Coventry's stories of peace and reconciliation - Print version

Thérèse Mema Mapenzi continues to strive to share lessons learnt from her time in Coventry

Coventry International Prize for Peace and Reconciliation recipient 2014

The Coventry International Prize for Peace and Reconciliation recipient Thérèse Mema Mapenzi shares her ‘Coventry’ experience of forgiveness at home in the Congo.

Coventry Cathedral in Romania

Jane Williams is a child of Coventry Cathedral.

As a member of the Cathedral Sunday School that met in the undercroft before the Consecration she recalls being carried by Provost Bill Williams at the end of the service as he spoke to and encouraged the children after their classes.

It was the international vision of Bill Williams that inspired Jane to take direct action in the years that followed.

After the Romanian Revolution of Christmas 1989 horrific conditions were revealed when the borders opened. In 1994 Jane and Martin Williams travelled the 1500 miles from Coventry to Sibiu, Transylvania to see what help they could offer themselves. That was the start of a long-term commitment.

At first the need for direct practical aid was paramount. Ordinary Romanians were starved of food and lacked what we would consider daily necessities.

Jane and Martin launched appeals for aid. Clothing, medical supplies, food and building materials arrived in response. Royal Mail donated mail lorries to take the aid across Europe. The Cathedral nave was cleared of chairs and hundreds of people paid to take part in aerobic sessions organised by Centre AT7. Volunteers from the congregation helped to sort out the aid that arrived.

After two years the need for practical aid became less important than the need to help the Romanian people to help themselves. An education aid project began with the aim of improving living conditions for ordinary Romanians - so that children would no longer be abandoned to “orphanages”.

Jane Williams still visits regularly. She developed training courses for nurses and devised the first course of ante-natal classes to be held in Romania – classes that were later adopted for use by the Association of Romanian Midwives.

Jane took with her to Romania a professor from Newman College, Birmingham to start links between his university college and the University of Sibiu, and the first Romanian Early Years programme has now started.

The senior staff of the Hospital acknowledge that the health education programmes of the last ten years for staff, mothers and mothers-to-be have played a major part in updating hospital practices and patient attitudes with the effect of reducing abandonment.

The project’s vision includes building better interdenominational relationships within the Christian community – a community scarred by the “divide and rule” policies of Ceausescu. An Anglican presence causes no offence to any other denomination because it is not aligned with any of them!

The Coventry Cross of Nails was presented to the project in 1996. Ten members of the Cathedral congregation travelled to Romania that year with Jane and Martin to help complete the building where the Cross of Nails was kept. The dedication ceremony was attended by priests and ministers – fellow Christians who had never before stood together in the same room, let alone prayed together! It was a special occasion.

Later the Revs Geoff and Gill Kimber were recruited by the Church Mission Society, and left Coventry diocese for Romania in 2002 to develop the work of reconciliation. The Centre for Ecumenical Research brought together the Orthodox and Lutheran theological faculties in Sibiu to help build better relationships between denominations through higher education. The Centre was dedicated on 23rd September 2006 and Rt Rev Colin Bennetts, the Bishop of Coventry travelled with Jane to Sibiu for the occasion.

In 2009 the UK charity SHARE, that funds the Romanian work, linked with German volunteers at the Cross of Nails Centre in Dacia, about 60 miles from Sibiu. They are working to improve the schooling of the village children and the living conditions of the older residents.

More recently members of the Cathedral congregation have sponsored local final year University students to spend their summer working at a Centre for Disabled Children in Sibiu where deprived children with complex health and behavioural problems reside. The volunteers (Occupational Therapists and Speech and Language Therapists) report life-changing experiences. The centre Director values not only the benefits to the children, but also the sharing of the therapists’ skills with the untrained staff carers.

The work continues.

"Britten's War Requiem" - by Robin Lewis

I have been a member of the Chorus of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) for over 20 years. As you know it was the Orchestra which gave the premiere of Britten's War Requiem at Coventry Cathedral in 1962.

I have been lucky enough to sing the piece on many occasions, one of the most recent being the 2012 performance we gave in the Cathedral marking the Cathedral's and the piece's 50th anniversary.

