Fr. Johannes Alois Duesing (1914-2000)
Father Johannes Düsing died in Muenster, Germany, of cancer on 17 January 2000 at the age of 85. He had spent half his life in Jerusalem, where he was a notable personality. His face half-hidden by a patriarchal beard radiated joy. His manifest goodness, not to say sanctity, attracted people of all ages and all faiths. His intuitive understanding and shining sincerity made him the bond of union of all the churches in the Holy Land... (excerpt from "Nouvelles de Jerusalem no. 77, January 2001, pp. 36-37).
In 2001, the Ecumenical Fraternity published a booklet containing the following memorials:
A Man of Good Will
Dr. Kirsten Stoffregen Pedersen
President, Ecumenical Fraternity
When I think of Fr. Johannes Alois Düsing, whom I have had the privilege of knowing here in Jerusalem for many years, a story of one of the Russian spiritual leaders, Father Silvan, comes to my mind. Fr. Silvan lived – unlike most of the famous 18th and 19th century staretzes - in a monastic community. It is told of him, that once he sat with a few other monks in the refectory, when the talk came upon a member of the community who was known as having a difficult character. The others were criticizing him, while Fr. Silvan was keeping silence and stood up to leave. One of the monks then said to him: “Why do you not say anything? You know we are right!” Fr. Silvan answered with another question: “Have you ever heard me criticizing anybody? And if not, do you think I will begin today?”
I often heard Fr. Düsing praising people in whom I with my critical mind found very little to praise, and his good will to see the positive sides of such people made me smile and mostly keep silent.
I spent part of my childhood and the first years of my teens in Nazi occupied Denmark. As a result of that I can assure you that we Danes of that generation did not love the Germans. Thank God I rather early was saved from the bitter hatred which normally was the result of the occupation. But I grew up in the atmosphere of intense hatred between the various nations of Europe which dominated those years. I could hardly imagine any German who would love Russia and the Russians – but I met one in Jerusalem. And that was even a German who had spent six years as a prisoner of war in Russia – Fr. Johannes Düsing. Again many of us must smile when we remember his contagious enthusiasm concerning Russian culture and Russian Christianity.
It gives me hope when thinking of the Middle East and the bitter enmity by which we are now again surrounded here. It seems impossible like it did in the second World War – but peace and co-operation is not impossible. Not even here.
____________________
Fr. Frans Bouwen, WF
St. Anne's Church
The fact that we are gathered so many here today shows that the memory and heritage of Father Düsing are well alive in Jerusalem. He is bringing us together, coming from different churches and traditions, and he is bringing us together in the presence of the Lord, for prayer.
During his many years in Jerusalem, Fr. Düsing has been doing exactly that: Trying to bring together the churches and children of God. And he did it most of all by being present in the prayer of the different traditions. Even when it was not possible officially to pray together and especially not to celebrate the Eucharist together, by being present Fr. Düsing expressed the desire that these barriers may one day be overcome. His attentive presence was already a prayer in itself. At the same time his presence also reminded us, in a most humble and respectful way, that we never should stop looking and loving beyond the limits of our own church or community. The praying awareness of what already unites us, and the untiring hope of reaching one day the full communion, are at the heart of the heritage that Fr. Düsing left us. We know that it is not easy at all, humanly speaking, to continue this witness, but we find trust and strength in the conviction that the Holy Spirit is present and helps us in our weakness: "For we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.... The Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God" (Rm 8:26-27).
Today, in Jerusalem, it is impossible to speak about bringing together the children of God without feeling deeply concerned with the misunderstandings, the lack of mutual trust and the violence prevailing instead of true peace. In this field also Fr. Düsing had a long and personal experience. The dramatic way he got personally involved in the Second World War played an important role in helping him to know and to love the Russian Orthodox Church. During his 42 years presence in this country, he witnessed a long series of dramatic events and wars. Therefore, he was a man of peace and reconciliation. In this field also he can be an inspiration for us here. By trying to know and to respect everyone, without sacrificing truth and justice, we have to feel the present divisions and hostilities as cutting through our own hearts and lives, so that our prayer may be suffering and our suffering may become prayer.
