The 29th Kirchentag, the major annual meeting of the German Protestant Churches, was recently held in Frankfurt. We publish a report on the event and the impressions of some of its participants The fourth time for Frankfurt, the first for a German Chancellor since 1987. 100,000 participants, but many last-minute guests swelled the ranks. 2500 events, including celebrations, reports, meditations, processions, concerts and theatrical performances. Such, in brief, are the bare statistics of the 29th Kirchentag, held in Frankfurt in the second half of June: a showcase of the Protestant confessions in Germany, but also an occasion for dialogue, debate, discussions between the German churches and a forum for dialogue with the lay world. And this year the link with the political, economic and financial world was even more in evidence. Apart from the presence of Chancellor Shroeder and that of Federal President Johannes Rau, who presided over the celebration in the Waldstadium on the final day – an event attended by some 80,000 people – the speakers included Welteke, the Chairman of the German Bundesbank, often the target of accusations in a past that now seems remote, as in 1987 when the organization of the Kirchentag itself announced that it was closing its own account at the bank in protest again the financial support provided to the South-African regime. Of course, politics were not the main focus of the event, which is already looking forward to the first ecumenical Kirchentag to be held in Berlin in two years time. A particularly significant moment in this perspective was the feast of Corpus Domini, when four processions with the symbols of the Chalice, the Cross, the monstrance and the Bible converged on the Roemenberg for an ecumenical celebration. In the view of Msgr. Hans Joachim Meyer, chairman of the central committee of German Catholics, ecumenism is in fact “in a phase of stagnation following the hopes aroused by the joint declaration on justification two years ago”. The Archbishop of Berlin, Cardinal George Sterzinsky, expressed the desire for greater unity among Christians and Cardinal Karl Lehmann, President of the German Episcopal Conference, made an appeal for the continuation of an intensive dialogue between the religions and recalled that the truth of the Gospel is always greater than the Church herself. The need for Christian unity was also expressed by Martin Dolde, president of the Kirchentag, according to whom “in the metropolis on the Main it has been shown that Protestants and Catholics feel themselves profoundly linked”. He also declared his conviction that “Christians will no longer allow themselves to be divided”.
