By Uwe Siemon-Netto, UPI Religious Affairs Editor

Sixty years ago this Saturday, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged at Flossenbuerg concentration camp in Bavaria, just days before U.S. forces liberated the camp. The Allies arrived too late to save him and fellow members of the German resistance against Hitler.

Only days before his execution, Bonhoeffer had told the other condemned prisoners, "Let us calmly go to the gallows as Christians."

When the great Protestant theologian was led to the scaffold in the early morning of April 9, 1945, Flossenbuerg's camp physician recalls the following:

"I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer.

"At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost 50 years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God."

This last sentence sounds almost identical to the reports of witnesses who were present when Pope John Paul II died last Saturday -- a week after Easter, just like Bonhoeffer.

But there are more parallels between the Roman pontiff and the Lutheran theologian, who both stressed that discipleship was costly and involved suffering.

"Christ suffered as a free man alone, apart and in ignominy, in body and spirit," Bonhoeffer wrote in his prison letters, "and since then many Christians have suffered with him."

"Christ did not come down from the cross, and neither will I," insisted John Paul, explaining why he would not resign, despite his multiple illnesses and intense pain.

"Both men lived what Lutherans call the Theology of the Cross," says Charles Ford, a St. Louis mathematics professor who ranks among the world's leading Bonhoeffer scholars. "They just used a different terminology."

The Theology of the Cross pervading Bonhoeffer's thought corresponds to John Paul's "paschal mystery," which he described thus in "Redemptor Hominis" (Redeemer of Man), his very first encyclical in 1979: "For our sake, God made him to be sin who knew no sin."

This reads as if taken straight out of Bonhoeffer's "Ethics," a seminal work penned behind prison walls. There, Bonhoeffer, too, marveled about the mystery of Christ's bearing man's guilt.

To the end, the German theologian, who conducted an Easter service for Catholic and Protestant prisoners alike as they were being trucked about Hitler's crumbling Reich, maintained an astonishingly cheerful demeanor.

Payne Best, a British intelligence officer captured by the Germans, was with the doomed German dissidents. He later wrote:

"Bonhoeffer was all humility and sweetness; he always seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, a joy in every smallest event in life, and of deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive. ... He was one of the very few men I ever met to whom his God was real and ever close to him."

Again, this reads like out of a biography of John Paul II.

The uncanny parallels between both men go even further: Though men of deep faith, both were far from unworldly. They were ardent sportsmen, enjoyed good food, laughter and the arts. Both were hands-on. Both also managed to influence secular events while remaining solidly theological.

As an agent of Germany's anti-Nazi military intelligence service, or "Abwehr," Dietrich Bonhoeffer traveled to Norway to shore up the resistance of that country's Lutheran state church against the pro-Nazi Quisling regime. In that Bonhoeffer was eminently successful.

The pope's corresponding act was his support to the anti-communist Solidarity trade union movement in his native Poland. This marked the beginning of the end of communist rule not only in that country but in the whole of Eastern Europe.

To Bonhoeffer, "suffering with God in a godless world," was the Christian's proper response to "God's show of solidarity with suffering humanity."

"We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune."

The pope couldn't agree more. "Suffering seems to be particularly essential to the nature of man," he said. Suffering is neither accidental nor avoidable. It is "one of those points in which man is in a certain sense 'destined' to go beyond himself."

In June 1939, Bonhoeffer was in the United States, avoiding conscription in Germany. A stellar teaching career at Union Theological Seminary in New York awaited him. But as Charles Ford wrote, a daily Scripture lesson made him change his mind.

"Do your best to come to me before the winter," he read in 2 Timothy 4:21. So he decided to return to Germany to share the fate of his fellow-countrymen, knowing this to mean certain death for him.

"I have made a mistake in coming to America," he wrote to U.S. theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. "I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany.

"Christians in Germany have the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose; but I cannot make that choice in security."

Ford believes that "Bonhoeffer returned from America because he did not want to miss his encounter with Jesus Christ, who was waiting to take form in his life."

Those who were with John Paul II as he lay dying report that he, too, was joyfully preparing for this encounter with Christ, even though this encounter meant death.

Thus on the fundamental question of suffering as an expression of discipleship, two of the most outstanding Christians of the 20th century established ecumenical unity almost half a millennium after their churches had separated.

© 2005 United Press International

The editor Uwe Siemon-Netto is also writing for the Evangekical news agency idea in Germany.