Racism should not be condoned. Unfortunately that word gets thrown around to discredit anyone that disagrees with current immigration policies. Europe has been overwhelmed with migrants and has shrinking native populations. Their cultural identities are at risk. The popularity of the so called “extreme right” parties that favor slowing/stopping immigration seems to be due to those policies as opposed to any racism.
A policy that seeks to slow or stop immigration would not be a policy that makes derogatory comments about current citizens of Germany because of their race. AfD fails the test of being a non-racist movement.
At the risk of creating a tu quotue fallacy, have the German bishops looked at the log in their own eyes? This whole story reads very much like the horseshoe theory when looking at both the left and right sides of the political spectrum. Have the German bishops taken similar steps to punish adherents of left-wing extremist parties?
Let me take this quote and insert left-wing instead of right:
“Members and representatives of the XYZ party often publicly advocate left-wing extremist positions that disregard human dignity and are diametrically opposed to the Christian view of humanity, the commandment to love one’s neighbor, and Catholic social doctrine, at least without sufficient distancing by official bodies of this party becoming known to the outside world, so that there is a contradiction to the Church’s order of values.”
Insert any sacred secular value left-wing (I am using a generality here for those on the extremist edge, so bear with me): abortion, homosexual actions/"marriage", communist/socialist/marxist social and economic policies, calls for complete unrestricted immigration, complete subjugation to transgender ideology, etc.
There are parties who call for these things in an extreme manner even though they are completely, by essence or by taking them to an extreme form, opposed to the "fundamental principles of the Catholic Church." Considering the calls to abrogate established Church doctrine by the ZdK, and supported by the majority of the German bishops, I don't expect to hear anything but crickets.
We have seen, through studies and our own personal experiences, that people on the left find it very difficult, and often impossible, to understand and accept the views of those who don't agree with them. That is why your thought about applying the same policy to leftists is a fantasy. It is why you will only find the media referring to people as being "on the left," and "the right extreme."
Obviously, we Catholic Bishops in Germany are totally opposed to abortion, homosexual marriage, etc... Er, er, except that most of us, including Cardinal Marx, are looking to recalibrate Church teaching on same sex attraction. And we don't want to annoy the nice respectable main stream parties, because we are so dependent on the Church Tax and want to keep the money flowing as long as politically possible. How else could Cardinal Marx enjoy his palace, chauffeur driven BMW and six figure salary?
I wish I had more time to understand the nuances of the AfD platform and the church in Germany. But can we just appreciate this thought: Imagining the outcome of a similar policy was enacted in the United States regarding the support of abortion among Catholics in a "church position"?
An incredibly small number. It would be a ridiculous claim to suggest that the Dobbs decision would ever lead to such a small number of abortions (even adjusting for comparative population sizes).
That is a an entire small city’s worth of people each year. I’m pretty sure if someone killed one quarter of the population of a mid-sized city, something the size of New Orleans, each year, nobody would call that incredibly small. Yes, 100,000 is fewer dead children than we have now, but it is still shockingly many.
It is and it is tragic. But compared to the strikingly higher rate of abortions in post-Dobbs United States, it is clear that German society is much more affirming of life than post-Dobbs America. Perhaps pro-life Americans need a major re-examination of our approach to protecting life.
Why does it appear that leftist bishops are the ones who keep people out of the Church unless it is on their terms? Pope Francis proclaims, "Todos, todos, todos," yet Cardinal McElroy has denied homeschool groups the right to utilize parish properties, and now the German hierarchy seeks to exclude those who belong to a certain political party.
I've never really understood the term "gaslighting," but Cardinal McElroy and the German bishops have helped me understand it a bit more.
The content of the document appears, prima facie, to be obvious and praiseworthy. Who can argue against denouncing racism and antisemitism? Yet it remains ambiguous enough to give wide latitude for those in positions of authority to purge members of the German church with whom they disagree- both politically and, I presume, liturgically.
The German bishops and Catholic lay leadership is so extremist in their leftist, pro-perversion and murder of babies ideology and heresy that lay representatives from Poland have refused to meet with them anymore. There was a meeting every year, but at the most recent meeting the Poles told the Germans that these meetings have become pointless, because they are not of the same faith. The Germans had strayed so far away from the teachings of the Catholic Church that the Poles found it a waste of their time to have meetings with them.