In commemorating Fr. Düsing, we want, once more, to give thanks to God for what he has been for Jerusalem and for each of us, and we want, above all, to renew our hope that one day, peace and unity may prevail in the city that has become the symbol of encounter, coexistence and fraternity of all of humankind.
_______________________
Fr. Tom Stransky, Paulist
Rector Emeritus, Tantur
Rather than the place and circumstances of a person's death, I have always been far more curious and investigative of a person's birth and early years: Where born? His or her specific milieu? How raised and educated? And for a clergyperson, the reflective experiences of the first years in ordained ministry? For T.S. Eliot: "The end is where you start from". Or for the 17th century English poet John Denham: "We may our ends by our beginnings know."
So were my curiosity and probings in several one-to-one conversations with Father Johannes Düsing. They sometimes focused on the ecumenical scene here in Jerusalem, but more often, on Muenster --the hub-city-- in the predominantly rural Westfalia of northwest Germany. I persisted on speaking in German, and did not allow him to practice his English on me; selfishly I wanted to practice my German on him. When over 80 years, in reminiscing on his early decades, he occasionally forgot his Hochdeutch and broke into the familiar Plattdeutch of Westfalia, which I only partially understood. He seemed to forget that I was not a Westfalian but only a temporary Muensterite.
It had been at the University of Muenster that 13 years after the war I studied Protestant and Catholic mission histories and theologies. And far more formative, I allowed to flow through me the articulated experiences of older Muensterites and rural villagers in the Nazi period.
Westfalia and Muenster was Fr. Düsing's home environment. Born there on October 31 (Reformation Day), 1914 (Gelsenkirchen-Horst), he grew up in the post-world war pervasive depression during the Weimar Republic, and since 1932 during the Nazi regime. In the midst of the war, he was ordained to the Muenster diocese in 1941 (March 19). The bishop was the aristocrat Clement August Count von Galen. Fr. Düsing told me how providential to have had von Galen as his bishop (since 1936) --a model of Christian priestly integrity.
The bishop was called the "Lion of Muenster" because his thundering sermons directly opposed Hitler and his Nationalist Socialist regime, especially his three famous sermons during July and August of 1941, soon after Fr. Düsing's ordination. In confronting the injustices and inhumanities of the totalitarian terror-state, Bishop von Galen's oft-repeated motto which all the faithful knew was: "Lieber sterben als suendigen (It is better to die than to sin)". Even the Gestapo was afraid to still the bishop's voice. Hitler told his entourage that he would settle his account with von Galen "after the war". Alas, among the German bishops, he was one of the very few who refused to compromise his faith-convictions.
At this period of Fr. Düsing's first three decades, the small minority of Lutheran and Reformed Churches of Westfalia was in Muenster; the rural areas were 100%, if not 150%, Roman Catholic. There were no Eastern Orthodox or Oriental Orthodox communities in the region.
So the intriguing question: In this rather Catholic ghettoed, a-ecumenical environment, and during a sheltered seminary education and formation, wherefrom came his interest in, and commitment to, that ecumenical life we experienced in him during his many decades in Jerusalem?
It began in Russia. Shortly before his ordination, Fr. Düsing was required to join the German army, which accepted Catholic and Protestant clergy for non-violent, unarmed service; to chaplain or to medically care for the wounded soldiers in battle, in ambulances and in hospitals. Düsing was a health worker or medical ordinary.
In 1944, he was captured on the Russian front. Such captured clergy were separated from other prisoners-of-war, and together were placed in isolated, impoverished villages in faraway Siberia. In the village they could go freely about; it was not a typical prisoner-of-war camp.
In this environment, month after month for six years, he was living with Protestant ministers. In the poor, poor village, also for the first time Fr. Düsing was living among Russian Orthodox laity, and he experienced their spiritualities, their pastoral and liturgical hungers. The immediate area had no Orthodox priest. The faith of these simple lay men and women respected priests as such, even non-Orthodox priests with enemy blood. They asked for sacramental assistance --baptism and chrism of their children, the Eucharist for themselves. The sacraments were ministered, with no intent to turn the recipients into Westfalian Roman Catholics, for example. No church official from Moscow or from Rome would venture to a Siberian village during the war, in order to disapprove the breaking of canonical norms. "Wo die Not am groessten, ist Gott am naechsten (Where the need is greatest, God is nearest)".