Apart from that very memorable performance, two others stand out particularly in my memory, especially as I experienced the piece's very powerful message of reconciliation on both occasions.

In 1995 we were invited to Leipzig to perform the piece with Kurt Masur and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. This was one of the first occasions for the piece to be heard in Eastern Europe, it being only four years after the Berlin Wall came down.

Masur deliberately echoed the symbolic international forces used by Britten at the premiere in Coventry: Masur used his own German orchestra, a British choir (us), an American tenor, a German bass, and a Russian soprano.

It was indicated very clearly in the programme notes for the concert that, at the conclusion of the music, there was to be no applause: the audience was simply to stand in silence. It was an extraordinarily moving experience at the end of such a powerful piece to watch from the stage of the Gewandhaus as this German audience rose as one to its feet in complete silence to acknowledge the very powerful message of reconciliation which this great piece conveys so movingly.

More recently, in 2013, we performed the piece in the newly rebuilt Thomaskirche in Dresden, this time with the CBSO, who gave the first performance in 1962. It was again a very powerful and moving experience to sing the piece, which was written for the consecration of our new Cathedral, in Coventry's twin city, which of course was devastated in 1945, and in a church which had lain in ruins for over 50 years.

On both occasions many members of the audience (and in Leipzig, of the orchestra) spoke to us about what an emotional and heart-wrenching experience it was to hear this piece performed by a British choir in Germany. Many commented on what a positive impact the piece, and its close association with Coventry, has had on our two nations' journey towards reconciliation.

Robin Lewis

Ecumenical work at the Chapel of Unity in 1967

In July 1967 Archbishop Cardinal, the Apostolic Delegate, was guided around the Cathedral by Bishop Cuthbert Bardsley and Provost Williams before attending a service.

This was the first visit by the Pope’s official representative to an Anglican Cathedral since the Reformation.

The visit of the Papal Delegate followed the ground-breaking ecumenical work based at the Chapel of Unity. It is hard to think that no Papal Delegate had entered an Anglican cathedral for 400 years, and Coventry broke the ice! There is no such thing as a Papal Delegate today as since 1982 the Vatican has appointed ambassadors - itself a sign of improved relations.

The service that he led was in praise of St Benedict. It received no general advance publicity because relations with the RC church were a very sensitive issue. The Cathedral was packed with members of local RC congregations.

St Mark's Episcopal Church in Florida

In 2015, St Mark’s Episcopal Church became a member of the Community of the Cross of Nails (CCN).

The Church has a long and impressive record of engagement with marginalised people in the area; from fixing roofs and finding furniture for those in danger of losing their homes through ‘code violation fines’, to delivering meals to infirm people around the county, feeding homeless people and providing emergency care for destitute families.

The School is equally impressive as students take part in practical work in Costa Rica and learn Christian values of peace building.

Finally a significant part of their joint mission is the provision of a Peace Chapel on the grounds of the church and school, open 24/7 for those visiting or working at the hospital over the road.

Pforzheim and Huchenfeld

Every year, the people of Pforzheim remember two events.

They remember the destruction of their city on 23rd February 1945, just 10 days after the bombing of Dresden. 18,000 citizens died, a proportionately much higher figure than at Dresden.

They also remember an incident a few days later, in the village of Huchenfeld on the outskirts of Pforzheim, when five British airmen who had bailed out of their aircraft were murdered by young Nazis.

Murder at the Huchenfeld and its amazing consequences

Of all the German Cross of Nails Centres, Huchenfeld’s story, a village just outside the City of Pforzheim, is the most remarkable example of murder most foul, turning to reconciliation most profound.

An East German Lutheran pastor with a brave record of resistance to many injustices retired to West Germany, to the village of Huchenfeld where his son lived. There he unearthed a story that the villagers did not want known. Soon after an air raid on Pforzheim, as devastating as Dresden’s, a British reconnaissance plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire. Its wing ablaze, the captain of the aircraft ordered his crew to bail out. His own parachute had jammed. He flew on, expecting to die but, surprisingly, the fire went out and he landed safely behind allied lines.

