Department for External Church Relations
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Department for Church Relations with Society and the Media issues statement in relation to the removal of 500-year-old crucifix from the Hall of Peace in Münster Town Hall
On November 4, 2022, Die Welt newspaper reported that German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock had made the Münster city authorities remove a crucifix fr om the Hall of Peace in the local Town Hall wh ere it had been kept for 482 years. It was done in the lead-up to the G7 Foreign Ministers Meeting.
As was also reported, it was not the first time that Christian symbols were removed from public spaces on the initiative of politicians from the German party Alliance '90/The Greens. For instance, the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Claudia Roth (The Greens), suggested that Biblical inscriptions should be removed from the building of the Berlin City Palace in the centre of the German capital and replaced by other “more cosmopolitan” texts.
Pursuing their policy aimed at obliterating the memory of Christian heritage from the public space, authorities in some European countries thus neglect the rights of believers and the will of their people. Such disregard for Christian roots undermines European identity and results in the loss of the centuries-old notions of morality based on the faith in Christ.
It is common for the European liberal press to denounce the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church for his repeated statements in which he points out that deliberate eradication of Christian culture in Europe poses a threat not only to the future of the continent, but also to peace among nations which for centuries have been united by their shared Christian heritage. Yet, the recent news from Germany confirms that the Primate of the Russian Church is right in his assessment of the situation. Uprooting Christian symbols from the European public life has as its direct consequence the immediate substitution of the Christian heritage for an exact opposite. Thus, for example, official statistics show that over the past 6 years the number of Satanists in Germany has grown sixteenfold and amounts to 100,000 people.
We express our solidarity with those Europeans who stand up against any attempts to obliterate their historical memory, and state that peace and neighbourliness within the pan-European area are only possible if they rest on the common Christian foundation.
Patriarch
Sermons
24.01.2021
06.11.2020