In short, Father Düsing's introduction to theological and practical ecumenism was not in German university circles or in academic dialogues, but in the crucible of suffering and poverty of a Russian prisoner-of-war village --a daily living encounter with Protestant ministers and Russian Orthodox laity.
In 1951 the priest found his way back to Westfalia. He ministered in parishes until the bishop, aware of his deep wish, agreed that in September 1955 he study at the Jesuits' Collegium Russicum and the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome. Then in 1957, the bishop agreed that he go to Jerusalem, with a base at this Schmidt Girls College, as chaplain to the Mary Ward Sisters and to other German-speaking Catholics in the city. He began also to exercise his rather unique unthreatening ways of friendship with the Russian, Romanian and Greek Orthodox, and the Armenian, Syrian, Coptic and Ethiopian Christians --fellow members of the one community of disciples of Christ.
My last point. The typical Westfalian personality, and perhaps the example of Bishop von Galen, shaped Fr. Düsing's tendency to blunt remarks, which inevitably erupted whenever another seemed to discredit or slur the Eastern Churches in Jerusalem.
A personal experience. My last one-to-one conversation with him had been in early 1999, before he returned to Muenster with cancer for his last painful earthly months, and then the eternal embrace with God. The French Centre of Research in Jerusalem had asked me to lecture on the complicated history of foreign Christian presences in Jerusalem in the mid-1800s. I devoted a section to the results of Russian Foreign Minister Karl Nesselrode's sending Archimandrite Porphyrius Uspenskij to Jerusalem for eight months in 1844. His task was discretely to explore the church scene. I illustrated how the talented, also Arabic-speaking Uspenskij was neither prudent, nor tactful, nor discrete, in his relations with the Greek Orthodox as he "investigated" that Church.
Immediately after the last lecture, Fr. Düsing approached me, looked me in the eye, and bluntly said that I was unjustly harsh on the Russian archimandrite. I replied that my lecture was coldly historical; it was not a pious plea for Uspenskij's canonization. The Westfalian quickly answered: "Auch die Heiligen waren gar nichts vollkommene (Also the saints were not at all perfect)".
Today I gratefully remember that remark --in a way his last reminder to me, and to us here. Each of us prayerfully hopes that God continues to work through our not at all perfect lives, as we go about our ecumenical tasks in all-too-earthly Jerusalem.
___________________
Sr. Pauline Wagner
Schmidt Girls' College
For several years I was granted the privilege to live with Fr. Düsing in the same house together here in Jerusalem. This gave me the chance to get to know better his personality, his opinions, his insight and detailed knowldege about the Christian Churches of Jerusalem and above all his prayerful attitude as a Catholic priest.
I would like to put my impressions in the word of Jesus addressing his apostles: "Stay here and keep watch with me!"
It became literally true that Fr. Düsing remained here as a witness of faith, representing his favoured ecumenical attitude in many different ways. At last when sometimes already rather feeble we could find him in the Kaisersaal sitting near the window facing the Holy Sepulchre Church and praying. Many people -near and far- were included into his intercessions thus being blessed and consoled.
His watchfulness was also shown by his exceptional interest in the Christian Churches and his detailed knowldege about them referring to Ecumenism. His frequent visits to Istanbul expressed his desire for unity, which reached its climax in the great event of 1964 in Jerusalem with the meeting of Pope Paul VI and the Patriarch of Konstantinopel Athenagoras. Repeatedly Fr. Düsing referred to it as the fulfillment of his constant prayer.
And what are the perspectives for the future?