The five man crew came down in the village of Huchenfeld. Anger at British bombing was running high. A Nazi officer rounded them up and locked them in the cellar of the village’s town hall. The next morning he put pistols into the hands of young members of the Hitler Youth, probably 15 or 16 years old, drove the airmen through a jeering crowd into the church yard and ordered the boys to kill them. Four died, but in the confusion two of them escaped into the forest and were taken prisoner-of-war as the law demands.

Pastor Heinemann-Grüder was determined not to let things rest until there had been a public acknowledgment of this lynching and a memorial placed to the victims. He faced a great deal of hostility but he persevered. Knowing of Coventry’s work for reconciliation with Germany, he invited me to the village to discuss this with the mayor and with others. The village council was not willing to erect a memorial. It would be too upsetting. Those boys might still be around. But the church council was willing. A memorial plaque on the church wall would be solemnly unveiled, just feet from where the men were killed. This would follow a Eucharist in the Church at which I was invited to preach.

Once this was agreed, the mayor was shamed into officially associating the whole village with this act of repentance. The Independent and The Mirror cooperated in finding the widow of one of the men killed. She was deeply moved and readily agreed to come to the ceremony. Other relatives were not found. The British Embassy sent a senior diplomat from Bonn. The bodies of the murdered airmen had been buried after the war by the British War Graves Commission not far away. The Nazi officer responsible for the murders had been tried by a war crimes tribunal and executed. The boys who had obeyed his illegal order were not held to account.

At the Eucharist one man who came to receive communion was crying bitterly. I quietly tried to comfort him. His were not the only tears. But through his tears he managed to say to me: “I’m so ashamed, I was one of the boys who killed them.” He had come for forgiveness, some fifty years later.

After the service I shared this with the widow of one of the victims. Her immediate response: “Find him. I’d so much like to put my arms around d him and forgive him.” We did not find him, nor did anyone know him. He had gone quickly and probably come from afar.

All this was published in several British papers. On a sheep farm in Wales, the surviving captain of the aircraft read the story. Until then he had never been told the fate of his crew. He was moved beyond measure, wrote to the mayor, asking what he could do to express his gratitude to the village. A new kindergarten was being planned. He agreed to come to its opening and brought as his gift a Welsh rocking-horse. The children queued to ride it. It was a wonderful village festival. That led to annual exchanges between Huchenfeld and a Welsh village. In an RAF veterans publication the two who had escaped read the story. They too then became an active part of this reconciliation story, part of a new network of friendships.

No other Cross of Nails Centre expresses as dramatically as Huchenfeld what reconciliation can mean in practice. Remarkably, an almost exact parallel story can be told of the City of Rüsselsheim, home of Opel cars. There, American airmen were lynched and there also two escaped. One of them returned when a memorial was erected to his comrades by the City. He was a devout Baptist, a simple working class man from the deep South. I interpreted for him as, in tears, he embraced a university professor, the son of one of the murderers who had been executed. Deep wounds can be healed.

Paul Oestreicher [written in June 2010]

A story of peace and reconciliation by Oliver Schuegraf, Chair of the German Community of the Cross of Nails

As the 75th anniversary of the Coventry blitz draws closer, each day we are sharing a story from our archive or from our partners within the Community of the Cross of Nails.

This is a reflection of what it was like to work at Coventry Cathedral by Oliver Shuegraf (Chair of the German Community of the Cross of Nails board) and, in particular, when he met Stuart Hooke from New York – in the years following 9/11.

From 2002 to 2006 I worked at Coventry Cathedral as Co-ordinator of the Community of the Cross of Nails. At the beginning I quite often asked myself: What do I have to offer in regard to reconciliation? I am a well-off German, born in 1969 into a time of peace and prosperity. I gratefully look back to a sheltered childhood und a university full of opportunities. No real harm was ever done to me. I’ve never had to struggle for justice or peace. How can I dare to talk to others about reconciliation?

