Visit to Berlin - an exercise in (n)ostalgia

It is impossible to visit Berlin without being prompted to reflect on how a city should remember its past (whilst at the same time allowing its citizens to live their present time); and also being prompted to reflect on the meaning of freedom. As you might aim to visit one particular location, you inevitably encounter others that are full of meaning. I am sure that Zero and I missed much of significance.

In the crypt of the Catholic Cathedral of St Hedwig, located in a square just off the Unter den Linden, there is a chapel with the tomb of Fr Bernhard Lichtenberg. The display case at the right hand side contains a dedication from the Yad Vashem memorial, recognising Fr Lichtenberg as a "righteous among the nations". His story can be found at their site here. Fr Lichtenberg was beatified by Pope John Paul II.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is very much on the tourist trail, being just a few steps from the Brandenburg Gate. The nature of the field of stelae, and its immediate position in a square surrounded by ordinary life, is such that people interact with it in widely different ways - climbing up, walking among the slabs, taking in the sun lying atop the lower slabs. Towards the outskirts of the city, but I suspect more moving to visit, is the "Gleiss 17" memorial at Grunewald S-Bahn station. This marks the railway platform from which the Jews of Berlin were deported to concentration camps. The edge of the platforms record the date of each transport.

We did come across the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church on our way elsewhere, but it is well worth a visit. The remains of the old church, badly damaged during the Second World War, stand alongside a very modern new church; and the closeness of the location to the most prosperous streets of Berlin is thought provoking (Kurfurstendamm is just a couple of blocks away). There is a particular link between the Memorial Church and Coventry Cathedral (and see here), both new buildings being consecrated on the same day. The Memorial Church contains the original "Stalingrad Madonna", which is quite moving to visit in the visual atmosphere created by the stained glass of the modern church. The Church represents a striking symbol of reconciliation in the particular circumstances of the aftermath of the Second World War - but it also prompts a contemporary reflection as to whether, in comparable circumstances now, that attitude of forgiveness and reconciliation prevails over hatred and fear.

It is tempting to say that one cannot escape an encounter with the Berlin Wall during a visit to present day Berlin. I think that is true - but I think there is also a sense in which it is possible to visit Berlin and ignore the Wall. The double row of cobble stones that in many places marks where the wall once stood does not attract much attention. Traffic drives over it in the roads on the western side of the Brandenburg Gate, and even at Checkpoint Charlie the precise line of the Wall is almost ignored by visitors to a location that has something of a theme park atmosphere to it. Alexanderplatz, now a busy transport and shopping hub in what used to be East Berlin, through which Zero and I passed regularly during our visit, was the scene just days before the Berlin Wall came down of a huge rally calling for political change in East Germany. The memorial to Peter Fechter, which is just two minutes walk along Zimmerstrasse from Checkpoint Charlie, is visited by very few of those who form a kind of procession from the Unter den Linden down Friedrichstrasse to the former crossing point itself. I left Zero in a nearby bar while I went off to find the memorial, with the aid of a search via my mobile phone. The present day memorial is not the original (see here). The double line of cobble stones marks the position of the Wall when Peter Fechter died in 1962, and the circular slab in the ground the point where he died. The memorial pillar is in what would in 1962 have been West Berlin; the image below is taken from what would have been the death strip on the East Berlin side of the Wall.

Whilst near the centre of Berlin, the Berlin Wall Memorial is not directly in the normal path of tourist visitors. I think it will be to visit on another occasion.

A visit to the Olympic Stadium had a personal interest as well as a historic interest. The stadium is still used by Hertha BSC football club; and, when Zero and I visited, the former Olympic swimming pool was being used by local families, with that unique sound of children playing in water reaching the visitors to the stadium proper. That this resource is still used by the local community rather than being discarded because of its associations with the Nazi regime, suggests a city that has not forgotten its past, but which does wish to live in its present. The stadium underwent a major renovation between 2000 and 2004.

