German Bishops Firing Conservative Voters

Over 400,000 Germans left the Catholic Church last year. In 2022, over a half a million left. Of those who remain, less than 7 percent attend Mass with any regularity. LGBT activists within the ranks of the clergy are at risk of going to war against the Vatican. Catholic moral teaching is diluted and dismissed with prejudice and impunity, in favor of sexual degeneracy. And what are Germany’s bishops — those shepherds and princes of the Church tasked with leading souls to Heaven — doing to address these multifaceted crises? Criticizing the “far-right,” of course.

Germany’s bishops published a document last week giving guidelines for firing members of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party from jobs with parishes or dioceses. Although not binding, the guidance followed a spate of AfD members being fired from positions with various parishes. One man was even told that he could not be an altar server because of his involvement with the conservative political organization. (READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: Can A Catholic Support Kamala Harris? No.)

While some political parties in Germany — such as Die Heimat or Der III. Weg — align themselves with actual Nazi ideology, AfD does not. Instead, it simply opposes the mass immigration program imposed on Germany by its own political elites and the European Union, opposes the Islamization of Germany, and supports traditional marriage and the nuclear family. Yet AfD is condemned by name 56 times by the German bishops, while Nazi-influenced groups like Die Heimat or Der III. Weg only warranted a peripheral nod.

What’s so bad about AfD, according to the German bishops? The political party is labeled “extremist,” with the bishops writing:

These fundamental principles of the Catholic Church are not compatible with extremist positions or a racial [völkisch]-national ethos that aims at an unchanging cultural identity and a homogeneous community of descent and, as a result, systematically and regularly excludes people.…

Members and representatives of the AfD often publicly advocate right-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.…

In the AfD … there are clear indications that a dominant part of the party aims to discriminate against people with a migrant background based on an “ethnocultural” concept of ethnicity that is incompatible with human dignity. 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.

Ironic, isn’t it, that the German bishops deride AfD members for being too “exclusive” in the very document that they’ve drafted with guidelines on excluding AfD members?

Catholic principles are not, in fact, in opposition to the preservation of a national heritage and identity. Pope Pius XII, himself an ardent enemy of Nazism, once wrote, “It is quite legitimate for nations to treat their differences a sacred inheritance and guard them at all costs.”

One cannot help but wonder if Germany’s bishops would feel quite so comfortable condemning, say, a Hindu nationalist party in India, or telling Israelis to abandon any “racial [völkisch]-national ethos” and stop trying to preserve “an unchanging cultural identity and a homogeneous community of descent…” One imagines that the German bishops would crawl on their hands and knees to avoid being associated with any such statement. Yet their own countrymen are subject to such derision.

As I wrote earlier this month, immigration controls and the protection of one’s national heritage are not contradictory to Catholic teaching, but are actually upheld by it. And the condemnation of a völkisch-national ethos may be addressed by the Doctor of the Church St. Thomas Aquinas himself, who wrote that “friendship among blood relations is based upon their connection by natural origin, the friendship of fellow-citizens on their civic fellowship, and the friendship of those who are fighting side by side on the comradeship of battle.”

He concluded, “Wherefore in matters pertaining to nature we should love our kindred most, in matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow-citizens, and on the battlefield our fellow-soldiers.”

However, the German bishops added, “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.” The Social Democratic Party is explicitly Marxist and socialist, ideologies which have been condemned time and time again by the Catholic Church, from the time of Pope Pius XI to that of the late Pope Benedict XVI.

The Left is also a socialist organization and supports all manner of moral degeneracies which the Church has condemned since the first century. The current Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, worked with a coalition of varying parties to decriminalize advertising abortions — considered among the gravest of sins by the Catholic Church, punishable by automatic excommunication — in 2022. Yet we are to believe that these parties and politicians do not “contradict the Church’s values?”

It may come as little surprise, given their LGBT adoration over the past several years, that the German bishops are again attempting to rewrite the Church’s moral teachings, declaring immigration control and social conservatism a sin worthy of excommunication — at least excommunication from the sinner’s job — while Marxism, abortion activism, and the destruction of the nation via mass migration all get a free pass. (READ MORE: Immigration Control Is Smart, Not Un-Christian) 

Many of the political problems being faced in Germany — immigration chief among them — are currently being faced in the U.S. American Catholics must be careful to know what the Catholic Church teaches. The leftist ideology has found its way into the seminaries and episcopal chairs of the American clergy, too, and American Catholics must be prepared to confront it when the time comes.

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