On Friday mid-day I regularly led the Litany of Reconciliation in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and presided over the following Eucharist. One Friday in 2005, we were visited by Stuart Hooke, an Anglican priest from St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City. St. Paul’s is the little church in Manhattan surrounded by skyscrapers directly opposite Ground Zero, where until 11th September 2001, the towers of the World Trade Centre soared up. It is also the only building in the area surviving the attack without any harm. A bit after the service in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, Stuart Hooke recorded his impressions in an internet video to his church community. I was quite amazed by the powerful emotions that were evoked in him by my own rather modest utterances which I had made on so many similar Fridays. My original words must have gained much more pathos in his memory than they had actually possessed in reality:

“There he was, standing in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, celebrating the Eucharist. It was a Eucharist of Reconciliation, and there was a large group of people there – pilgrims, tourists, curiosity seekers.

And he said to them after the service: ‘Look at me! I am a young German Lutheran minister. I am offering the sacrament of unity in this place. Unity and reconciliation and forgiveness’. And he said: ‘Do you understand the symbolism of this?’

And they all said: ‘Oh yes’.

Well, I was standing in the back, and I just … ah … teared up immediately, because it was just immediately for me resonant of what we are about at St. Paul’s.”

During my time in Coventry, I was constantly amazed how Coventry Cathedral and its story have the power to move people and to bring alive the message of reconciliation. More than once I was able to experience that, for people from the most varied crisis-torn regions of the world, the encounter with this place became an incentive and a motivation to fight unceasingly for justice and reconciliation. The link back to Coventry’s ruined cathedral and its history of reconciliation is more than a mere nostalgic reminiscence of times gone by.

And I also had to find out that apparently the story can move especially when it is told by a German serving at Coventry Cathedral and giving living witness to the fact that things can change: Coventry Cathedral has stretched out the hands for peace, British and Germans have been reconciled by God’s grace and it is by now almost the most normal thing in the world when a German is presiding over this Friday noontime service in the ruins. It has been a privilege of telling and symbolizing this reconciliation story.

Oliver Schuegraf
Chair of the German Community of the Cross of Nails
#CCN #Fatherforgive

Some people find it rather strange that military bases are members of the Community of the Cross of Nails

The experience of the Reverend Canon Dr David Stone, Canon Precentor, who travelled to Den Helder in the Netherlands to present a Cross of Nails.

I had the privilege of presenting a Cross of Nails to the Protestant Chaplaincy of the Dutch Armed Forces at their Naval Base in Den Helder, right at the top of the Netherlands.

Klass Ubels heads up the chaplaincy department and his colleague Wilco Veltkamp made me and my family feel most welcome. It was also good to be joined by Bert Kuipers, who chairs the CCN in the Netherlands.

A new Chaplaincy Centre in Den Helder was built and opened in 2013 and, in preparation for their application to join the CCN, they have been praying the Litany of Reconciliation on Fridays since January.

Here’s what they say:

“With the start of the Litany of Reconciliation in Den Helder, we realize how special it is to pray the Litany in a military area. We also realize that the aim of the Dutch Armed Forces to support international law and order, if necessary by fighting for peace, is in the end from a totally other level than the peace we believe in through Jesus Christ. It is extraordinary to pray for the coming of his peaceable Kingdom, wearing a military uniform!

“We hope that, in time, more centres of the Chaplaincies in the Dutch Armed Forces will join the Coventry Litany at their barracks, at the ships and during deployments, for example now in Afghanistan or Mali. The opportunities for prayer are many, not at least for the so called ‘opposite groups’ during our deployments.

We wish to be a part of the CCN as network of Churches and Christian organisations who share a common commitment to work and pray for peace, justice and reconciliation, inspired by the story of Coventry Cathedral.”

David Stone, Canon Precentor (2014)

The Anti-War House in Sievershausen, Germany

The story of the work of one of the members of the Community of the Cross of Nails (CCN) - St Martin’s Church and the Anti-War House in Sievershausen, Germany.

In 2014, John Witcombe (Dean of Coventry and the Community of the Cross of Nails presented a Cross of Nails to St. Martin’s Church and neighbouring Anti-war House to the parish of Sievershausen, Germany.

For many years the parish of Sievershausen has worked in reconciliation. In 1979 the “Dokumentationstaette zum Kriegsgeschehen und ueber Friedensarbeite” was founded - this is the association which supports the anti-war house.