The personal connection came, not from the stadium itself, but from one of the administrative buildings in the Olympic park. This now houses an exhibition relating to the history of German sport, administrative offices supporting German sport and the offices of Hertha BSC football club.  Today it looks like this:

In 1956/57, it looked like this:

Apart from its occupants, the only difference is the stone in front of the flag pole which commemorates the use of the building as the Headquarters of the British Military Government and of the British Garrison in Berlin between 1945 and 1994.

In 1956/57, my mother (far right, in the photo below) was serving as a clerk with the Allied Staff Berlin, whose offices were somewhere at the back of the building. I haven't been able to work out exactly which unit my father (sitting next to mother in the photo) belonged to at this time. 

Our last visit in Berlin was somewhat quirky. The Café Sybille on Karl Marx Allee. Karl Marx Allee really is very sleepy and quiet, though only two U-bahn stops from Alexanderplatz. Café Sybille is a decidedly retro venue, with a small exhibition of the history of the now Karl Marx Allee, AKA Stalin-Allee (before the latter's fall from grace - both the man himself and his statue on this street). There are sufficient English commentaries attached to the displays to make a visit worthwhile, but an ability to read the full German language displays would have been an advantage.

Again, Karl Marx Allee is one of those places in Berlin with a history that is easily missed during a tourist visit. It was the workers building along this street in 1953 who first began the protests that became the 17th June uprising in East Germany - the first uprising against the Communist powers in a satellite country after the Second World War. It was put down with the help of Soviet tanks, after the workers had marched from what is now Karl Marx Allee to the area of the Potsdamer Platz.

Which perhaps exemplifies my first thought in this post - that you cannot visit Berlin without reflecting on the ideas of memory and freedom.







Year for Consecrated Life (8): Comparing Secular Institutes and Consecrated Virginity

I think this post at Sponsa Christi offers an informative discussion of the vocation of Secular Institutes in relation to the vocation of consecrated virginity: Consecrated Virginity versus Secular Institutes (it isn't as argumentative as the title suggests!).

Catholic teaching on migration

When we read what the Catholic Church has had to say about migration - the messages for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees of Pope Francis and those of Pope Benedict, and the Instruction Erga migrantes caritas Christi of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants - there are a number of threads which emerge.

1. A right to emigrate and, in a mirror to this, the possibility of a right to immigrate. A right of migration is rooted in a right that individuals have to contribute effectively according to their abilities to the economic, social and cultural development of their communities. Where the present location of a person means that this is not possible, then a right of movement to a new place where there is a reasonably founded hope of realising it is part of the Church's teaching with regard to migration. Gaudium et Spes n.65, in passing, asserts this right of migration at the same time that it suggests that those who deprive their community of the material and spiritual aid that it needs endanger the common good. This right of migration might be exercised by a person who moves from one part of a country to another part of the same country in order to find work; it might have a greater social significance if it forms part of a general move of population from the countryside to towns and cities; and it might also be represented by emigration from one country to seek immigration into another. It is in this last instance that, if a right to migration is to be exercised, there can be suggested a corresponding right to immigration into a potential host country.

There are two interesting points about this. Firstly, the right to migration arises from a dimension of the dignity of the human person, that is, the right (and duty) to an opportunity to contribute creatively to the life of the community in which a person lives. It is not, fundamentally, a right that is political, economic or sociological in nature, though it is a right that has implications in all of these spheres. Secondly, it represents part of what in public debate is characterised by the terms "economic migration" or "economic migrant". Catholic teaching at this point challenges an assumption that those seeking entry to a new country as "economic migrants" should, just by virtue of being economic migrants rather than refugees who meet the UNHCR definition or the requirement for humanitarian protection, be refused entry.

