Berkley Center

Background: In this exchange on July 3, 2012, in Berlin, Christian Herwartz, S.J., and Colin Steele discussed the life and role of migrants in Germany, the role of migration in the Catholic Church, and Herwartz's role and feelings about the Church.

Describe your vocation to the Jesuits.

I joined the order in the 1970s and spent most of my time working in East German factories. My fellow factory workers were my first flock. I combined ministry with the hard work of East German factory life. I’ve been a Berliner—an East Berliner—all my life. After reunification, the factory closed, but I knew there would be new ministries to be undertaken. That’s why you find me in this house today: reunification also brought with it migration, and this community is dedicated to providing shelter for migrants in the city and connecting them with the services they need to survive.

What is life in this house like for you?

The first thing you must understand about me is that I live with the people of East Berlin, I don’t "work with" them. For me, there is no professional distance—I live between and across the borders of everyday life here in East Berlin. I’m a bridge—not only between different cultures and places and walks of life, but between the privilege and education of traditional education and the big university we can’t see—daily life in the city. Just look at the art and artifacts on the walls: there have been African refugees who have walked in here and said, “This place is Africa.”

As someone who lives with and ministers to migrants and other invisible people of Berlin, what are your observations about the overall state of society and the economy here in Germany today? Germany’s in the news for being stingy on the euro crisis, but clearly not everything’s perfect here at home.

Unsurprisingly, as an East German, I have a complicated and often skeptical relationship with capitalism. Democracy, liberalism, and the welfare state are nice concepts, but they’re quite clearly unrealized: this city is full of people who have fallen through the cracks in the social-democratic fabric. In the GDR days, nobody knew what unemployment was. Now, you don’t have to look very hard to find people who have been blocked out (ausgegrenzt) of the system and society. Capitalism certainly drives globalization—look at the Turks, Africans, Arabs, and others who live in and pass through this apartment—but it also hinders it. Fundamentally, capitalism—at least as far as it’s practiced now—is fundamentally a hyper-competitive, inhuman system. Even and especially when people are brought together by economic pressures, the same spirit of competition that brought them there keeps them from interacting positively with one another—everyone’s most concerned with maximizing his own gains.

What inevitably happens is that cracks develop in the social compact, and where such cracks exist, people are falling through them. We say that everyone has worth, we say there’s a social safety net, but it’s pretty easy to see daylight between our ideals and what’s real. We’ve created a state that is insecure and uncaring (Unsicherheitsstaat), in which there are certain people who are not seen as of full worth, either because we can’t imagine them as our neighbors or because it would be inconvenient for us to ascribe full dignity to them (or assume full responsibility for them).

You’ve spoken about the cultural aspects of migration and invisibility in Berlin. As a priest, how do you see these issues as matters of religious concern?

There is a religious side to this problem, and it deeply informs my Christology and my vocation. It’s because of the great unseen drama that gets played out at or beyond the margins of polite society that I find Jesus more in the people—the migrants, the jobless, the homeless, the addicted, the handicapped, the invisibilized—than in prominent personalities. Without meaning any disrespect to presidents, politicians, executives, and the like, Christ lives in and with the poor and marginalized. Their struggles are his struggles; their drama, his drama. That’s why there can be no professional distance for me in my work—my vocation is to live with these people and so with Christ. There’s no room for physical or emotional distance in that relationship.

In fact, it’s that sense of closeness—the increasing awareness of God in all people and things—that led me into my vocation in the first place. I looked for life in the gemeinschaft and didn’t find what I was looking for; after I encountered religious writings and found that they offered a more authentic description of what I saw around me, I eventually followed those insights into religious life. Ever since, I’ve been accompanying these people in whom our society will not or cannot see humanity. In this house, everyone’s welcome—no questions asked. In fact, it’s the people who come through here who carry me and bring me joy, not the other way round.

This is a religious mission, but what’s your relationship with the Church at large? Is caring for these people a priority?

Make no mistake—I need the shelter and ministry of the people who live here at least as much as they need mine. Although this—these people, this house—is my vocation, I get little or no support from the [Catholic] Church (or the state, for that matter) for what I do. Even in this obvious case of a social need not being met and a group of people who need ministry, neither government nor ecclesial authorities have deemed it worthy of funding. Still, that’s life: a series of challenges and crises big and small that demand our best efforts at solving. That’s how I understand Ignatian spirituality, too. It’s not an ideology, but a process that might more aptly be called a pilgrimage. Like the people who come through this house, I’m on my own journey from crisis to crisis; that’s the central pilgrimage of all human life.

Develop the motif of pilgrimage more. It seems to be central to your sense of vocation. What does it mean to you, and what could it mean to the culture?

Once you’ve conceived of life as a pilgrimage, it becomes clear that no one can be excluded. Different cultures and ideologies surely exist, but it’s only failure of imagination that prevents us seeing the overwhelming fundamental similarities of us all. Often, ideology is the obstacle of imagination: there are plenty of mind-sets out there that have no interest in discovering truth, and the individualism upon which much of modernity is based is particularly bad for that. Individualism isn’t critically evaluative enough to produce a conversation that goes forward. Instead, it encourages the endless repetition of everyone’s opinion as if it were fact.

What we need most of all is a forward-moving conversation, and that can only happen in cooperation. Everyone has to take that most important step forward with his own opinions, but no one can take that step without the help of those around him. Mensch zu sein kann keiner allein sagen—no one can say he is a person by himself. Thus, the notion of the Privatsache, the private good, is fundamentally flawed. If humanity can only be realized in community, how can we hold that there can be such a thing as a “private good"? Clearly, this is a question with political implications as well as religious ones. I’m reminded of that at the monthly non-denominational worship service I help facilitate for Berlin’s forgotten people, who are well aware that government has chosen to recapitalize the banks instead of the jobless.

What are your overall thoughts on the life you’ve chosen—the challenges and opportunities it presents, and how it ties into the whole Church?

Is it challenging to live this way, in this house, with one foot constantly in jail? Yes, of course. But that’s the price one pays for living an ideal. The important thing is that for me it is on some level a choice. My vocation is to live here in this flat and in this community, but I could leave this if I wanted. I’m educated; I’ve seen the alternatives and consciously chosen this life over others. But for the people I live with, to live this way is not a choice. For them to live with one foot in jail is not a choice, either. They have no economic opportunities and have received little education, without which there cannot be any truly human life. Education opens not only economic doors, but cultural ones, and how else can we expect to realize the communal nature of our species if we can’t access culture?

Sadly, and finally, I’d say that the biggest obstacles in this realm are to be found within the Church itself. Of course the sexual abuse scandal is a black eye, but it bespeaks a deeper inability or unwillingness to confront human sexuality that will be the agent of the Church’s downfall if it cannot be addressed head-on, and soon. Things simply cannot go on as they are.