They will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. (Isaiah 2:4)

This is the underlying principle for the work and worship of the community in Sievershausen. The anti-war house has become a lively event centre and developed a diverse programme that reflects their understanding of peace work as a political, historical and cultural task. There are regular exhibitions, lectures, readings, music, and theatre performances.

There is also a seminar house, which hosts people, to teach them how conflicts may be solved in a constructive way. Since the mid-1960s by Klaus Rauterberg peace workshops and lectures have taken place on this site. There is space for youth camps, seminars and a retreat centre. In recent years the church and anti-war house have invested time working together and have a close and supporting relationship.

#CCN #Fatherforgive

Taking the Boys Choir to Horishima on a tour of Peace and Reconciliation

Inspiring our young people - October 2000, taking the Boys Choir to Horishima on a tour of Peace and Reconciliation

Told to Christine Doyle by Rupert Jeffcoat, former Director of Music:

"This was an important trip (in eight years I took choristers on 12 foreign excursions), not only for the sheer organisation and funding it required but because it made sense of the reconciliation perspective. Visiting Hiroshima and hearing from a Hibakusha (survivor of the bomb) was both harrowing and humbling, yet in a strange way inspiring.

In relation to that, the boys were involved with various performances of the War Requiem across Europe (including the premiere in Volgograd and in the turbine hall that made the V2 bombers near the border with Poland). Most memorable was a marvellous trip to Wurzburg in April 2005 (just before I left) when I took the eldest dozen boys to sing in the cathedral there, as we finally managed to take our Secretary, Janet Hart, with us: she did so much to make the department tick, but was always left back at base holding the fort, so for once we thought she should benefit from all her hard work!

There are of course dozens of odd little stories that fan out from such trips. One slightly amusing story from Japan was the opening ceremony at a huge Buddhist hall where the Bishop of Warwick (Priddis) and Canon Andrew White had to talk about Christianity and Reconciliation respectively. Their speeches bore no resemblance to the ones translated in advance, but we crossed our fingers and hoped that no-one really noticed!"

The story of Kemper Anderson from Georgia

Not only does the Coventry story inspire organisations to be members of the Community of the Cross of Nails (CCN), but the work of the members inspires those around them. Here is a story from Kemper Anderson, from Georgia, in the USA from his experiences

“I first heard about the Community of the Cross of Nails (CCN) from the Rev. Eloise Lester at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta (Georgia) in 1980. I was twenty something and grappling with the transition from being a young person to a “grown-up” (if there is such a thing) in God’s church.

“Of course, I had studied the Second World War in high school and college, but the story of Coventry and Dresden that Eloise told me challenged my rather simplistic perspective about “who were the good guys and who were the bad.” That we on the allied side could also be guilty of wanton and indiscriminate violence against brothers and sisters caught up in the madness of war, whose only crime was being at the wrong place at the wrong time, was a sobering thought indeed.

“My participation in a CCN-focused “foyer group” was instructive—in an odd sort of way. This was the year of the Mariel Boat Lift, wherein 125,000 Cuban expats, many recently released from Cuban jails and mental health facilities by Fidel Castro, attempted the perilous transit across the Florida straits in small boats, rafts and even converted automobiles, to reach the U.S. mainland and a better life. The impact on South Florida was enormous, both economically and politically, and the evening news was filled with stories of chaos, survival against the odds and, all too often, death.

“Sadly, however, even within a Christian foyer group formed around an ethic of reconciliation, many resisted the moral imperative to adopt Castro’s exiles, opting instead to have them repelled at sea by the Navy and Coast Guard, even if it meant death by dehydration or drowning. I was pretty disillusioned—how could this be? How could good people, people I loved and admired, turn a blind eye to such suffering? How could they fail to be reconciled with brothers and sisters in such grievous need?

“Isn’t it ironic how the present sometimes mirrors the past? I confess that I dropped out of that foyer group a few months later in search of something more authentic. I never forgot the lessons I had learned from the Coventry story, however, and they would later stand me in good stead during the “first journey” God had in store for me.

