# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1861_S96
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

96 Church Contemporary History.

II. Abroad.

Deaconesses. In the Correspondenzblatt der Diakonissen von Neudettelsau, edited by E. Lotze, conrector at the deaconess house at Neudettelsau, there is found in the September and October number of last year the minutes of a meeting of the Society for Female Diaconate held on October 12. In it we read: "In conclusion the following three points were discussed: 1. The necessity of the obedience of the deaconesses; 2. The relation of the deaconesses to the married and the unmarried estate, and independence from the family; 3. The poverty of the deaconesses and the renunciation of personal property." So they discussed the three actual monastic vows: obedience, so-called chastity, and poverty. It does not exactly inspire particular confidence that on precisely these subjects nothing of the proceedings was published along with the rest, while the result of all the other proceedings is reported.

Weimar, November 7. A strange "mass" conversion to the Catholic church is preparing in our neighborhood: a small congregation, Schoppendorf, two hours from Weimar, has by a large majority — only 4 of 28 local citizens dissented — resolved upon it, and is in consequence negotiating with the episcopal see at Fulda. The congregation is in fact defying the grand-ducal ministry, which for thoroughly well-considered reasons assigned the congregation of Schoppendorf to the school of the village of Bergen, about 20 minutes away. The congregation insists on having its own schoolmaster, but on the other hand is not in a position to raise the schoolteacher's salary (160 Thaler) out of its own means; the ministry, however, is not authorized under these circumstances to grant the schoolmaster's salary out of the general school fund. That is the reason why an Evangelical Lutheran (?) congregation wishes to go over to the Catholic church.
(N. Pr. Z.)

In London, where no plays may be performed on Sunday, the theaters are now being rented for Sunday evenings for preaching. The novelist Dickens reports on his attendance at one such evening service. He found about 4000 hearers present.

Bavaria. The Süddeutsche Warte, the organ of the Friends of Jerusalem, is informed from there: "After lengthy examination the correspondent has found that the overwhelming majority of the Bavarian clergy will hear nothing at all of the prophecy (that is, of chiliasm), while the scarcely noticeable minority that occupies itself with it to any degree shares the opinion of Vicar Clöter, which was already refuted earlier in the Südd. Warte, namely that nothing can be done that would correspond to the seriousness of this age." Thank God, that at least is some good news out of Bavaria.

Religious Conditions in Vienna. The "Wahrheitsfreund" reports the following from the Freiburger Kirchenblatt: "An example is told from Vienna which of course could only have happened in Vienna. Not so very long ago someone came to a pastor and said he was an Israelite and wished to become a Christian. The pastor answered that he would have to receive instruction. The Israelite replied that he already knew the catechism. The pastor examined him, and astonished at his knowledge, asked him how he had learned it all. The Israelite answered that for many years he had been coming into various houses where he had been engaged to teach the children the catechism. He had learned the catechism as one learns music, in order to teach it, and Catholic parents had engaged him without troubling themselves about his confession of faith, probably because his lessons were cheaper than other people's."

Turkey. The "Preuß. Ztg." publishes a letter from the royal Prussian consul in Beirut, who gives a harrowing picture of the distress prevailing among the Syrian Christians in consequence of the well-known atrocities. The reporter believes he can put the total number of Christians driven from their dwellings and robbed of all their goods at 120,000; of these about 75,000 belong to the Lebanon, 20,000 to Damascus, the rest to the Anti-Lebanon, the Bekaa, and the district of Baalbek. All are now crowding toward the coast; in Damascus and the interior of the country they no longer dare to remain. The number of those murdered amounts to about 14,000, of whom about 6000 fell in Damascus alone. Besides these unfortunates, the number of those who died after the massacres as a result of the terror of death they had endured and of privations of every kind is put at 5000. Of infants no fewer than 95 percent have perished in this way, and even now the mortality among the fugitive women and children is very great. More than 500 young girls and women have been carried off, and in the neighborhood of Damascus the Christian population has been forced by violence to accept Islam.