`Catholic Herald' Correspondent: Fulda, Sunday
A quarter of a million Germans came to Fulda to manifest the unity of the Catholic Church. For the first time since the war 25,000 German Catholics from the Eastern Zone have been present at a demonstration that they are not left to endure their difficulties alone.
They have carried their banners representing every diocese of prewar and present Germany side by side with their brothers and sisters from the West in the midst of a gathering which by English standards is colossal.
They have enjoyed the hospitality of their more fortunate brethren and of the town of Fulda. They have prayed at its glorious altars and they have mixed with fellow-Catholics from other lands.
I have spoken with some of them, and if those young men and women are typical of their fellows in Magdeburg and Meiklenburg, the cause of Catholicism in Eastern Germany is not lost.
Catholic 'island'
There is something in coming to Fulda similar to the pilgrimage to St. Thomas of Canterbury in England's Catholic days — something simple and perhaps medieval in German Catholicism which we English at Evesham and Glastonbury are only just beginning to regain.
It is an opportunity for taking stock, and its inner meaning is enhanced by its thoroughly efficient organisation.
The feeding of the 25,000 from the Russian Zone and the handing out to each one of a packet of foodstuffs plentiful here but scarce there is, after all, not a bad bit of organisation.
Fulda and its dependent villages are an "island" of Catholicism in the midst of a Protestant land, in which Catholics are few and scattered.
The Katholikentag has been taking place in the shadow of all that work in the spirit of St. Boniface which has been carried on to preserve and maintain the Catholic Faith in Protestant areas — a work which has brought into being 793 new Catholic churches since the war and which is
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