Sunday morning
Getting off the trams, scout and guide marshals showed the way to the Schuetzenplatz, where 105000 people gathered in very hot sunsine for the closing Communion service. The music was a mixture of German chorales, world music, a samba-like setting of Psalm 8 and the Sanctus. The preacher was Dutch RC theologian Hub Oosterhuis, who was patiently listened to, but the �Word� which stirred the crowd came from the President of the Kirchentag Committee, who said pretty clearly, and to very loud applause, that it was about time that, at least at such gatherings, we learned to sweep aside the barriers to shared Protestant/RC Communion. The RC bishop who followed him on the microphone carefully floundered and did not really comment.

I spent the afternoon looking at galleries (Sprengel gallery of Modern Art, with a big Chagall exhibition, the Kestner museum with an exhibition of mediaeval manuscrips, and the Herrenhaueser Gaerten - the gardens that belonged with the residence of the House of Hannover, which building was destroyed in an air raid in 1943