Happily Pope Francis may have anticipated this tiresome chaos back in 2013, in para 32 of Evangelii Gaudium. This paragraph floats the idea of giving Bishops' Conferences doctrinal authority. In true Pope Francis style, it does not positively, clearly recommend it. It seems to air it as an idea well worth considering.
The sad side effect would be the disintegration of the Church into a patchwork of national churches. But seeing that Pope Francis recently declared in Singapore that all religions are different paths to God, who am I to judge?
Somehow their "murder of babies ideology" results in a lower abortion rate than all but a handful of countries and a rate dramatically lower than Dobbs offers any hope of achieving in the US.
"While individual positions of other parties without an extremist stance may diverge from the Church’s teachings, their basic orientation does not contradict the Church’s values."
Are they really going to argue that this doesn't characterize Die Linke or Die Grünen? If so, I'd like to see the details. 'Extremist stance" is a useless descriptor. The Democratic Party sees Catholic teaching as "extremist."
"This concept of ethnicity is based on the idea of a culturally homogeneous population consisting exclusively of autochthonous Germans. It is characterized by the idea that peoples are distinguished from one another by an unchanging cultural identity and as a homogeneous community of descent."
Yes, this idea can be taken to unhealthy extremes, but are they really arguing that Germany DOESN'T have an identifiable "cultural identity and... homogeneous community of descent"? What's wrong with that and why would that be wrong to preserve and sustain? The French have generally done it, so...? And if anyone is not convinced, transpose it into another context: the developing world. If Germans started flooding into another country and that country took steps to limit their influence and numbers, how would it be regarded by many leftists in the West? They would fawn over that culture as attempting to preserve their distinctiveness in the face of capitalist, colonialist homogenization, or whatever. And I would agree with them!
If you go to the Wikipedia page on the AfD, it is mostly (unfriendly) "expert interpretations" and innuendo, but there is a summary of one part of the AfD's actual policy that is of interest: "In its program, AfD wants to end what it describes as mass immigration and focus on taking in small numbers of skilled immigrants who are expected to integrate into society and speak German. It encourages German nationals to have more children, as opposed to trying to boost the German population through foreign migration. The party wants to review EU freedom of movement rules and states that immigrants must be employed and contribute to social security through paying taxes for at least four years before being allowed to receive state benefits. AfD calls for mass deportation of foreign born criminals with multiple citizenship or permanent residency. The party describes the Geneva Convention on Refugees as "outdated", calls for stricter vetting of refugees, and believes the German government should invest in special economic and safe zones in third world nations as opposed to taking in large numbers of asylum seekers without background checks."
What exactly is wrong with this, from a Catholic perspective? Is there no room, in the minds of the German bishops, for finding prudential alternatives to just flooding Germany with immigrants and refugees from radically different cultures and giving them the same political status as generations of families who have contributed to building up their own nation? (That last bit about "economic safe zones" is one of the most interesting proposals I've heard so far to mitigate international disturbance.)
"Cohesive culture for me but not for thee." That's my problem with this line of thought. I think every identifiable nation has a right to moderate its interfacing with the world to preserve its distinctiveness and security, internally and externally. There's some support for this in the Compendium on CST as well: "157. The field of human rights has expanded to include the rights of peoples and nations: [325] in fact, “what is true for the individual is also true for peoples”.[326] The Magisterium points out that international law “rests upon the principle of equal respect for States, for each people's right to self-determination and for their free cooperation in view of the higher common good of humanity”.[327] Peace is founded not only on respect for human rights but also on respect for the rights of peoples, in particular the right to independence.[328] The rights of nations are nothing but “‘human rights' fostered at the specific level of community life”.[329] A nation has a “fundamental right to existence”, to “its own language and culture, through which a people expresses and promotes ... its fundamental spiritual ‘sovereignty”', to “shape its life according to its own traditions, excluding, of course, every abuse of basic human rights and in particular the oppression of minorities”, to “build its future by providing an appropriate education for the younger generation”.[330] The international order requires a balance between particularity and universality, which all nations are called to bring about, for their primary duty is to live in a posture of peace, respect and solidarity with other nations."
This teaching is not absolute and needs to be balanced by other considerations, but the ideas in the quote above need to be taken more seriously and allowed to be applied with greater equality over the world. Instead, the "West" is collapsing everywhere under the weight of its own decadence, but also because of decades of being expected to carry the weight of the entire world as due penance for its sins. Perhaps this is just, in the strict sense, but I don't think a penance that requires the destruction of the penitent is very constructive.