There is a meaningful German legend personifying the Word of God and Ecumenism visiting each other, consoling and encouraging each other. In the course of the dialogue, the Word of God, the Logos, summarizes the important talk by stating: "Nothing is more decisive and important but love!" Love for Him -Christ- and love for each other. This attitude is shown by respect for each other, by acknowledging each other, sharing with each other bread and wine, forgiving each other every day.
This is what He does with us every day -and those should be the dreams and hopes for our future life as well.
In 2001, the Ecumenical Fraternity published a booklet containing the following memorials:
A Man of Good Will
Dr. Kirsten Stoffregen Pedersen
President, Ecumenical Fraternity
When I think of Fr. Johannes Alois Düsing, whom I have had the privilege of knowing here in Jerusalem for many years, a story of one of the Russian spiritual leaders, Father Silvan, comes to my mind. Fr. Silvan lived – unlike most of the famous 18th and 19th century staretzes - in a monastic community. It is told of him, that once he sat with a few other monks in the refectory, when the talk came upon a member of the community who was known as having a difficult character. The others were criticizing him, while Fr. Silvan was keeping silence and stood up to leave. One of the monks then said to him: “Why do you not say anything? You know we are right!” Fr. Silvan answered with another question: “Have you ever heard me criticizing anybody? And if not, do you think I will begin today?”
I often heard Fr. Düsing praising people in whom I with my critical mind found very little to praise, and his good will to see the positive sides of such people made me smile and mostly keep silent.
I spent part of my childhood and the first years of my teens in Nazi occupied Denmark. As a result of that I can assure you that we Danes of that generation did not love the Germans. Thank God I rather early was saved from the bitter hatred which normally was the result of the occupation. But I grew up in the atmosphere of intense hatred between the various nations of Europe which dominated those years. I could hardly imagine any German who would love Russia and the Russians – but I met one in Jerusalem. And that was even a German who had spent six years as a prisoner of war in Russia – Fr. Johannes Düsing. Again many of us must smile when we remember his contagious enthusiasm concerning Russian culture and Russian Christianity.
It gives me hope when thinking of the Middle East and the bitter enmity by which we are now again surrounded here. It seems impossible like it did in the second World War – but peace and co-operation is not impossible. Not even here.
____________________
Fr. Frans Bouwen, WF
St. Anne's Church
The fact that we are gathered so many here today shows that the memory and heritage of Father Düsing are well alive in Jerusalem. He is bringing us together, coming from different churches and traditions, and he is bringing us together in the presence of the Lord, for prayer.
During his many years in Jerusalem, Fr. Düsing has been doing exactly that: Trying to bring together the churches and children of God. And he did it most of all by being present in the prayer of the different traditions. Even when it was not possible officially to pray together and especially not to celebrate the Eucharist together, by being present Fr. Düsing expressed the desire that these barriers may one day be overcome. His attentive presence was already a prayer in itself. At the same time his presence also reminded us, in a most humble and respectful way, that we never should stop looking and loving beyond the limits of our own church or community. The praying awareness of what already unites us, and the untiring hope of reaching one day the full communion, are at the heart of the heritage that Fr. Düsing left us. We know that it is not easy at all, humanly speaking, to continue this witness, but we find trust and strength in the conviction that the Holy Spirit is present and helps us in our weakness: "For we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.... The Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God" (Rm 8:26-27).
Today, in Jerusalem, it is impossible to speak about bringing together the children of God without feeling deeply concerned with the misunderstandings, the lack of mutual trust and the violence prevailing instead of true peace. In this field also Fr. Düsing had a long and personal experience. The dramatic way he got personally involved in the Second World War played an important role in helping him to know and to love the Russian Orthodox Church. During his 42 years presence in this country, he witnessed a long series of dramatic events and wars. Therefore, he was a man of peace and reconciliation. In this field also he can be an inspiration for us here. By trying to know and to respect everyone, without sacrificing truth and justice, we have to feel the present divisions and hostilities as cutting through our own hearts and lives, so that our prayer may be suffering and our suffering may become prayer.
In commemorating Fr. Düsing, we want, once more, to give thanks to God for what he has been for Jerusalem and for each of us, and we want, above all, to renew our hope that one day, peace and unity may prevail in the city that has become the symbol of encounter, coexistence and fraternity of all of humankind.