2. A right of countries to adopt immigration policies that control the entry of people from other countries, in the interests of the common good. Gaudium et Spes n.26 defines the idea of the common good as follows (with my italics added to focus on the definition of the common good as such, but the perception of the universal dimension is very relevant to the contemporary situation):

..... the common good, that is, the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment, today takes on an increasingly universal complexion and consequently involves rights and duties with respect to the whole human race. Every social group must take account of the needs and legitimate aspirations of other groups, and even of the general welfare of the entire human family.

In respecting the needs of the common good, a country's immigration policy needs to consider not only the good of its own population but also the good of the potential immigrants to that country. There is a need for nations to collaborate with each other - nations that receive migrants need to collaborate among themselves, and nations that receive migrants need to collaborate with the nations from which those migrants originate. It is unlikely that the common good will be served by an immigration policy that is focussed on securing borders; and neither will it be served by a policy whose origins lie in a reaction to a domestic political exigency.  Nor is the common good going to be served by a policy that places such high barriers to immigration that it has an effect, foreseeable to a greater or lesser extent, of encouraging migrants to gain illegal entry into potential host countries.

It should not be forgotten that, sitting behind the notion of the common good, is the principle of the dignity of the human person. This requires that, at the point of encounter between the migrant and the authorities of a potential host country, there should be a respect for a person who has the rights that accrue to any person by virtue of their being a person.

3. Migration is an international phenomenon that requires the co-operation of states in response to both the situations that cause people to become migrants and the response of receiving nations. This co-operation is only going to occur when there is an authentic community of nations; it is not served by an international politics determined by a competition of national interests.

4. The Catholic Church also offers a teaching to its own pastors and faithful. This urges them to offer a welcome to migrants who arrive in their territories, both in material and spiritual terms. In referring to the pastoral care of migrants, the Church explicitly includes a care for their religious life as well as for their material well being, recognising that many migrants bring with them their religious belief and culture. The Church also sees, in the encounter between the life and culture that migrants bring with them on their journey and the life and culture of a host nation, an opportunity for evangelisation (though it should be clear that this opportunity is seen in the dialogue between the cultures rather than in any proselytising intent towards the conversion of migrants). Another strand in Catholic teaching is represented by a spiritual reflection on the situation of migrants who are uprooted from one home and make a journey, full of hardship, towards a foreign land. This journey is in places compared to the journey of salvation, to the journey of the Chosen People from Egypt to the promised land, to the journey of the Holy Family as they went into exile in Egypt to escape King Herod.

The UNHCR website for the UK identifies the numbers seeking asylum in the UK between January and March 2015 as follows (largest ten countries of origin only):

Eritrea (3,239), Pakistan (2,711), Syria (2,081), Iran (2,011), Albania (1,576), Sudan (1,449), Sri Lanka (1,282), Afghanistan (1,136), Nigeria (875), India (689)

One can readily identify in this list countries that are seriously affected by conflict, and conflict that shows no prospect of coming to an end in the near future. It also reflects the news reporting of the origins of those migrants who are currently crossing the Mediterranean or trying to enter the UK from Calais. I would suggest that, if the background and stories of many of these migrants were considered against the qualified right of migration suggested above, then decisions about their entry into the countries of Europe would be very different.

See also: How should Catholics respond to the tragic scenes at Calais?

See also: UNHCR calls for comprehensive response to the Calais situation

Two asides for the Synod

I am, perhaps, taking just a phrase from each of these two posts and adding to them a reflection not intended by their original authors.

First, tigerish waters, who some time ago posted on the Instrumentum Laboris for the forthcoming Synod of Bishops on the family. Read her post before reading my comments that follow.

I think the most interesting question tigerish waters asks is that of whether the (biological) family as a unit receives a mission or whether it is the individuals, particularly but not exclusively the parents, within such a family unit who receive a mission. Clearly such a mission, as a vocation received from the Lord, exists in the order of grace, and is certainly there for a Christian married couple. It might not, however, be completely absent from a "natural" marriage between non-believers who live a family life rooted in a genuine "good will".

