Hitler salutes and the chanting of Nazi slogans at migrants from the Middle East has pained German Cardinal Reinhard Marx. Marx, the President of the German Bishops’ conference said he felt physically pained seeing protesters making the gestures and shouting the chants. In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine, Marx labelled the emergence of a new xenophobia in Read more
As dawn breaks, ghost-like figures with sunken heads laden with babies, bundles of food and clothing can be seen trudging slowly along the autobahn. Alongside the usual tips on tailbacks and delays, traffic bulletins on the local radio alert drivers to “pedestrians who have been spotted on the A3 between the Austrian border and south Read more
Judging from the headlines, it sometimes seems no one in Europe wants to help refugees. Record numbers are arriving in Italy and Greece this year, and yet other European governments have agreed to share less than a fifth of them. Hungary is building a wall to keep them out. For the same reason, France has Read more
Anyone following the news over the past few months could be forgiven for thinking that German Catholicism is uniformly liberal. Fifty years after the Second Vatican Council, it appears that the Rhine may once again be flowing into the Tiber, to paraphrase Fr Ralph Wiltgen’s historic account of that council, in the lead-up to this Read more
Germany’s main lay Catholic organisation has called for a raft of new pastoral practices concerning marriage and sexuality. The Zentralkomitee der deutschen Katholiken (Central Committee of the German Catholics) called for the admittance of civilly remarried divorcees to Communion, acceptance of all forms of cohabitation, the blessing of same-sex couples and the reconsideration of the Church’s teaching Read more
Poland’s Catholic Church has called for a fitting tribute to hundreds of its priests who died in the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau. Commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau, near Munich, in 1945 run from April 30 to May 3. A spokesman for the Polish bishops, Msgr Józef Kloch, said Dachau Read more
Churches in parts of Germany are up in arms about a proposed weakening of a law which bans public dancing on some religious holidays. The regional government of Baden-Württemberg is considering relaxing the state’s ban on dancing during part of the Easter period and on other Christian holidays, reports The Guardian. The holiday law – Read more
A German cardinal has blasted his nation’s ecclesiastical apparatus as completely unfit to work against growing secularism. According to the Catholic News Agency, Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes wrote a letter to a German language newspaper objecting to statements by two prelates from his homeland. In February, German bishops’ conference president Cardinal Reinhard Marx said: “We Read more
Despite a postponed vote last month, a German prelate has said he is confident the country’s bishops will change Church rules to allow employment of remarried divorcees and men and women living in same-sex relationships, despite growing opposition to the move. Archbishop Stephan Burger of Freiburg im Breisgau said the German bishops’ conference “will revise” Read more
German bishops have, for now, tabled a reform of Church labour law that would allow homosexual employees in a relationship and remarried Catholics to work in Church-run institutions. The bishops postponed the decision until April 2015 after a minority of conservative bishops resisted the change. They were also impeded by a federal court ruling that Read more