_______________________
Fr. Tom Stransky, Paulist
Rector Emeritus, Tantur
Rather than the place and circumstances of a person's death, I have always been far more curious and investigative of a person's birth and early years: Where born? His or her specific milieu? How raised and educated? And for a clergyperson, the reflective experiences of the first years in ordained ministry? For T.S. Eliot: "The end is where you start from". Or for the 17th century English poet John Denham: "We may our ends by our beginnings know."
So were my curiosity and probings in several one-to-one conversations with Father Johannes Düsing. They sometimes focused on the ecumenical scene here in Jerusalem, but more often, on Muenster --the hub-city-- in the predominantly rural Westfalia of northwest Germany. I persisted on speaking in German, and did not allow him to practice his English on me; selfishly I wanted to practice my German on him. When over 80 years, in reminiscing on his early decades, he occasionally forgot his Hochdeutch and broke into the familiar Plattdeutch of Westfalia, which I only partially understood. He seemed to forget that I was not a Westfalian but only a temporary Muensterite.
It had been at the University of Muenster that 13 years after the war I studied Protestant and Catholic mission histories and theologies. And far more formative, I allowed to flow through me the articulated experiences of older Muensterites and rural villagers in the Nazi period.
Westfalia and Muenster was Fr. Düsing's home environment. Born there on October 31 (Reformation Day), 1914 (Gelsenkirchen-Horst), he grew up in the post-world war pervasive depression during the Weimar Republic, and since 1932 during the Nazi regime. In the midst of the war, he was ordained to the Muenster diocese in 1941 (March 19). The bishop was the aristocrat Clement August Count von Galen. Fr. Düsing told me how providential to have had von Galen as his bishop (since 1936) --a model of Christian priestly integrity.
The bishop was called the "Lion of Muenster" because his thundering sermons directly opposed Hitler and his Nationalist Socialist regime, especially his three famous sermons during July and August of 1941, soon after Fr. Düsing's ordination. In confronting the injustices and inhumanities of the totalitarian terror-state, Bishop von Galen's oft-repeated motto which all the faithful knew was: "Lieber sterben als suendigen (It is better to die than to sin)". Even the Gestapo was afraid to still the bishop's voice. Hitler told his entourage that he would settle his account with von Galen "after the war". Alas, among the German bishops, he was one of the very few who refused to compromise his faith-convictions.
At this period of Fr. Düsing's first three decades, the small minority of Lutheran and Reformed Churches of Westfalia was in Muenster; the rural areas were 100%, if not 150%, Roman Catholic. There were no Eastern Orthodox or Oriental Orthodox communities in the region.
So the intriguing question: In this rather Catholic ghettoed, a-ecumenical environment, and during a sheltered seminary education and formation, wherefrom came his interest in, and commitment to, that ecumenical life we experienced in him during his many decades in Jerusalem?
It began in Russia. Shortly before his ordination, Fr. Düsing was required to join the German army, which accepted Catholic and Protestant clergy for non-violent, unarmed service; to chaplain or to medically care for the wounded soldiers in battle, in ambulances and in hospitals. Düsing was a health worker or medical ordinary.
In 1944, he was captured on the Russian front. Such captured clergy were separated from other prisoners-of-war, and together were placed in isolated, impoverished villages in faraway Siberia. In the village they could go freely about; it was not a typical prisoner-of-war camp.
In this environment, month after month for six years, he was living with Protestant ministers. In the poor, poor village, also for the first time Fr. Düsing was living among Russian Orthodox laity, and he experienced their spiritualities, their pastoral and liturgical hungers. The immediate area had no Orthodox priest. The faith of these simple lay men and women respected priests as such, even non-Orthodox priests with enemy blood. They asked for sacramental assistance --baptism and chrism of their children, the Eucharist for themselves. The sacraments were ministered, with no intent to turn the recipients into Westfalian Roman Catholics, for example. No church official from Moscow or from Rome would venture to a Siberian village during the war, in order to disapprove the breaking of canonical norms. "Wo die Not am groessten, ist Gott am naechsten (Where the need is greatest, God is nearest)".
