Oberammergau Passion Play struggles amid faith falloff and Bavarian clerical abuse

It’s one hour to show time in Oberammergau, a pretty village of extravagantly painted houses tucked into the Bavarian Alps.

Every decade for nearly 400 years the crowds have come here to watch the village stage the Passion Play – and today is no different, with visitors from Florida, the Philippines and just down the road in Garmisch.

“We’ve never been as we’re not really churchgoers,” said Viktor, a 65-year-old local alongside his wife. “Friends offered us tickets and we decided to come, but it’s more for the theatre than out of any religious conviction.”

Inside the vast festival theatre, the 4,400 seats are filling up in the covered auditorium when, as if on cue, the sky behind the stage darkens. A roll of thunder is followed by a flash of lightning and a heavy Alpine downpour. Jesus rides onstage on a donkey, cheered by followers waving palm leaves, beginning an overwhelming feast for the eyes and ears: a Cecil B DeMille-sized cast of 1,400, six goats, two camels, two horses a choir of 125 and 57 musicians in the pit offering a lush Haydn-like musical palette.

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Over the next five hours of performance, broken up by a three-hour dinner break, a familiar drama will unfold. But each decade Oberammergau’s amateur passion players take a different route to Golgotha. This year their journey is coloured by the two-year pandemic delay, war in Europe – and lingering fury towards bishops in what was once a traditional Catholic heartland.

Six months ago, the Bavarian archdiocese of Munich and Freising presented a report revealing at least 497 cases of clerical sexual abuse in the postwar era. Some relate to Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI’s time as archbishop of Munich, though he denies any knowledge of or responsibility for abuse or abusing priests.

[ Emeritus Pope Benedict admits to false clerical sex abuse testimony ]

Oberammergau artistic director Christian Stückl remembers how, when he took over in 1990, the local Catholic church still had what he calls a “‘we’re the boss’ arrogance” towards the play and its theological content, reflecting the exalted position the institution enjoyed in daily life.

“Like in Ireland, though, the change towards the church here is astonishing,” he said.

When the clerical abuse report came out in January, he and his creative team wondered if they really wanted to hold a traditional opening Mass for this year’s Passion Play.

“We went ahead with it in the end after they said to us, ‘You can’t abandon us, too’,” he said. “But people have given up on the church here.”

From its beginning in 1634, the Passion Play, staged every decade by villagers in thanks for being spared the plague, has been a tug-of-war twice over: between liberal and conservative villagers, and between locals and Bavarian bishops who muscled in.

Stückl has led the lay, reformist pushback since 1990, stripping the script of anti-Semitism, dropping historical bans on married women appearing and allowing Protestant and Muslim villagers onstage. In a sign of the times, 2022 is the first-ever production where none of the 40 main performers are churchgoers.

“In one way it’s immaterial, the story we are telling,” says Stückl, a celebrated German theatre director. “On the other hand, though, it’s impossible to get around the material and, the larger their role, the more the performers are forced to engage with and discuss this story, these teachings.”

This year’s script places Jesus’s revolutionary teachings and political arguments at the heart of the play, placing many of Jesus’s most familiar gospel teachings in the mouths of his followers. The result: Jesus’s famed Sermon on the Mount is not top-down revelation but a crowdsourced, human reaction to the injustices of the time and the belief in something better.

Oberammergau’s Jesus in 2022 is angry towards the high priests, delivering a blunt message that is as applicable today. Anyone more interested in privilege and position than their core message, anyone who preaches rather than lives the gospels, need not worry about being sidelined by secularism: they have sidelined themselves.

At a bleak time for Christianity in Europe, this unflinching Oberammergau message feels curiously optimistic: the human hope for salvation never dies, just those who take this hope hostage.

Staging such a play is a massive undertaking: one-third of this village of 5,200 is directly involved and hotels and restaurants live off the playgoers who come from May to October.

But what of the future? The pandemic cancellation of 2020 has meant not all guests have returned and – unusually – tickets are still available for most performances until October. Oberammergau’s audience profile is old – and getting older. And when visitors disappear into the theatre, the pretty streets of Oberammergau resemble a Potemkin village. Local wood carvers continue to sell traditional wooden religious designs, unchanged in a century, but few are buying.

“The ship has sailed on our woodcarver tradition,” says one older shop owner sadly. “Any younger talents are now working in the theatre or in Berlin.”

Sharing that gloomy outlook is Benedikt Fisher. He sits before his bright and cheery Theatre Cafe, the last caffeination point before the performance, as he gets ready for his camp, scene-stealing turn as King Herod.

Like all locals, the 39 year old has a huge emotional connection to the Passion Play. After wrestling back its control from the bishops, though, he would like a radical overhaul of Oberammergau – both play and village – to ensure its best years aren’t behind it.

“The Passion Play is like a golden calf we worship every 10 years,” he says. “It absorbs all our energy and innovation potential, and sometimes I worry that it destroys and hinders more than it creates.”