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The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 143-145



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Book Review

Glaubensmut unter den Bedingungen des Sozialismus anhand der Predigten des Paters Gordian Landwehr


Glaubensmut unter den Bedingungen des Sozialismus anhand der Predigten des Paters Gordian Landwehr. By Joachim Seeger. [Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe XXIII: Theologie, Bd. 715.] (Bern: Peter Lang. 2001. Pp. 476. $68.95.) [End Page 143]

Joachim Seeger has written an insightful, analytical monograph, initially a dissertation, that focuses on the life and contribution of Gordian Landwehr (1912-1998), a Dominican preacher active during the Third Reich, during the era of Soviet control of the DDR, and during the tumultuous early years of the post-1989 reunification struggle. Seeger's work is a model for studies in church history, especially for those engaged in comprehending the role of spirituality in political life. He has thoughtfully included a list of Landwehr's homilies by title, date, and number of pages. An exhaustive list of primary and secondary sources dealing with Landwehr as well as with the Catholic Church in the Third Reich, the DDR, and post-1989 Germany has also been compiled. This comprehensive study is unfortunately flawed by Seeger's habit of extensively developing such background sections as the struggle of institutional Catholicism against Nazism and then inserting them in ways that interrupt his train of thought and ours as well.

Seeger's book deals with several questions. How can faith survive in atheistic political systems? What is the role of the well-constructed homily in nourishing the spiritual lives of the faithful especially in political systems that strive to alienate citizens from one another? How does the authentic faith of the person offering the homily speak to the gathered congregation? Finally, how can the ecumenical sensitivities of a man like Landwehr serve as a weapon against the totalitarianisms that in our lifetime have tried to annihilate human dignity and the diversity rooted in the human condition?

The portrait of Landwehr that emerges is, not surprisingly, complex. Here is a man, for example, who was a soldier and a priest, a participant in a war that he judged even at the time to be unjust. In Landwehr's reflections on his experiences, we can tangibly empathize with the dissonance that he and, presumably, other Germans must have experienced in the war.

Landwehr's career in the DDR occupies about 75% of this book and is a welcome contribution to an understanding of the Church's struggle with Communism after World War II. In his homilies during this period, he focused, for example, on comparing the Christian and the Communist anthropologies. Christian anthropology, he insisted, is grounded in the fact that each person is an image of God and so possesses a dignity that is sacrosanct. For the Fathers at Vatican Council II and for Landwehr in the trenches fighting for souls, such an anthropology provided the foundation for Catholic social teaching and, in particular, for the human rights conversation in the Church launched by John XXIII and kept alive by his successors.

Such men and women as Gordian Landwehr helped weaken the East German regime by providing a space for the kind of theological and spiritual reflection that nurtured the values that would ultimately undermine the regime. His homilies also addressed issues tied to the materialistic and consumer-oriented societies of the West and so reinforced the agenda of John Paul II. Seeger's study is a work that should challenge church historians of the modern period to revisit [End Page 144] the role that well-constructed homilies still have to move men and women spiritually and politically.

 



Donald J. Dietrich
Boston College

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