If today, in one part of Germany, the church loses many of its old privileges, the church must see this as God's way of regenerating it ... The church must suffer with its people, must share their problems, their political frustration."

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