Political night prayer

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Political night prayer was the title of a liturgy that was celebrated at the 82nd German Catholic Day from September 4 to 8, 1968 in Essen . This gave rise to the worship tradition of the same name, first in Cologne , and then in many other places.

Emergence

Against the background of the Vietnam War ( Tet Offensive ), the Ecumenical Working Group Cologne - consisting of Dorothee Sölle , Fulbert Steffensky , Marie Veit , Heinrich Böll , Egbert Höflich , Michael Dohle , Vilma Sturm and others, wanted to a. - Celebrate a "political service" at the Essen Catholic Day in 1968 . The organizers of the Catholic Day did not schedule the service until 11 p.m., after which the group called the event “Political Night Prayer”.

As a result, "Political Night Prayers" took place every month from October 1968 at 8:30 p.m. in the Protestant Antoniterkirche in Cologne . Cardinal Joseph Frings had forbidden the use of St. Peter's Church. The President of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland, Joachim Beckmann, congratulated the cardinal “that he has the right to forbid something like this in a church”. He himself could not decide against the permission of the presbytery of the Evangelical Community of Cologne. Over 1,000 people came to the first prayer on October 1st. Catholic and Protestant church leaders criticized Dorothee Sölle's theology. A particular stumbling block was a creed that Dorothee Sölle uttered in the first night prayer. Beckmann saw it as "heresy". Beckmann also criticized the fact that during the night prayers political information that was “only a topic of conversation” was declared to be a service.

In addition to political information and discussion, the political night prayers also included a sermon or meditation based on a biblical text. Sölle described the structure of the night prayers as follows: The night prayers are “ political information, your confrontation with biblical texts, a short address, calls for action and finally the discussion with the community ”. For them " information, meditation and action remained the basic elements of all subsequent night prayers ".

Behind this structure stood Sölle's conviction that theological reflection without political consequences always amounts to hypocrisy and that every theological sentence must also be a political one.

Topics of the political night prayers were, for example, the military dictatorship in Greece (May 1969), economic co-determination (November 1970), § 218 (October 1971), the " Jesus People " movement (November 1971), the Baader-Meinhof group (July 1972), the federal election ( September 1969 and November 1972 ), the Vietnam War (February 1973) and the coup in Chile (December 1973).

Since then, church services have been celebrated in many different places based on the idea of ​​“political night prayer”. The evening prayers of Christianity & Justice are also "Political Night Prayers".

The political night prayers served the Leipzig pastor Christoph Wonneberger as a model for the Monday peace prayers, which have been held in Leipzig since 1982. From these, the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig and other places in the GDR in autumn 1989 emerged.

See also

literature

  • Political night prayer in Cologne . Edited by Dorothee Sölle and Fulbert Steffensky on behalf of the ecumenical working group "Political Night Prayer", Stuttgart and Mainz 1969
  • Political Night Prayer in Cologne, Texts - Analyzes - Criticism , Volume 2, edited by Dorothee Sölle and Fulbert Steffensky on behalf of the ecumenical working group. Stuttgart / Mainz, no year
  • Friedrich K. Kuryio: Church concerns . In: Die Zeit , No. 8/1973
  • Uwe Seidel, Diethard Zils: Action Political Night Prayer. Analyzes, working methods, texts and political worship services from Augsburg, Berlin, Bonn-Bad Godesberg, Dinslaken, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Osnabrück, Rheinhausen, Stuttgart, Trier and Utrecht . Wuppertal 1971 (with contributions by Dorothee Sölle, Max von der Grün and Jürgen Tillmanns)
  • Dorothee Sölle: Headwind. Memories . Hamburg 1995.
  • Anselm Weyer: Liturgy from the left. Dorothee Sölle and the Political Night Prayer in the Antoniterkirche. Edited for the Evangelical Congregation in Cologne by Markus Herzberg and Annette Scholl. Greven Verlag Cologne 2016, ISBN 978-3-7743-0670-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dorothee Sölle : Gegenwind , pages 71 and 72
  2. ^ Dorothee Sölle: Headwind , page 71
  3. ^ Thilo Schmidt : [1] German calls: Monday demonstration. Deutschlandradio Kultur, country report, September 4, 2013