Word: dibeliuses
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...emergency, Berliners (88% Protestant) rallied to help their fellow Christians. Berlin's famed Evangelical Bishop Otto Dibelius threw open the Marienkirche, the principal Protestant church in the city, to the Catholic meetings. He took Munich's Roman Catholic Archbishop Joseph Wendel as a guest in his own home. At open-air Masses in the Walbühne. Catholics worshiped before the same cross used by Protestants at last year's Evangelical Kirchentag. At Berlin's Funkturm fairgrounds, Protestant Pastor Lothar Kreyssing addressed the packed Catholic gathering and got the most thunderous applause...
...Said Berlin's bearded Bishop Otto Dibelius, who has been more outspokenly anti-Communist than other German Protestant churchmen: "We especially pray for our imprisoned brothers & sisters here and out in the wide world...
...both churches raised a fresh storm of Communist anger. In this tense atmosphere, the Evangelical Synod of all Germany-both West and East-held its annual meeting in the Eastern sector of Berlin. Many expected that the Synod would widen the breach between Christian church and Communist state. But Dibelius, after denouncing the "increasingly worsened" conditions, insisted that the church was not attacking any special group, but only "defending itself against anti-Christian assault." It was thus clear that Protestant leaders hoped to maintain their tenuous attitude of "a plague on both your houses" in the East v. West conflict...
...Dibelius told the meeting: "Our church is [not] willing to be used as a factor in the play of political forces. We are concerned with the soul of man and with that which makes him man. That is possible under the most divergent political patterns . . ." At the close of the meeting a resolution was adopted calling on both the Western and Eastern zone governments for "justice...
...Next day Dibelius, the Eastern zone Evangelical bishops and several Catholic churchmen met with Grotewohl. From the meeting came a joint communique: "The representatives of the churches gave assurances that they were deeply concerned with the reconstruction of the life of the German people in peace and freedom. The representatives of the government gave assurances that the church in the German Democratic Republic could work unhindered on a constitutional basis...