God Comes Along by Bus
The Chapel Truck Action of the Eastern Priests Relief Organization, 1950-1970
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17979/aarc.2013.3.0.5090Keywords:
Eastern Priests Relief Organization/Aid to the Church in Need, missionary work, mobile chapels, (German) diaspora, Cold WarAbstract
In the aftermath of World War II, twelve million Germans were forced to seek refuge elsewhere in their country. Their sort attracted the attention of Catholic charities such as the Eastern Priests Relief Organization, which provided material and spiritual assistance through a fleet of mobile chapels. This paper claims that this action was a genuinely ‘modern’ form of missionary work in the sense that both its method and message were a child of its time: dwelling on a culture of generalized mobility and mass communication, it spread the word of a triumphalist church claiming moral superiority over other world views, in particular communism. Moreover, the chapel trucks anticipated a fundamental paradigm shift in pastoral care, bringing the church to the people rather than the other way around.
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