Armin Laschet, now the leader of the Christian Democratic Union, speaks at the party headquarters in Berlin, Jan. 11, 2017. Credit: photocosmos1/Shutterstock.
Berlin, Germany, Aug 11, 2021 / 10:42 am (CNA).
An anti-Catholic video targeting the election campaign of a potential successor to Angela Merkel has drawn criticism from bishops and politicians in Germany amid growing concerns about a wider erosion of religious freedom in an increasingly secular Europe.
The video was published online and shown at an election event of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in early August. It depicts Armin Laschet, the Christian Democratic Union’s candidate to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel, as a Russian Matryoshka doll that “hides” several other dolls inside.
“Whoever votes for Armin Laschet and the CDU, votes for … ultra-Catholic Laschet confidants for whom sex before marriage is a taboo,” an ominious voice-over tells viewers, while a further Russian doll, bearing face the face of a close aide to Laschet, is revealed from inside the bigger doll.
The aide is a 35-year-old Catholic in charge of the Laschet’s office in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia by name of Nathanael Liminski. As a practicing Catholic, Liminski in 2010 defended the Church’s views on pre-marital sex and homosexuality in a TV show. He also co-founded the group “Generation Benedict” following World Youth Day 2005. (The organisation changed its name to “Pontifex Initiative” after Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation from office).
In response to the video clip, the German Bishops’ Conference called for a fair election campaign. “We consider the way in which the election commercial deals with the expression of a religious conviction to be inappropriate,” a spokesman of the conference told media. A parliamentarian and spokesman for religious affairs of the CDU, Hermann Gröhe, also weighed in, accusing the SPD of stoking up anti-Catholic sentiment.
The controversy has also sparked a wider debate over concerns for religious freedom and growing anti-Catholic sentiment in particular in German society, with one expert on constitutional law, who is also a Catholic canon lawyer, warning of a break with Christian tradition in German society. Professor Hans Michael Heinig told the Berlin newspaper “Tagesspiegel” on August 7, the SPD spot constituted a “paradigm shift” that identified the minority of practicing Catholics as problematic in wider society. He warned that this shift “can undermine religious freedom and a sufficiently clear distinction between religion and politics.”
Attacking political opponents, in particular their personal faith, has so far been considered a taboo in modern German elections. The socially powerful consensus so far has been that election commercials and campaigns should focus on policies and issues, not polemics and populist claims about opponents. Nonetheless, Liminski’s Catholic faith has come under intense media scrutiny in recent months, with a number of secularist and left-wing media such as the “Tageszeitung” running critical portraits of “Laschet’s right-hand man“.
German voters will go to the pools on September 26 to vote for a new federal government and a successor to long-time Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has led the country since the year 2005. The question of how a clearer separation of Church and State can be achieved in light of an increasing number of German Catholics turning their backs on the Church will be one of the challenges facing the new government.
The Church in Germany received 6.76 billion euros from the church tax in 2019, an increase of more than 100 million euros compared to 2018. The rise is believed to be due to the growth of Germany’s economy in 2019.
While the number of Catholics abandoning the faith has increased steadily since the 1960s, the Church’s income has risen. In 2019, a record number of Catholics left the Church in Germany, with 272,771 people formally leaving.
Pope Francis took the historical step of writing a 28-page letter to German Catholics in 2019, urging them to focus on evangelization in the face of a “growing erosion and deterioration of faith” in their country. More recently, Pope emeritus Benedict XVI., who hails from the German State of Bavaria, expressed strong concern about the lack of faith within Church institutions in Germany.
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Valencia, Spain, Dec 3, 2019 / 05:49 pm (CNA).- Cardinal Antonio Cañizares Llovera of Valencia wrote Saturday that in the wake of an inconclusive general election, a pre-agreement between Spain’s prominent socialist and left-wing populist parties could have grievious cultural repercussions.
Spain held a general election Nov. 10, the second of the year. Prime minister Pedro Sanchez’ Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party won 120 seats, while 176 is required for a majority in the Congress of Deputies.
Behind PSOE, the right-wing People’s Party and Vox won 88 and 52 seats, respectively. Podemos, an anti-capitalist and populist party, took 35 seats.
PSOE and Podemos recently announced a pre-agreement for a coalition government, though they would still be 21 seats short of a majority.
“The effective economic repercussions have been immediate, the reactions and commentaries in Europe and Spain, besides being negative, leaves us in great fear,” Cañizares wrote Nov. 30 of the pre-agreement.
The cardinal also warned that the ten points of this pre-agreement have “some cultural, anthropological connotations and a vision of reality that go beyond economics and leave or create great concern.”
With the pre-agreement, he said, “a cultural change is established or engendered, one way of thinking is imposed, with a vision of man intended to be spread to everyone, the approval of euthanasia, the extension of new rights, gender ideology, radical feminism, bringing up historical memories that foment hatred and aversion.”
Cañizares said that the issues present in the pre-agreement “suggest and foresee a deepening and immersion into a very deep crisis above all cultural, but also a political and institutional, a democratic, social, religious crisis about what constitutes Spain in its reality and its very own identity.”