Every family, within the wider context of a calling of the couple to a vocation that they share in common with other couples, is called to live that vocation in circumstances that are unique to them; and these circumstances give a specificity to their living of that vocation. tigerish waters question prompts me to wonder whether the Synod Fathers should try to teach in a universal way of a mission of the family, ad extra. For some families, the specificity of the circumstances of the couple might make that appropriate - families, for example, who through an engagement with an ecclesial movement are sent to a new part of the world as missionary families. But for others, the notion that they should be "active in the parish" rather overrides a primacy of a mission of the couple towards their own family - if they are to fulfil that mission, they simply do not have the time to be a parish catechist. The sense in which it is possible to speak universally of a mission of the family in society needs a careful relation to the mission of individuals in the family.

Secondly, Fr Christopher Jamison, who writing on A great Catholic marriage revolution, identifies a language of "discerning a vocation to marriage" as indicating a significant change in the way the Church speaks about marriage. Again, read his post before continuing.

Fr Jamison is referring, I think, to an action of discernment on the part of the couple themselves as to whether or not they have a calling to marriage. Of its very nature, this discernment needs to be a shared discernment of the couple ..... so it must radically challenge any culture of a "proposal" on the part of one party and a "yes" on the part of the other. It requires a shared conversation.

As far as the discernment of other vocations in the Church is concerned, those who hold office in the Church - Bishops, religious superiors or a vote in chapter - play a definitive part. How far is something similar appropriate to the discernment of a vocation to marriage? There seems to me some implication of this at least in the use of the language of "discernment" that Fr Jamison sees as marking a change in the way the Church is coming to speak about marriage. If a couple approach a parish priest asking for a marriage in Church, but clearly have no understanding of Catholic teaching about the nature of a sacramental marriage .... does not the parish priest have a part to play in helping the couple to discern the vocation to a sacramental marriage, and whether or not that is the vocation that they have in their relationship? And is this part to be played in discerning the vocation of a couple one that can be "delegated" from the priest to the marriage preparation course provided by such as Marriage Care? It will be interesting to see where the Synod Fathers get to in reflecting on the part that is played by "office" (in the Balthasarian sense) in the discernment of vocations to marriage in the Church.

Ideological colonisation?

During his visit to the Philippines in January, Pope Francis warned against an "ideological colonisation" of the family - Pope says "ideological colonisation" threatens traditional family.

Pope Francis on Friday warned against an "ideological colonisation of the family," a reference to gay marriage around the world and to a heated debate in the Philippines about a government population control plan.

The Pope made his impromptu comments at rally for families in Manila on a day that began with an appeal to the government to tackle corruption and hear the cries of the poor suffering from "scandalous social inequalities" in Asia's most Catholic country.

It is interesting in this context to watch Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta's response to  US President Barack Obama's comments on gay rights, during a press conference. It can be found in the second embedded clip of the BBC News report: Kenya: Trials would aid fight against corruption - Obama. (There is a certain disingenuity in President Obama's reference to "love", the term "love" here being typically undefined).

More recently, President Obama urged world leaders to heed Pope Francis' call in Laudato Si for action on climate change: Obama calls for world leaders to heed Pope Francis’s message.

“We have a profound responsibility to protect our children, and our children’s children, from the damaging impacts of climate change.”

But Laudato Si, n.155, reads as follows (emphasis added):

Human ecology also implies another profound reality: the relationship between human life and the moral law, which is inscribed in our nature and is necessary for the creation of a more dignified environment. Pope Benedict XVI spoke of an “ecology of man”, based on the fact that “man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will”. It is enough to recognize that our body itself establishes us in a direct relationship with the environment and with other living beings. The acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation. Learning to accept our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology. Also, valuing one’s own body in its femininity or masculinity is necessary if I am going to be able to recognize myself in an encounter with someone who is different. In this way we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God the Creator, and find mutual enrichment. It is not a healthy attitude which would seek “to cancel out sexual difference because it no longer knows how to confront it”.

