Faith Matters: The Church Program

The Papa Francisco is the best-equipped hospital ship in Brazil’s Amazon Region. She was launched in August 2019. Her mission is to serve more than 1,000 isolated communities along the world’s longest river - villages where there is no hospital and no doctor.

Emissary, pastor and director: Life in the Holy Land is a life full of tension for Wolfgang Schmidt - invigorating, but also exhausting.

Creative Church, a German Lutheran foundation, has produced another musical for mass choirs: Martin Luther King - A Dream Changes the World. In a series of flashbacks the show sketches the life of the great American civil rights leader and Nobel laureate from the perspective of his fellow activists.

The churches of Europe are pretty empty generally. But in Indonesia, with its mainly Muslim population, Christian seminaries are overwhelmed with applicants. On a hill in the middle of the jungle on the island of Flores lies the world’s largest seminary. More than 1000 students study at Ledalero, and at least 600 of them are candidates for the priesthood.

The Lutheran pastor Nikolaus Schneider held the highest office in the Evangelical Church in Germany, but his life has often been clouded by death. Aged 22, his daughter, Meike, died of leukemia. He preached at the memorial service for the victims of the crowd disaster at the 2010 Love Parade in Duisburg. Then his wife was diagnosed with cancer.

Dieter Vieweger is a Lutheran theologian and an archaeologist. He has been Director-General of the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology in Jerusalem since 2005. With his infectious enthusiasm for unravelling the past, Professor Vieweger succeeds in fascinating young and old with his exploration of the Holy Land’s 5000-year-old history.

Those looking for a quiet retreat are unlikely to find it in Dusseldorf’s Dominican monastery. The monks there live in the heart of the city’s nightlife district. Their evening prayers are accompanied by drunken bawling from the street. Revelers and homeless people are a permanent challenge. How has this community of eight priests come to terms with their very unusual monastic environment?

"Mega, awesome, cool!" That was twelve-year-old Linus’s comment. He is one of 60,000 Catholic altar servers from across the world who made the pilgrimage to Rome this year to see the pope. With the Eternal City sweltering in temperatures around 40 degrees Celsius this summer it wasn’t always "cool." But nothing could stop these kids.

Finally declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Naumburg Cathedral is one of Germany’s finest churches - significant not only for its architectural splendor but because it contains a portrait of one of the great beauties of the Middle Ages: Margravine Uta von Ballenstedt. The statue was carved by a mediaeval stone sculptor who, in spite of his fame, is known to history only as the Naumburg Master.

A thousand years ago, the Benedictine abbey on the island of Reichenau was a center of scholarship. The monks created some of the finest illuminated manuscripts ever produced. But in the early 19th century, the religious community was expelled. In spite of secularisation, the islanders struggled to preserve the monks’ legacy and today Reichenau is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.