The Church in Germany

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 47, 23 November 1905, Page 3

The Church in Germany

The Rev. D. S. Phelan, writing from Dresden to the ' Western Watchman,' St. Louis, gives his impressions of the Church in Germany. He says :— ' Before coming here I spent a few days in Berlin, where I found a great bustling modern city and the throbbing heart of Pan-Germandom. It did not interest me. Its ideals are too new ; its heroes are too "Well known, and look too much like cheap actors in their bronze coats and heroic pose. The present Emperor has done much for Berlin, and before long it will be the greatest city, in the world : the fairest paradise of the flesh and the strongest c:tadel of the devil. I found religious and social conditions there very much what they are here in Dresden. It is an adage there that people do not go to church on Sunday in Berlin ; they go to the theatre. The middle classes are still devoted to conservative home life and go to church, but the upper and lower classes have given up all religion. It is strange that in the two cities where' for four hundred years all the energies of the State and all the passions of the people were directed towards the extirpation of Catholicity, the Catholic Religion should be the only one to survive. In Berlin or Dresden, if you hear a church bell on Sunday or any other

morning, you may depend upon it it is either the Angelus or a call to Mass. I visited the new Evangelical Cathedral of Berlin dedicated by the Emperor the other day, and proclaimed the St. Peter's of the Protestant world. It was closed. I asked the reason, and the guard told me it was open on week days from, ten till six, but on Sundays it was open only one hour and a half in the forenoon and an hour in the afternoon. On •week days strangers visited it ; on Sundays nobody. On the other hand, the Catholic churches are thronged with worshippers at every Mass. It is so in Berlin, it is also so in Dresden. The uiesenee of the great and unbending Centrum has made Catholicity respected in Berlin, and has given courage to Catholics everywhere in the Empire. Nothing is too good for a Catholic in the eyes of the Emperor, and no post or place too high for the aspiration of a German Catholic.

The Effect of Persecution

is here everywhere evident in a bold and demonstrative Catholicity. Catholics take off their hats to a priest in Berlin and Dresden, as they take off their hats to an old soldier in Paris. And for the same reason. The priest has been in the thickest of the fight and borne the brunt of the battle during the Kulturkampf. The people visit the churches and pay respect to the Blessed Sacrament. There is a live, active, virile Catholicity in the most Protestant sections of Germany that speaks volumes for the future of the Church in that country. It is becoming plainer and plainer 1o all thinking .people in this country that religion spells morality, and Catholicity is synonymous with Christianity. Stubborn, irresistible truth ! '