Germany’s Catholic Church has called for a reduction in the number of refugees coming into the country.
The president of the German bishops’ conference, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, said Germany cannot “take in all the world’s needy”.
The question of how to respond to the migrant crisis, he said, should not solely be a matter of “charity, but also reason”.
Germany has been struggling to cope with 1.1 million asylum seekers, who arrived in 2015.
Cardinal Marx also expressed concern at the rise in xenophobia in Germany amid the worst refugee crisis that Europe has known since the Second World War.