In short, Father Düsing's introduction to theological and practical ecumenism was not in German university circles or in academic dialogues, but in the crucible of suffering and poverty of a Russian prisoner-of-war village --a daily living encounter with Protestant ministers and Russian Orthodox laity.
In 1951 the priest found his way back to Westfalia. He ministered in parishes until the bishop, aware of his deep wish, agreed that in September 1955 he study at the Jesuits' Collegium Russicum and the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome. Then in 1957, the bishop agreed that he go to Jerusalem, with a base at this Schmidt Girls College, as chaplain to the Mary Ward Sisters and to other German-speaking Catholics in the city. He began also to exercise his rather unique unthreatening ways of friendship with the Russian, Romanian and Greek Orthodox, and the Armenian, Syrian, Coptic and Ethiopian Christians --fellow members of the one community of disciples of Christ.
My last point. The typical Westfalian personality, and perhaps the example of Bishop von Galen, shaped Fr. Düsing's tendency to blunt remarks, which inevitably erupted whenever another seemed to discredit or slur the Eastern Churches in Jerusalem.
A personal experience. My last one-to-one conversation with him had been in early 1999, before he returned to Muenster with cancer for his last painful earthly months, and then the eternal embrace with God. The French Centre of Research in Jerusalem had asked me to lecture on the complicated history of foreign Christian presences in Jerusalem in the mid-1800s. I devoted a section to the results of Russian Foreign Minister Karl Nesselrode's sending Archimandrite Porphyrius Uspenskij to Jerusalem for eight months in 1844. His task was discretely to explore the church scene. I illustrated how the talented, also Arabic-speaking Uspenskij was neither prudent, nor tactful, nor discrete, in his relations with the Greek Orthodox as he "investigated" that Church.
Immediately after the last lecture, Fr. Düsing approached me, looked me in the eye, and bluntly said that I was unjustly harsh on the Russian archimandrite. I replied that my lecture was coldly historical; it was not a pious plea for Uspenskij's canonization. The Westfalian quickly answered: "Auch die Heiligen waren gar nichts vollkommene (Also the saints were not at all perfect)".
Today I gratefully remember that remark --in a way his last reminder to me, and to us here. Each of us prayerfully hopes that God continues to work through our not at all perfect lives, as we go about our ecumenical tasks in all-too-earthly Jerusalem.
___________________
Sr. Pauline Wagner
Schmidt Girls' College
For several years I was granted the privilege to live with Fr. Düsing in the same house together here in Jerusalem. This gave me the chance to get to know better his personality, his opinions, his insight and detailed knowldege about the Christian Churches of Jerusalem and above all his prayerful attitude as a Catholic priest.
I would like to put my impressions in the word of Jesus addressing his apostles: "Stay here and keep watch with me!"
It became literally true that Fr. Düsing remained here as a witness of faith, representing his favoured ecumenical attitude in many different ways. At last when sometimes already rather feeble we could find him in the Kaisersaal sitting near the window facing the Holy Sepulchre Church and praying. Many people -near and far- were included into his intercessions thus being blessed and consoled.
His watchfulness was also shown by his exceptional interest in the Christian Churches and his detailed knowldege about them referring to Ecumenism. His frequent visits to Istanbul expressed his desire for unity, which reached its climax in the great event of 1964 in Jerusalem with the meeting of Pope Paul VI and the Patriarch of Konstantinopel Athenagoras. Repeatedly Fr. Düsing referred to it as the fulfillment of his constant prayer.
And what are the perspectives for the future?
There is a meaningful German legend personifying the Word of God and Ecumenism visiting each other, consoling and encouraging each other. In the course of the dialogue, the Word of God, the Logos, summarizes the important talk by stating: "Nothing is more decisive and important but love!" Love for Him -Christ- and love for each other. This attitude is shown by respect for each other, by acknowledging each other, sharing with each other bread and wine, forgiving each other every day.
This is what He does with us every day -and those should be the dreams and hopes for our future life as well.
