25.07.2014Elisabeth Bücking, Irmhild Buttler-Klose
Report from the German JSL-Project 2014
„Woman from Greece meets woman from Germany – who is saved by the measures to save the Euro?“
This was the title of the workshop the German forum offered with the help of participants of former Ecology Summer Schools during the German Ecumenical Gathering in Mainz, 30/4-4/5 2014.
One of the speakers was Maria Koutatzi from Athens/Greece, member of the EFECW Coordinating Committee. To about 30 listeners she gave a lively report on the increasing poverty in her country. Because the Troika dictates the diminution of expenditures, the state of Greece decreases ist budget and privatizes public goods and institutions.
The second speaker, Dr. Brigitte Bertelmann, expert for economic and financial questions and working in adult education projects of the evangelical church of Hessen-Nassau, explained the economic background of the so-called measures to save the Euroin a very comprehensible way. She emphasized the importance of the financial stability of a state and pointed to a few possible alternatives to the measures taken in Greece to reach similar or better results.
After having heard this not only Maria Koutatzi concluded, that in the end the measures to save the Euro should save (German) banks by preventing the insolvency of an important debtor and, as a consequence, big losses.
Maria Koutatzi reported a growing solidarity in many places of the Greek society. Often church communities serve as mediators to distribute help.
In a second part five women from Romania, Slowakia, Croatia, Serbia, and Belarus spoke about the situation in their countries. It was striking, that many details of difficulties in their daily life were quite similar irrespective of the ideological/economic system their country belonged to. Could it be, that the problems of Greece are not only caused by ist membership in the EU, but are a consequence of a reckless global economy exerting ist influence everywhere?
Some of the workshop participants meet again in Tinos. We would like to continue work on these issues!
Though this workshop was for us the most prominent event in Mainz, the ecumenical gathering with its motto „The future we mean – Life instead of destruction“ offered much more: an opening service, where members of different religions participated, panels and workshops with well-known people of the ecumenical movement, such as Meehyun Chung, and a closing service, where the retired bishop and Forum member Bärbel Wartenberg-Potter did the sermon and where the „message of Mainz“ ( - in German) was handed over to Martin Robra from the WCC.
This message revived the ecumenical process for justice, peace, and the integrity of creation, and placed the gathering as a station in the pilgrimage for justice and peace initiated in Busan 2013.
But perhaps the most pleasurefull item was a visit in the St. Stephan church in Mainz, where Marc Chagall had created windows towards the end of the past century, the last one a few months before his death. The church was flooded with an incredible blue light. Our guide was a former priest of the parish and friend of Marc Chagall, very old and wise, who enjoyed the presence of women from Belarus, Chagalls home country.