GERMAN CATHOLICISM AMIDST THE RUINS

The Church in the early days of 1945 was no longer the same as the Church of 1932, and we shall pay heavily for any failure on our part to recognise the importance of this fact. On the one hand the Church has suffered the loss of almost everything that is normally associated with the Faith as it is practised in the family and in the parish; its scaffolding and its organisations have almost all been destroyed. Nor can the Church in Germany be entirely exonerated from the accusation of having failed over long periods of recent history to provide the nation with spiritual leadership and from its guilt on this account. But there is another side to the picture. New life has been poured into the Church by the blood of its martyrs, it has been purified by a flow of superhuman suffering, and it has undergone an interior rejuvenation. A generous missionary spirit is animating many of its members who have rediscovered the meaning and the richness of the Christian community; it can claim a trained, if small, elite , joyously prepared for sacrifices, who have it in them to serve as leaven for the masses. At the same time as the Third Reich was brought low, the philosophy which had inspired that Reich, its ersatz religion, also came to an end. Millions of people were ready to entrust whatever hope and faith they had left to the Church because it had proved itself wiser, mightier and more enduring than their idol, the State. Yet there should be no illusions about the nature of this return to Christianity.