This, this statement from the German bishops comes across as progressive multicultural ideology, not Catholic teaching. It is part of a wider pattern, not unique to the German Church, of mistaking the State for the Church. The State's first duty is to its own people, and it is accountable to their legitimate needs and wants FIRST. Nobody else is going to look after a people's interests of not its own government, just as families need to make sure their own kids are going to be alright before taking in the homeless.
Beyond that, of course it's good for a country to be generous with itself, but a country is not a charity: it is a living people that needs a proper amount of stability in order to be generous with others. And generosity towards others does not logically entail unrestricted welcome. Whatever groups like the AfD are asking for, care needs to be taken to see both sides in what's going on. But the German bishops seem to be quite partisan in their alignments, with a bias towards marginalizing members of their own flock who are not perfectly aligned with their (yes, I'll say it) political and economic incentives.
There was a proposal in Germany within the last year to expel German citizens who were not of German descent by a right wing party. That’s a problem when you start deciding certain citizens aren’t really citizens based on their ancestry. Again, not asylum seekers or illegal migrants but people who had citizenship from birth or for decades. I disagree with just about everything the German leadership does but from an American perspective if someone from the Patriot Front was a catechist in your parish father I’m sure people would be uncomfortable with that. We don’t need to “both sides” everything.
Thank you, Ashley. There's just too much context that's missing. In addition to citizens of color there are millions of people living long-term in Germany legally without being citizens. They are overrepresented among the regular attendees at my German parish. Even though I am the "right" kind of immigrant (white, legal, employed) I am under no illusion that "remigration" wouldn't include me, and potentially my children.
As to why there are no examples on the left - it's because there are few if any high profile members of those parties seeking to be on parish councils - they are largely from the former East and are atheists.
These aren't liturgical debates - it's a question of whether people who voluntarily associate with the likes of Bjoern Hoecke and celebrate their election victories with chants of "foreigners out" should be the public face of the Church.
On a purely practical level, the German church is also an important employmer in the health care sector which desperately needs foreign workers.
The conference in Potsdam last year wasn't a formal political proposal, more like a think tank and fundraising gathering but there were high ranking representatives of the AfD in attendance and the focus was how to deport a wide range of people including asylum seekers, non-citizens and citizens they don't consider adequately integrated.
Given it sounds as though you are a legal migrant, I’d like to ask a couple questions if you don’t mind answering. 1. For the millions there legally, is it difficult to gain citizenship? 2. Do most legal migrants intend to integrate and become members of German society or is it primarily to find work? I’m not sure that question is clear, I’m wondering if some come for work opportunities with the intention of moving back to their home countries in the future with savings and experience. Thank you!
Well said. Someone needs to tell this to the German Bishops (not that they would listen). They seem to conflate common sense immigration policies with racism, which we hear all the time from the left over here too. It's all so tiresome.
“This concept of ethnicity is based on the idea of a culturally homogeneous population consisting exclusively of autochthonous Germans. It is characterized by the idea that peoples are distinguished from one another by an unchanging cultural identity and as a homogeneous community of descent.”
I don’t have the full translated version, so maybe I’m missing some important context. But this quote seems to me to set the Catholic Church in Germany against the very idea of a distinctive German people. Perhaps the German Bishops could do some work to situate this position within Catholic history? My knowledge of Church-Nationalist relations is hazy. I’m sure Pope Leo XIII wrote something about it! Maybe even the German bishops during the Kulturkampf. But it must have roots somewhere and I think it would be very interesting to dig those roots up.
Given the German nation state has only existed from 1871 and was a Protestant project that launched oppression against the Catholic Poles of Silesia, the Kulturkampf against Catholics under the proposition that the German homogeneous cultural community stands firmly in the Reformation and not under a foreign prelate and then later developed into the anti-Catholic, nationalistic Nazi regime, I would expect the Catholic bishops to be very sensitive to racist assertions.
Ah yes, purging and punishing Catholics for, "wrongthink". I remember when Jesus taught his disciples to strip their neighbors of their livelihoods and blacklist them for having ideas he deemed unacceptable. The people on the, "right side of history" are increasingly tyrannical.
What does it look like when a conference of bishops abandons the Gospel in favor of political jockeying...? What a disgrace.
The Gospel does not condone racism.