A reference from this paragraph refers to Pope Francis' General Audience catechesis of 15th April 2015, during which Pope Francis discussed the significance of the "alliance between man and woman":

God entrusted the earth to the alliance between man and woman: its failure deprives the earth of warmth and darkens the sky of hope. The signs are already worrisome, and we see them. I would like to indicate, among many others, two points that I believe call for urgent attention.

The first. There is no doubt that we must do far more to advance women, if we want to give more strength to the reciprocity between man and woman. In fact, it is necessary that woman not only be listened to more, but that her voice carry real weight, a recognized authority in society and in the Church. .....

A second reflection concerns the topic of man and woman created in the image of God. I wonder if the crisis of collective trust in God, which does us so much harm, and makes us pale with resignation, incredulity and cynicism, is not also connected to the crisis of the alliance between man and woman. In fact the biblical account, with the great symbolic fresco depicting the earthly paradise and original sin, tells us in fact that the communion with God is reflected in the communion of the human couple and the loss of trust in the heavenly Father generates division and conflict between man and woman.

Across all three - President Obama, President Kenyatta and Pope Francis - there is an intriguing similarity of themes, but also a striking difference.

President Kenyatta appears to have articulated a very competent resistance to the colonisation of the culture of his country by an issue that is not foremost in the minds of its citizens.

[Whilst decriminalisation of homosexual activity might well be a step that the Catholic Church would consider desirable, I think we should recognise that the agenda represented by President Obama's remarks goes further than that.]

Pope Francis and the Greek deal? UPDATED

Speaking to a meeting of popular organisations during his visit to South America, Pope Francis observed of the work of those organisations:

The first task is to put the economy at the service of peoples. Human beings and nature must not be at the service of money. Let us say NO to an economy of exclusion and inequality, where money rules, rather than service. That economy kills. That economy excludes. That economy destroys Mother Earth.

And cf this passage from Laudato Si, n.189:

Politics must not be subject to the economy, nor should the economy be subject to the dictates of an efficiency-driven paradigm of technocracy. Today, in view of the common good, there is urgent need for politics and economics to enter into a frank dialogue in the service of life, especially human life. Saving banks at any cost, making the public pay the price, foregoing a firm commitment to reviewing and reforming the entire system, only reaffirms the absolute power of a financial system, a power which has no future and will only give rise to new crises after a slow, costly and only apparent recovery.

I wonder whether the recently agreed Greek bailout deal measures up to this criterion?

UPDATE: When Pope Francis was asked about exactly this during his return flight to Rome, he gave a somewhat inconclusive answer as far as the Greek context was concerned, though I add emphasis to the last sentence as it perhaps indicates His Holiness' essential stance:

Certainly, it would be all too simple to say that the fault is only on one side. If the Greek government has brought forward this situation of international debt, also they have a responsibility. With the new Greek government we see a revision and it’s a bit right ... I hope that they find a way to resolve the Greek problem and also a way to have oversight so that the same problem will not fall on other countries. And this will help us move forward because that road of loans and debts, in the end, it never ends.

The Day of Christ, the Day of Mercy

I have just encountered a book Generating Traces in the History of the World,  a book which according to its blurb, "is a synthesis of Monsignor Luigi Giussani's reflection on Christian experience". In the last few months, excerpts from the book have appeared in Magnificat.

I was struck by the title of the last chapter of the book: "The Day of Christ, the Day of Mercy". Given Pope Francis' familiarity with the movement Communion and Liberation, I wonder whether that familiarity provides at least something of the background to his calling of the Year of Mercy, and a helpful way of understanding what the year is and is not about.