“If you had asked me in 1980 to list my top one hundred career paths, being a cop wouldn’t have made the list. But I needed to support my family and policing seemed as good an option as any. During my thirty years in law enforcement, I learned a lot about reconciliation, and about the cost of failing to be reconciled. As a “peace” officer, I often found myself holding up the prospect of reconciliation to people who had become estranged from one another, and in some cases from the community, due to a veritable litany of real and imagined sins perpetrated by one person against another. In most cases, no one was truly without sin. Some figured it out, accepted accountability for things done and left undone and managed to begin anew with those they had wronged, and had been wronged by. Others clung to the myth of their own righteousness, and were never completely able to let go of their injury, or accept their own culpability. Their anger and pain never really abated; the wounds they had suffered could never truly heal.

“No one said reconciliation was easy: the cases of real reconciliation that I have witnessed were not the result of “cheap grace”—lip service in lieu of the hard work necessary to bring about a lasting peace. The parties to the conflict had to engage closely with each other and hammer out the wrongs that each had perpetrated on the other. Both had to ask for and grant forgiveness. And still there would always be “raw moments,” where old wounds were apt to reopen and threaten a fragile peace. I’ve learned that forgiveness and reconciliation must be on-going.

“So now I’m beginning my “second journey” as a priest in God’s church. The need for

reconciliation between (and within) faith traditions has never been greater. The imperative to

end the estrangement between sisters and brothers of different races and ethnicities, socio- economic classes and generational cohorts has never been more urgent.

“The imperative to end the estrangement between sisters and brothers of different races and ethnicities, socio- economic classes and generational cohorts has never been more urgent. Failure in this most important work will guarantee an on-going cycle of social conflict, “tit-for-tat” insults and injuries, grinding on with endless monotony, and ensure that our pain and half-healed scars are passed down to our children and grandchildren. What can I do? I can’t “fix” the problems, but I can get in the middle of things, roll up my sleeves and work to apply the lessons I learned from the story of Coventry and Dresden, and from my years as a peace officer, as I walk beside those who are willing to give forgiveness and reconciliation a chance.

“For a long time, I thought this cop turned priest thing was “simply serendipitous,” (if there is such a thing) but I’ve begun to discern that I’ve been being formed for ministry since well before seminary. God just had a lot of work to do with me. And God never wastes anything. How it will all work out, I can’t say. But I’m game. Given what I’ve learned over the past three and a half decades, how could I not be?”

'Father Forgive'

On the charred walls behind the Altar, Provost Richard Howard wrote the words ‘Father Forgive’.

Just a few short weeks later he broadcast to the nation saying “What we want to tell the world is this: that Christ born again in our hearts today, we are trying, hard as it may be, to banish all thoughts of revenge…… We are going to try to make a kinder, simpler, a more Christ-Child-like sort of world in the days beyond this strife…”

Coventry twinned with Volgograd

As Coventry still lay in ruins, our Civic and Faith leaders reached out to other bombed cities across Europe and, as a result, we are one of the most twinned cities in the UK.

One city is Volgograd – formerly Stalingrad. Here is just one example of how we work together.

We use works of art to tell our stories of peace and reconciliation. Once such piece is the ‘Stalingrad Madonna’ – the battle of Stalingrad was the traumatic turning point of the Second World War. Dr Kurt Reuber was a German army surgeon during the long winter siege that nearly destroyed the city. The death toll was huge. At Christmas 1942, deep in a dug out, Kurt Reuber, who was also a Lutheran pastor, invited some of the surviving soldiers to celebrate the birth of Jesus. To enliven that bitterly cold, bleak place, he drew a Russian mother and her child, a reflection of his love for the Russian people, so cruelly treated by his nation. This drawing came to be called the Stalingrad Madonna, surrounded by the words ‘LICHT, LEBEN, LIEBE Weichnachten 1942’ (Light, Love, Life, Christmas 1942). The surgeon, artist and pastor went into Soviet imprisonment together with 9,000 German survivors of the siege. Like most of the others, he did not survive for long. Providentially, the Stalingrad Madonna did survive, flown out of the siege on the last plane to Germany.