Racism should not be condoned. Unfortunately that word gets thrown around to discredit anyone that disagrees with current immigration policies. Europe has been overwhelmed with migrants and has shrinking native populations. Their cultural identities are at risk. The popularity of the so called “extreme right” parties that favor slowing/stopping immigration seems to be due to those policies as opposed to any racism.
A policy that seeks to slow or stop immigration would not be a policy that makes derogatory comments about current citizens of Germany because of their race. AfD fails the test of being a non-racist movement.
At the risk of creating a tu quotue fallacy, have the German bishops looked at the log in their own eyes? This whole story reads very much like the horseshoe theory when looking at both the left and right sides of the political spectrum. Have the German bishops taken similar steps to punish adherents of left-wing extremist parties?
Let me take this quote and insert left-wing instead of right:
“Members and representatives of the XYZ party often publicly advocate left-wing extremist positions that disregard human dignity and are diametrically opposed to the Christian view of humanity, the commandment to love one’s neighbor, and Catholic social doctrine, at least without sufficient distancing by official bodies of this party becoming known to the outside world, so that there is a contradiction to the Church’s order of values.”
Insert any sacred secular value left-wing (I am using a generality here for those on the extremist edge, so bear with me): abortion, homosexual actions/"marriage", communist/socialist/marxist social and economic policies, calls for complete unrestricted immigration, complete subjugation to transgender ideology, etc.
There are parties who call for these things in an extreme manner even though they are completely, by essence or by taking them to an extreme form, opposed to the "fundamental principles of the Catholic Church." Considering the calls to abrogate established Church doctrine by the ZdK, and supported by the majority of the German bishops, I don't expect to hear anything but crickets.
We have seen, through studies and our own personal experiences, that people on the left find it very difficult, and often impossible, to understand and accept the views of those who don't agree with them. That is why your thought about applying the same policy to leftists is a fantasy. It is why you will only find the media referring to people as being "on the left," and "the right extreme."
Obviously, we Catholic Bishops in Germany are totally opposed to abortion, homosexual marriage, etc... Er, er, except that most of us, including Cardinal Marx, are looking to recalibrate Church teaching on same sex attraction. And we don't want to annoy the nice respectable main stream parties, because we are so dependent on the Church Tax and want to keep the money flowing as long as politically possible. How else could Cardinal Marx enjoy his palace, chauffeur driven BMW and six figure salary?
The bishops have been quite clear has to their condemnation of the Communist Party.
I wish I had more time to understand the nuances of the AfD platform and the church in Germany. But can we just appreciate this thought: Imagining the outcome of a similar policy was enacted in the United States regarding the support of abortion among Catholics in a "church position"?
Over 100,000 abortions are performed under German law per year.
An incredibly small number. It would be a ridiculous claim to suggest that the Dobbs decision would ever lead to such a small number of abortions (even adjusting for comparative population sizes).
That is a an entire small city’s worth of people each year. I’m pretty sure if someone killed one quarter of the population of a mid-sized city, something the size of New Orleans, each year, nobody would call that incredibly small. Yes, 100,000 is fewer dead children than we have now, but it is still shockingly many.
It is and it is tragic. But compared to the strikingly higher rate of abortions in post-Dobbs United States, it is clear that German society is much more affirming of life than post-Dobbs America. Perhaps pro-life Americans need a major re-examination of our approach to protecting life.
Why does it appear that leftist bishops are the ones who keep people out of the Church unless it is on their terms? Pope Francis proclaims, "Todos, todos, todos," yet Cardinal McElroy has denied homeschool groups the right to utilize parish properties, and now the German hierarchy seeks to exclude those who belong to a certain political party.
I've never really understood the term "gaslighting," but Cardinal McElroy and the German bishops have helped me understand it a bit more.
Pray for the Church in Germany.
The content of the document appears, prima facie, to be obvious and praiseworthy. Who can argue against denouncing racism and antisemitism? Yet it remains ambiguous enough to give wide latitude for those in positions of authority to purge members of the German church with whom they disagree- both politically and, I presume, liturgically.
The German bishops and Catholic lay leadership is so extremist in their leftist, pro-perversion and murder of babies ideology and heresy that lay representatives from Poland have refused to meet with them anymore. There was a meeting every year, but at the most recent meeting the Poles told the Germans that these meetings have become pointless, because they are not of the same faith. The Germans had strayed so far away from the teachings of the Catholic Church that the Poles found it a waste of their time to have meetings with them.
Link?
