To many Americans, Dresden is one of those forgotten cities of the old East Germany. Others know it as the site of some of the heaviest Allied bombing during World War II.

Happily, in the past dozen years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Westerners having been coming back to Dresden. The city has made great strides in overcoming its communist past and in recovering glints of its former glory.

The city was once the seat of kings, a major political and cultural center in Saxony. The Baroque and rococo flourished there. Its water-front on the Elbe inspired many famous painters, such as the Venetian master Canaletto, to paint it. And whenever they painted Dresden after 1751, they always included the katholische Hofkirche.

Since 1980, the Hofkirche has been the cathedral of the Diocese of Dresden-Meissen — dedicated to the Holy Trinity—but Dresden's Catholic roots reach much farther back.

During the Reformation, Lutheranism prevailed in Saxony. But if the Calvinist Henry IV converted because he thought “Paris is worth a Mass,” Freidrich August I thought the same about Poland. He became a Catholic in 1697 and decreed broader religious freedom for his new co-religionists two years later.

The Jesuits assumed care of the city's Catholics, which included a large art colony and a Croat Diaspora, and Jesuit Father Karl Moritz Vota celebrated Dresden's first official post-Reformation Mass in 1699 in a chapel set up in the royal palace.

Prime Property

The Jesuits' work of evangelization paid dividends, as the Catholic faith once again re-established itself in Dresden. That was when the king hired the Italian architect Gaetano Chiaveri to create a new Hofkirche. Thus was today's cathedral born.

Chiaveri designed the church in rococo style. If location is everything in real estate, the Hofkirche occupies prime property. It sits next to the royal palace, near the Zwinger complex (which still houses the rich royal art collection) and right on the Elbe.

Lorenzo Mattielli's statues, collectively, make up one of the church's most attractive exterior features. Mostly looking down from the roof, they depict the Apostles and other saints as well as allegorical figures who epitomize the virtues. Like the statues on Bernini's colonnade in Rome, you don't really see how much larger-than-life they are until you get up close to them.

Unfortunately, a close-up look at the dark exterior also reveals just how ravaged by pollution Dresden is—it was once as white as the interior still is.

Dresden was then an apostolic vicariate. By 1816, its apostolic vicar would also be a titular bishop. In 1921 Dresden became part of the Diocese of Meissen, although the Hofkirche enjoyed the status of second church in the diocese. By 1964 it was the co-cathedral. In 1980, it became Dresden's cathedral.

Like Dresden itself, the Hofkirche was partially destroyed during World War II. An air raid on February 13, 1945, resulted in major bomb damage. The interior was burned, the roof collapsed and almost half of Mattielli's 78 outdoor statues were damaged or destroyed.

Thus is it particularly fitting that Catholics remember the church, along with all the people of Dresden who died during the bombing campaign, each Memorial Day.

Postwar Pieta

Reconstruction of the church started after the War but dragged on for years. The high altar, for example, was finally rededicated in July 1962. Roof statues were still being put in place in the early 1990s. Today the Memorial Chapel, with its modernistic Pietà, a masterpiece of the local Meissen porcelain craft, is a striking testament to the power of rebirth and renewal in Christ.

Dresden was one of those places where the moral erosion wrought by sustained all-out war was evident.

The abandonment of the moral principle of no attacks on civilian populations had been seen before—take the Bolshevik Revolution and the Spanish Civil War for example—but Hitler literally carried it to new heights with his air raids on London and his attacks on noncombatants in Warsaw, Belgrade and Rotterdam.

The Allies, unfortunately, followed suit, likewise jettisoning the moral principle of noncombatant immunity. The firebombing of Dresden is one such example. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are another.

This visitor to today's Dresden senses that, in some ways, World War II ended east of the Elbe only in the 1990s. The old East German Länder are busy playing catch-up, making up for the lost time of the war and its aftermath.

Knowing the history of the place, a walk through Dresden and a visit to its cathedral should make us pray for redress of the causes of conflict so as to make Pope Paul VI's appeal our own: “Never again war!”

John M. Grondelski, a moral theologian, writes from Warsaw.