The Stalingrad Madonna became a significant icon in post-war German church life and found its place in West Berlin’s Cross of Nails Centre, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a ruin preserved as in Coventry, with a significant modern church beside it, which in effect became West Berlin’s Cathedral. Kurt Soppa, the church’s pastor, presented a replica of Kurt Reuber’s Madonna to Coventry Cathedral at John Petty’s installation. It forms the Altar piece of the Cathedral’s only new chapel, which was dedicated on the 50th anniversary of the Blitz by the Bishops of Coventry and Berlin and the Archbishop of Volgograd – Anglican, Lutheran and Russian Orthodox, truly international and ecumenical and a profound symbol of love in the midst of hatred.

The Most Reverend Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury

The Most Reverend Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury was a Canon at Coventry Cathedral working in the International Reconciliation Ministry (IRM).

Recently he was interviewed by the Reverend Canon Sarah Hills, Canon for Reconciliation, on his experience.

"’ll pick one from Burundi because it illustrates something. I was in Burundi in Bujumbura just around or just after the end of the civil war but it was still very, very tense with lots of fighting still going on up in the hills.

“It was still on the Foreign Office`s list of the places that you must never on any circumstances go and I was facilitating a three day conference of rebel and government military and politic leaders on reconciliation and we worked away in our groups.

“It was very hard work and utterly demanding. On the third day, a man in one part of the room pointed across the room and pointed to a man and said ‘In the war he lead a militia that killed 30,000 people. How can I be reconciled to him?’

“He was a very senior officer and I remember looking out of the window across Lake Tetanize while trying to think of what to say and pointing out to the lake and I said to him ‘If you go out in a boat on the lake and you fall out of the boat what do you do?’ He replied ‘Well I swim’, so I said ‘If you don’t swim what happens?’ And he said ‘Well I drown’, and I said ‘Well if you don’t reconcile you will slaughter each other’; I said that to illustrate, because they wanted me to give a sort of solution to reconciliation, that the whole point is that reconciliation is done by the people in conflict.

“What we do in Coventry or anywhere else, what we try and do here is to make it easier for people to find their own way to reconciliation.”

Canon David Porter on building links with Germany

In a recent interview with the Reverend Canon Dr Sarah Hills, he shared this experience with her about building links with Germany and presenting a Cross of Nails at the former concentration camp at Dachau.

Canon David Porter was the Canon for Reconciliation at Coventry until 12 months ago when he moved to lead the reconciliation team for the Most Reverend Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury.  

“I think the stories that I carry most with me about my time here are from Germany; when people ask me about my time in Coventry Cathedral I say that I define it as my love affair with Germany. I fell in love with Germany by 2012 and in the 2012, the anniversary year, I probably made 13/14 visits to Germany.

“Being invited to speak and presenting Crosses of Nails the stories that have most affected me have been about how Germany has dealt with its past and its pain. In Germany in the ‘Olympics of how to deal with the past’ they have the gold medal. It doesn’t mean to say they are perfect but they’ve done amazing things in dealing with their past and the president, by constitutional right, makes a speech each year about the past and how they continue to deal with it. Two stories have deeply touched me from that.

“One is about presenting the Cross of Nails to the chaplaincy at the Dachau Concentration Camp. I once stayed at the convent at the border of the camp overnight for two nights and I was in the guest house on my own for one of them. It was really quite a deeply, deeply profound experience; ‘scary’ is too silly a word to use, it was just haunting to be at the edge of that place.

“I heard the story of a Catholic priest who was in the camp for being a Catholic priest; he was ill-treated and tortured like others in solitary confinement. When they were liberated he chose to stay on to be the priest to the SS guards who were kept there in prison and when the camp was used to house refugees from Eastern Germany and what is now Poland who were coming to the West, he stayed on to be their priest and was the main advocate for the opening of the camp as a heritage site - a place of memorial - which was opposed and it took a lot of lobbying and advocacy to achieve.”

ICONS Neue Mittelschule Gundstamdorf - Jack Fleming, former intern

A story from a school in Austria.