Happily Pope Francis may have anticipated this tiresome chaos back in 2013, in para 32 of Evangelii Gaudium. This paragraph floats the idea of giving Bishops' Conferences doctrinal authority. In true Pope Francis style, it does not positively, clearly recommend it. It seems to air it as an idea well worth considering.
The sad side effect would be the disintegration of the Church into a patchwork of national churches. But seeing that Pope Francis recently declared in Singapore that all religions are different paths to God, who am I to judge?
Somehow their "murder of babies ideology" results in a lower abortion rate than all but a handful of countries and a rate dramatically lower than Dobbs offers any hope of achieving in the US.
It would be easy to be sedevacantist in Germany.
"While individual positions of other parties without an extremist stance may diverge from the Church’s teachings, their basic orientation does not contradict the Church’s values."
Are they really going to argue that this doesn't characterize Die Linke or Die Grünen? If so, I'd like to see the details. 'Extremist stance" is a useless descriptor. The Democratic Party sees Catholic teaching as "extremist."
"This concept of ethnicity is based on the idea of a culturally homogeneous population consisting exclusively of autochthonous Germans. It is characterized by the idea that peoples are distinguished from one another by an unchanging cultural identity and as a homogeneous community of descent."
Yes, this idea can be taken to unhealthy extremes, but are they really arguing that Germany DOESN'T have an identifiable "cultural identity and... homogeneous community of descent"? What's wrong with that and why would that be wrong to preserve and sustain? The French have generally done it, so...? And if anyone is not convinced, transpose it into another context: the developing world. If Germans started flooding into another country and that country took steps to limit their influence and numbers, how would it be regarded by many leftists in the West? They would fawn over that culture as attempting to preserve their distinctiveness in the face of capitalist, colonialist homogenization, or whatever. And I would agree with them!
If you go to the Wikipedia page on the AfD, it is mostly (unfriendly) "expert interpretations" and innuendo, but there is a summary of one part of the AfD's actual policy that is of interest: "In its program, AfD wants to end what it describes as mass immigration and focus on taking in small numbers of skilled immigrants who are expected to integrate into society and speak German. It encourages German nationals to have more children, as opposed to trying to boost the German population through foreign migration. The party wants to review EU freedom of movement rules and states that immigrants must be employed and contribute to social security through paying taxes for at least four years before being allowed to receive state benefits. AfD calls for mass deportation of foreign born criminals with multiple citizenship or permanent residency. The party describes the Geneva Convention on Refugees as "outdated", calls for stricter vetting of refugees, and believes the German government should invest in special economic and safe zones in third world nations as opposed to taking in large numbers of asylum seekers without background checks."
What exactly is wrong with this, from a Catholic perspective? Is there no room, in the minds of the German bishops, for finding prudential alternatives to just flooding Germany with immigrants and refugees from radically different cultures and giving them the same political status as generations of families who have contributed to building up their own nation? (That last bit about "economic safe zones" is one of the most interesting proposals I've heard so far to mitigate international disturbance.)
"Cohesive culture for me but not for thee." That's my problem with this line of thought. I think every identifiable nation has a right to moderate its interfacing with the world to preserve its distinctiveness and security, internally and externally. There's some support for this in the Compendium on CST as well: "157. The field of human rights has expanded to include the rights of peoples and nations: [325] in fact, “what is true for the individual is also true for peoples”.[326] The Magisterium points out that international law “rests upon the principle of equal respect for States, for each people's right to self-determination and for their free cooperation in view of the higher common good of humanity”.[327] Peace is founded not only on respect for human rights but also on respect for the rights of peoples, in particular the right to independence.[328] The rights of nations are nothing but “‘human rights' fostered at the specific level of community life”.[329] A nation has a “fundamental right to existence”, to “its own language and culture, through which a people expresses and promotes ... its fundamental spiritual ‘sovereignty”', to “shape its life according to its own traditions, excluding, of course, every abuse of basic human rights and in particular the oppression of minorities”, to “build its future by providing an appropriate education for the younger generation”.[330] The international order requires a balance between particularity and universality, which all nations are called to bring about, for their primary duty is to live in a posture of peace, respect and solidarity with other nations."
This teaching is not absolute and needs to be balanced by other considerations, but the ideas in the quote above need to be taken more seriously and allowed to be applied with greater equality over the world. Instead, the "West" is collapsing everywhere under the weight of its own decadence, but also because of decades of being expected to carry the weight of the entire world as due penance for its sins. Perhaps this is just, in the strict sense, but I don't think a penance that requires the destruction of the penitent is very constructive.
