The Lutheran role of engagement is not dissimilar to that of Catholics in many other parts of Eastern Europe but in the German Democratic Republic itself the Catholic Church stayed out of politics. During the post 1945 period Heinrich Wienken was Commissary of the Fulda Bishop's Conference and adopted the same attitude towards the Communists as he had adopted earlier towards the Nazis: to secure the existence and survival of the Church, with questions of political order of incidental significance. By the 1960s his successors, men such as Cardinal Bengsch, were boasting openly of having voted against the Vatican Council documents Lumen Gentiumand Gaudium et spes. The call to engage in the problems of society was repudiated by Bengsch because this might have entailed conflict with the State. He also rejected the ecumenical movement. By practising social abstinence and living at a distance in GDR society Catholics marginalised themselves. Even after the encyclicals Pacem in terris of John XXIII and Populorum progressio of Paul VI, which addressed issues of human survival, the Church in the German Democratic Republic remained insular and remote. Bishop Georg Sterzinsky, the Bishop of Berlin, admitted the failure to engage or to respond to society's needs in his greeting to the Synod of the Federation of Protestant Churches in East Berlin at the end of February 1990, when he said: 'We had no hope that demonstrations or the expression of people's will could lead to success, and we regret for that reason we held back and played far too small a part in bringing about the new initiatives.' Sterzinsky took the opportunity to thank Protestant Christians and communities for their courageous involvement in the 1989 revolution. Father Hans-Friedrich Fischer, of Leipzig, told the Ampleforth Conference that 'Here at last are plain words which not only confess guilt but also show a readiness for a new policy on the part of the Church. This is a signal which will encourage many committed Catholics to continue their witness.' But it is also a story with significance for us in the West, especially for those who say 'the Church' (meaning Christians) should stay out of politics.
Spring at Last: Czechoslovakia
In 1938 in a broadcast on the eve of the Munich crisis, Neville Chamberlain referred to Czechoslovakia in a famous phrase, as a 'far away country' of whose people 'we know nothing'. He thus justified Britain's continued appeasement of Hitler's Germany, which had invaded Czechoslovakia. In 1968 Britain was similarly impotent when Alexander Dubcek was displaced by Husak, following the suppression of Dubcek's attempts at reform. Soviet armed intervention ended the Prague Spring. In an attempt to forestall the revolution of 1989 the Communist Government of Czechoslovakia kicked Husak upstairs, made