“In the summer of 2015, as a reconciliation intern at Coventry Cathedral, I was able to spend three days in a middle school in the small town of Guntramsdorf, about 20 minutes south of Vienna.  Between us, my colleague Hannah and I built up a routine of running classes and activities with children aged between about 10 and 14. Using her native German and my piecemeal knowledge, we explored what it takes to be superheroes, how young people can be bridge builders, the importance of symbols, and what reconciliation is all about with some 15 classes over two days.

“The high point, however, came on the third day, when the School was presented with a Cross of Nails to mark its membership of the ICONS network. The School’s involvement stemmed from the work of one passionate teacher, who had visited Coventry before, and had taken our story back to her School and her R.E. classes, an environment where it could have a real impact.

“In small schools, ideas travel fast. Soon, children from other faiths were sitting in on Catholic Religion classes, and peace Cranes marked the stairs to the staff room. When it was time to present the cross, its impact was clear. At the service were Catholic monks, Lutheran pastors and Orthodox priests. But what made Guntramsdorf such a good example of the ICONS network in action was that it was the students who took the lead - the very same students who were already taking responsibility for their choices and their lives (not to mention supporting the Cathedral’s reconciliation work, having funded our plane tickets to Austria and back). The teacher who had initiated the process struggled and failed to hold back tears of joy in the service.

“Afterwards, the cross was carried in procession from the Church back to the school by one of the girls. The other children, staff and guests followed behind, the line stretching out of sight. That is what Coventry’s reconciliation ministry is - a line stretching back into the past, and moving forward, led by the Cross of Nails, towards a world reconciled to itself.”

Emma Griffiths - ICONS

Some members of the Community of the Cross of Nails are schools which come together to form the International Cross of Nails Schools network (ICONS).

Emma Griffiths, Associate Director of Reconciliation, shares her story of working in Bosnia Hercegovina and linking schools there with schools here in the UK.

“Last year I visited Tuzla in north-east Bosnia Hercegovina to officially launch the ‘Schools for Peace – Skola za Mir’ project, linking schools in Serbia, Bosnia Hercegovina and the UK.

“We were very generously hosted by the school and were the guests of honour at the school celebration event, attended by the Minister for Education, in the Cultural Centre. The objective of this project is to encourage the schools to work on shared projects which look at identity and peace building.

“As part of our ICONS network we will help promote and support each of the partner schools in all three countries with educational activities which enable young people to remember past events in ways which encourage understanding of and co-operation in the present. This means demonstrating that our similarities and our differences are both pathways to partnership.

“The final few days were spent in Sarajevo at the Peace Conference, where we attended a seminar run by one our CCN Partners – Community for Reconciliation: Footprints - who work in Vukovar and Osijek, Croatia.

“On Monday Lisa, Anne (a colleague from Clinton Primary School, Kenilworth) and I stood on the corner where Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand on 28th June 1914, which is said to have sparked World War I.

“We sat together and said the Litany of Reconciliation:

The hatred which divides nation from nation, race from race, class from class,

The covetous desires of people and nations to possess what is not their own,

“These phrases took on a new perspective and resonance.”

Emma Griffiths, Associate Director of Reconciliation

The Very Reverend John Witcombe - Potsdam

This story is told by the Very Reverend John Witcombe, Dean of Coventry and also Dean of the Community of the Cross of Nails.

“Earlier in the year, I visited Potsdam, just outside Berlin in the former East Germany. I was there to share in the dedication of a Cross of Nails Chapel within the building project to rebuild the Garrison Church in the town. It is a contentious project, with strong support from some who want to see a historic building rebuilt for its own sake, others who want to rebuild it as a Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, and others who think it should not be rebuilt at all.

“The church was deeply associated with Prussian military history, and was the site where Adolf Hitler took on leadership of the Third Reich. On the other hand, it was the place where some of those who plotted against Hitler and risked their lives in the attempt were regular members. Some opponents want the past to be forgotten, and others simply think that rebuilding is a waste of money.

“The associations with Coventry are of deep significance, and together with Canon Paul Oestreicher, I was there to draw attention to those, and to support the rebuilding as a Centre for Reconciliation. The whole event illustrated the complexities of working for Peace and a sound future for all in a way that acknowledges the realities of the past and seeks to heal – a message which we continue to take out from here to the world.”

The Very Reverend John Witcombe, Dean of Coventry