This, this statement from the German bishops comes across as progressive multicultural ideology, not Catholic teaching. It is part of a wider pattern, not unique to the German Church, of mistaking the State for the Church. The State's first duty is to its own people, and it is accountable to their legitimate needs and wants FIRST. Nobody else is going to look after a people's interests of not its own government, just as families need to make sure their own kids are going to be alright before taking in the homeless.
Beyond that, of course it's good for a country to be generous with itself, but a country is not a charity: it is a living people that needs a proper amount of stability in order to be generous with others. And generosity towards others does not logically entail unrestricted welcome. Whatever groups like the AfD are asking for, care needs to be taken to see both sides in what's going on. But the German bishops seem to be quite partisan in their alignments, with a bias towards marginalizing members of their own flock who are not perfectly aligned with their (yes, I'll say it) political and economic incentives.
There was a proposal in Germany within the last year to expel German citizens who were not of German descent by a right wing party. That’s a problem when you start deciding certain citizens aren’t really citizens based on their ancestry. Again, not asylum seekers or illegal migrants but people who had citizenship from birth or for decades. I disagree with just about everything the German leadership does but from an American perspective if someone from the Patriot Front was a catechist in your parish father I’m sure people would be uncomfortable with that. We don’t need to “both sides” everything.
Thank you, Ashley. There's just too much context that's missing. In addition to citizens of color there are millions of people living long-term in Germany legally without being citizens. They are overrepresented among the regular attendees at my German parish. Even though I am the "right" kind of immigrant (white, legal, employed) I am under no illusion that "remigration" wouldn't include me, and potentially my children.
As to why there are no examples on the left - it's because there are few if any high profile members of those parties seeking to be on parish councils - they are largely from the former East and are atheists.
These aren't liturgical debates - it's a question of whether people who voluntarily associate with the likes of Bjoern Hoecke and celebrate their election victories with chants of "foreigners out" should be the public face of the Church.
On a purely practical level, the German church is also an important employmer in the health care sector which desperately needs foreign workers.
The conference in Potsdam last year wasn't a formal political proposal, more like a think tank and fundraising gathering but there were high ranking representatives of the AfD in attendance and the focus was how to deport a wide range of people including asylum seekers, non-citizens and citizens they don't consider adequately integrated.
Given it sounds as though you are a legal migrant, I’d like to ask a couple questions if you don’t mind answering. 1. For the millions there legally, is it difficult to gain citizenship? 2. Do most legal migrants intend to integrate and become members of German society or is it primarily to find work? I’m not sure that question is clear, I’m wondering if some come for work opportunities with the intention of moving back to their home countries in the future with savings and experience. Thank you!
Well said. Someone needs to tell this to the German Bishops (not that they would listen). They seem to conflate common sense immigration policies with racism, which we hear all the time from the left over here too. It's all so tiresome.
Hey, but if you are a pro Abortion, pro Homosexual union Alt Left member, no worries, that's OK!
The Germans Bishops get dumber every day.
Sincere question: Are they/have they fired people who support legalized abortion?
“This concept of ethnicity is based on the idea of a culturally homogeneous population consisting exclusively of autochthonous Germans. It is characterized by the idea that peoples are distinguished from one another by an unchanging cultural identity and as a homogeneous community of descent.”
I don’t have the full translated version, so maybe I’m missing some important context. But this quote seems to me to set the Catholic Church in Germany against the very idea of a distinctive German people. Perhaps the German Bishops could do some work to situate this position within Catholic history? My knowledge of Church-Nationalist relations is hazy. I’m sure Pope Leo XIII wrote something about it! Maybe even the German bishops during the Kulturkampf. But it must have roots somewhere and I think it would be very interesting to dig those roots up.
Given the German nation state has only existed from 1871 and was a Protestant project that launched oppression against the Catholic Poles of Silesia, the Kulturkampf against Catholics under the proposition that the German homogeneous cultural community stands firmly in the Reformation and not under a foreign prelate and then later developed into the anti-Catholic, nationalistic Nazi regime, I would expect the Catholic bishops to be very sensitive to racist assertions.
Ah yes, purging and punishing Catholics for, "wrongthink". I remember when Jesus taught his disciples to strip their neighbors of their livelihoods and blacklist them for having ideas he deemed unacceptable. The people on the, "right side of history" are increasingly tyrannical.