Introduction

Thus, in Poland and East Germany, religion made a positive and highly influential contribution to the peaceful demise of communism, as Chapter 1 argues; and the Burgess text in Part Two details the case of two theologians’ contrasting roles in the renewal of political institutions. But since 1989 the Catholic Church in Poland has been accused of undemocratic behaviour and of trying to impose its morals on society, and even of attempting to establish a ‘para-religious state’,1 while in East Germany church officials have been implicated as collaboraters with the Stasi (secret police). The latter has called into question the whole policy of ‘the Church in Socialism’ on which the role of the churches in the opposition movement was based.