For the Repose of a Good Soul

Cardinal Georg Sterzinsky, who kept the Catholic Church alive under the East German state, has died early in the day today at the age of 75.

Officially atheistic as Socialists need to be to justify their power, the DDR tried to convince the people that they had no souls. Eventually, they had to back off and leave at least some of the people to be free to guide their consciences in the way that they choose.

Born in 1936, his childhood years were the hardest times in the lives of the German people as a whole. He was ordained 11 years after the establishment of the Marxist-Leninist state. The best years of his adulthood were spent in a church that had to find a way to survive and coexist with the immutable, seemingly eternal oppressive state.

What is little understood about German Communism was that it was not generous to those in society who face difficulties in life. The churches, particularly the significantly larger Lutheran church, were depended upon for charitable work that (in a strange way,) was not provided by the “workers’ and peasants’ state” the way those needs would be covered in the west by government and civil society. Despite that, the invasive ideology of Marx and Engels was at war with faith. It though it needed to BE the only faith, but failed in the same way that it couldn’t serve the needs of society.

The all-powerful nanny state still depended on the people of faith that they were at war with to provide for those in need. Remember, in a command economy, those who don’t work are of inherently no use to the state.