The beauty of German churches? ‘It’s typical’
October 23, 2008
Frankfurt-am-Main was decidedly warmer than Edinburgh when my bus, snorting and snarling, arrived outside the main railway station. I carried my coat in my arms and divested myself of a few scarves. I met my friend Johannes, a theology student who spent a year at Regis College in Toronto, and travelled with him and his father to their tiny 800-year-old village. One of the great blessings of the age of technology is that we can make friends across the world and, as long as the oil holds out, visit them in their natural surroundings. This is also one of the blessings of belonging to the universal church, particularly to that part of it that thinks about the universal church all the time: the Catholic world, though actually very big, often seems very small, and the world of Catholic theology students seems even smaller. It is easy to make many friends there. And although for many people the phrase “World Church” summons up images of grass skirts and bongo drums, for me it also means ancient European altarpieces too valuable to have been ripped out in the iconoclasm of the late 1960s.