German Christians Grapple With Pastor’s Ghastly Suicide
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ERFURT, Germany — We know this much: The 73-year-old pastor’s last sermon focused on his fear that Christian Europe would be overwhelmed by Islam.
A few weeks later, at one of the most important Lutheran landmarks, the Reverend Roland Weisselberg soaked himself in gasoline and set himself ablaze.
He left no suicide note, and the meaning of his final words is still the subject of conjecture. But in a time when Christians and Muslims in Europe lurch from one crisis to the next, the poetry-quoting, retired Lutheran minister is being proclaimed a self-martyr — the latest victim in a growing conflict between the cross and the crescent.
Germany has felt that uneasiness in many ways recently. Last month, a Turkish-born lawmaker sought protection from death threats after calling Islamic headscarves a symbol of oppression of women.
In Berlin, an opera company has become Europe’s latest freedom of expression flash point. A planned production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” outraged Muslims with a scene depicting the severed heads of the Prophet Muhammad along with other religious figures including Jesus and Buddha.
Pope Benedict XVI used a speech at a German university in September to decry violent trends in Islam, setting off a maelstrom of protests around the world. The German pontiff is scheduled to visit to Turkey on November 28 in his first papal trip to a mostly Islamic nation.
Weisselberg was not a silent bystander. He wrote letters to newspapers, venting on a range of topics. Most were packaged around his belief that European Christians had become too meek and separated from the faith’s bold history — such as Luther’s famous call for spiritual renewal, which helped stir the Protestant Reformation.
Weisselberg’s writings and conversations also were peppered with literary references, especially to the 19th-century German poets Heinrich Heine and Friedrich Holderlin, whose works were influence by the conquests of Napoleon.
In his last sermon in late September — called from retirement to fill in for an absent minister — Weisselberg said Christians in Europe must unite or risk being overrun by Islam in generations to come.
Then, on October 31, he walked through the stone arches of the St. Augustine Monastery, a place where from 1505 to 1511 Luther lived, studied, and took monastic vows. A morning service was under way for Reformation Day, the anniversary of Luther’s famous 95 Theses, which helped inspire the Protestant break from Rome.
Police say Weisselberg cut through a gap between a hedgerow and a metal fence circling a construction pit for a new library — on a site where more than 250 people died during Allied air strikes near the end of World War II.
Weisselberg pulled out a canister of gasoline hidden under his coat. An instant later, he was ablaze. Witnesses told authorities he cried two words: “Jesus” and “Oskar” — considered a reference to the Reverend Oskar Bruesewitz, who set himself on fire in 1976 as an apparent protest against the communist East German regime.
Weisselberg died the following day. No formal suicide note was found. But his widow — who has refused to speak publicly — told a church official that her husband left behind a letter describing his angst over Islam’s rising power in Europe.