by Giulio Meotti
Cologne Cathedral, known as the “German Rome”, is the landmark of the city and has been declared a World Heritage Site since 1996. It is one of the most visited places in Germany and one of the most important in Christianity (it was visited by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI). The first stone of the cathedral was laid in 1248. On old black and white photos you can see how the towers of the cathedral protrude from the rubble of the historic center completely destroyed during the Second World War.
Now the city of Cologne is deleting the iconic cathedral from its new logo. “My 92-year-old mother is stunned, my 11-year-old son is crying and my friend in London doesn’t understand it,” writes sculptor and painter Cornel Wachter.
Die Welt explains that even the head of the Jewish community, Abraham Lehrer, also spoke out in favor of keeping the spires in the city logo. And the president of the German-Hungarian Society, Gerhard Papke, commented on Twitter: “Cologne’s choice to remove the cathedral from the city logo is not surprising, since recently mosques have been expressly authorized to call the muezzin.” Papke refers to the decision by the mayor of Cologne last October to allow the “call to prayer” in the city. from its 50 mosques.
Beatrix von Storch, the deputy of the right-wing AfD party, also commented: “The mayor removes the Cologne Cathedral from the city’s logo because it is ‘outdated’. Nobody conquers our country. It is we ourselves who voluntarily erase our culture. We create a void that others are happy to fill.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.(Faz) had just informed us that the Minister of Culture and former leader of the Greens, Claudia Roth, had a famous quote from the Bible “contextualized” on the dome of the Berlin Palace of the Hohenzollern royal family, destroyed in the Second World War, satin ground by the GDR of East Germany and rebuilt in 2020 as the Humboldt Forum. In 1844, Prussian king Frederick William IV had chosen a phrase from the Bible.
And, after the defeat in the elections, in Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) discussions began about whether to delete the “C” and the reference to Christianity, says the Faz.
t’s not just Cologne. In the Willy-Brandt-Platz in Leipzig, the municipality has allowed huge green banners with Arabic writing to be posted: it tells the BILD that they are used to celebrate Muhammad’s birthday.
But basically the mayor of Cologne is right. That cathedral is really “out of date”. “The removal of the cathedral from the logo of the city means nothing but submission and is a logical consequence of the call to prayer of the muezzin, now allowed in Cologne,” writes the famous essayist Peter Hahn in the magazine Tichys. “The cathedral is obliterated, leveled to the cultural ground, sacrificed to the woke rage. And in Cologne it can only happen because Woelki’s Catholicism is defenseless right now. A Cardinal Meisner would have intervened with his flaming sword ”.
A tourist brochure aimed at the Arab world caused a sensation in “Catholic” Bavaria. Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze, is without the large golden cross on the summit. According to the Bavarian Tourism Association, wealthy sheikhs pay 1,000 euros per person per day for their stay at the mountain. Why offend them by showing them the cross?
In Jerusalem, the two leaders of German Christianity, Catholic Cardinal Reinhard Marx and Lutheran Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, hid the cross when they visited the esplanade of the Mosques, the Temple Mount of the Jews. Another scandalous sign of submission embarrassingly embellished. Even Der Spiegel, a German liberal weekly historian, criticized the bishops with an article entitled “Submission”: “How can it be called anything other than denial of faith when two prominent representatives of Christianity lay their crosses in consideration of the irritability of Muslim believers? Capitulation”.
But there is another reason. Christianity is dying in Germany. The archdiocese of Cologne, which is the largest in Germany, plans to reduce its parishes from 500 to 50 by 2030. A preconomic problem? No. The German Church is richer than the Vatican. Martin Struck, diocesan building director in the archdiocese of Cologne, has just revealed: “Since 2000 we have desecrated 28 churches. Seven were demolished. The last archbishopric church that was built was in 2003 with St. Catherine in Köln-Blumenberg. Not building a church for 20 years is something that has never happened in history, not even during the Second World War ”.
If the diocese of Aachen wants to reduce its churches by 30 percent, the archdiocese of Berlin has decided to drop by a quarter. A study by the Dresdner Bank predicts that over the next few years, half of Germany’s churches will have to close or be converted to other uses. The German Church is a sinking boat. The number of faithful in Cologne is also collapsing. As in the title of the Rundschau a few days ago: “Never have so many people in Cologne left the Church”.
If even the bishops no longer believe in it, why should the secularized and semi-Islamized European elites – who are only managing the transition of civilization – do so?