Just as the Bull of Indiction for the Holy Year includes a discussion of the relationship of justice and mercy to each other in the Christian mystery (nn.20-21), so does the chapter in Generating Traces suggest, albeit briefly, that where the reason of man can arrive at a notion of justice with regard to wrong doing, it takes the revelation of the Christian mystery to enable man to access the experience of mercy. The chapter does suggest an eschatological character to the revelation of divine mercy:

If every hour of history is the hour of Christ's human glory that happens through the conscious offering of believers, there will come a day that no one knows (neither the angels of God, nor the Son, but only the Father) when the definitive revelation of the Mystery will take place, as the valuing of every good the Father has generated, the Son has assumed, and the Spirit has made fruitful. All the good, even the furtive move stirred up in the almost unconscious darkness of human endeavours in history, will not be erased by God who, as the summit of Being, cannot contradict Himself by annihilating on single instant of good. It will be the day of the triumph of Christ, who will hand over everything to the Father, so that the Father may be "all in all".... If Christ is the protagonist of the "last day", the day of Christ's triumph will therefore be the day of mercy....

It is also worth reading the account of the parable of the prodigal son given in Generating Traces .. alongside that of Pope St John Paul II in his encyclical letter Dives in Misercordia (nn.5-6), in order to capture a nuance that is important in understanding a significance of the parable for the Holy Year:

In Rembrandt's famous painting, the prodigal son is the mirror image of the Father. The Father's face is full of sorrow at the son's error, at his denial, full of a sorrow that flows back into forgiveness. Human imagination can reach this point. But the most spectacular and mysterious thing is that the Father's face is the mirror image of the prodigal son. In Rembrandt's painting, the Father is in a position that mirrors the son - in Him is reflected the son's sorrow, the despair overcome, the destruction prevented, the happiness about to rekindle, in the instant in which it is about to rekindle, when goodness triumphs. Goodness triumphs in the prodigal son because he weeps for his mistake. But goodness triumphs in the Father: this is the concept of mercy which man cannot manage to understand, or speak of. And the Father's face is mercy, because it is pity for the one who has gone wrong and is there, turned towards the one who is coming back.

When we put this alongside words which occur about a page later in the chapter, and still commenting on the parable, it is impossible to take away from the proposal of the Jubilee of Mercy any sense that it is indifferent to wrong doing. Indeed, the call to conversion is of the essence of the response to mercy.

The concept of forgiveness, with a certain proportion between mistakes and punishments, is in some way conceivable for human reason, but not this limitless forgiveness that is mercy. Being forgiven arises here from something absolutely incomprehensible to man, from the Mystery; in other words, from mercy. It is what cannot be understood that ensures the exceptionality of what can be understood, because God's life is love, caritas, absolute free giving, love without profit, humanly "without reasons".

The chapter in Generating Traces .. suggests two ways in which we might in our turn try to be merciful as the Father is merciful. The first is that we should be sorrowful for what we have done, but sorrowful in a way that is at once also joy:

In virtue of the revelation of His mercy - which would seem to sanction all human behaviour, but it does not - God fills us with sorrow for the evil that we were not even aware of before ... his is a sorrow full of gladness, but it is still sorrow, sorrow at oneself.

The second is that of responding in astonishment at God's mercy, expressed in an attitude of entreaty, or begging, before the Lord:

We are not truly human if we do not wish to be merciful like our heavenly Father. The question is whether or not we really desire it. So the miracle of mercy is the desire to change.... This desire defines the present, the instant of man who is a sinner. The miracle is accepting oneself and entrusting oneself to an Other present so as to be changed, standing before Him and begging.

Entreaty is the whole expression of man now, in the instant.

Just as Pope Francis, at the end of the Bull of Indiction for the Holy Year of Mercy, indicates the dimension of evangelisation contained in the proclamation of mercy:

[The Church] knows that her primary task, especially at a moment full of great hopes and signs of contradiction, is to introduce everyone to the great mystery of God’s mercy by contemplating the face of Christ. The Church is called above all to be a credible witness to mercy, professing it and living it as the core of the revelation of Jesus Christ.

so does Generating Traces.., though from the viewpoint of an experience of Christian life:

The reality of mercy is the supreme opportunity that Christ and the Church have for making His Word reach man, not just as a mere echo of this word in man.