He also explained that there is renewed talk of the possibility of a new worldwide economic crisis, “but even more serious will be the cultural and identity crisis, suffered by Spain in the context of the West, with its own connotations, which, if this coalition takes over the national government given what is seen in the ‘pre-agreement,’ will deepen.”
The archbishop of Valencia recalled that we are “immersed in a human crisis that is deep and getting bigger”, which is in his view “the most serious of all because it’s a crisis of the truth about man and about society,” and which is “the crisis of the meaning of life, a human, anthropological, moral crisis and of universal values, a spiritual and social crisis, a crisis in marriages and families.”
And so he said that “we find ourselves facing a serious emergency, Spain’s emergency,” since “a new culture is being or has been imposed, a project of humanity that entails a radical anthropological vision which changes the vision that gives us identity and configures us as a people, and even as a continent, I dare to say: the identity received from our ancestors in our common history.”
This would lead to “the serious loss of or almost totally obscure the meaning of the person and his dignity” and ultimately to “abandoning and forgetting God which is to forget and negate man.”
He also said that Spanish society is suffering from “a real sickness, manifested on different fronts, in our society, whose great challenge, or rather, great and new challenges, are summed up in its urgent healing.”
And so the cardinal stressed that “the human person and his dignity, the basis of the common good founded on the real effective recognition of universal human rights, are the foundation that we must contemplate and put in all its consistency, if we want to find the healing and constructive path to follow”.
The cardinal described as “fundamental and urgent” the common commitment to put “the human person and his inviolable dignity and the common good, its essential truth in itself which makes us free for the world of culture, religion and science, of politics and human relationships.”
This would be an “broad basis” to “follow and build upon” with the goal of “reaching and enjoying and new and hopeful future, a new culture and a new civilization which all of us have to shape through dialogue, encounter, without impositions.”
The PSOE-Podemos coalition is seeking the support of the Republican Left of Catalonia, a social-democratic party that focuses on Catalan independence.
An artist’s rendering of the affordable apartment complex soon to be built by Our Lady Queen of Angels Housing alliance in Los Angeles. / Courtesy of Our Lady Queen of Angels Housing alliance
St. Louis, Mo., Aug 26, 2024 / 06:30 am (CNA).
Los Angeles is one of the most expensive cities in the United States, with an average home price almost touching a million dollars in 2024 — a landscape that crowds out not only the poor, but also young families with children. The high cost of housing is one of the primary reasons why tens of thousands of people live on the streets of LA, and most of those who are housed are “rent burdened,” which means they spend more than 30% of their income just keeping a roof over their heads.
In the face of such challenges, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles recently announced it will provide land for a new housing development dedicated to serving community college students and young people exiting the foster care system.
Amy Anderson, executive director of Our Lady Queen of Angels Housing alliance and a former chief of housing for the City of Los Angeles, told EWTN News that a group of Catholic lay leaders from the business and philanthropic community reached out to the archdiocese with a vision for creating an independent, nonprofit affordable housing development organization.
“Our vision is to really collaborate with the archdiocese and [use] the resources potentially available from the archdiocese to create homes that are affordable to a wide range of populations and incomes,” Anderson told “EWTN News Nightly” anchor Tracy Sabol.
She said they hope to break ground on the project, known as the Willowbrook development, “about a year from now.”
“The archdiocese is a fantastic partner. They are providing the land for our first development, which is already in process, and we’re working really closely with them to identify additional opportunities.”
The proposed building, which will be located steps from Los Angeles Community College, will feature 74 affordable housing units, as well as “on-site supportive services” for young people transitioning out of foster care — a population that often ends up experiencing homelessness.
The land, located at 4665 Willow Brook Ave just a few miles from the Hollywood Sign, currently hosts a Catholic Charities building, which will move its operations to another site to make way for the apartments.
“Through Catholic Charities and our ministries on Skid Row [an LA street where many unhoused people live] and elsewhere, we have been working for many years to provide shelter and services for our homeless brothers and sisters,” Archbishop Jose Gomez said in a statement to LAist.
“With this new initiative we see exciting possibilities to make more affordable housing available, especially for families and young people.”
Making land work for mission
The Catholic Church is often cited as the largest non-governmental owner of land in the entire world, with an estimated 177 million acres owned by Catholic entities.
Maddy Johnson, program manager for the Church Properties Initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate (FIRE), noted that the Church as a large landowner is not a new phenomenon, but there is a need today to adapt to modern challenges like regulations, zoning, and the importance of caring for the natural environment.
Many Catholic dioceses and religious orders have properties in their possession that aren’t fulfilling their original purpose, including disused natural land and parking lots, as well as shuttered convents and schools. Sometimes, Johnson said, a diocese or religious order doesn’t even realize the full extent of what they own.
“How can the Church make good strategic decisions, strategic and mission-aligned decisions, if it doesn’t know what properties it’s responsible for?” she said.
The Church of St. Agatha and St. James in Philadelphia, with The Chestnut in the foreground, a housing unit developed on property ground-leased from the church. Courtesy of Maddy Johnson/Church Properties Initiative
Since real estate management is not the Church’s core competency, FIRE aims to “provide a space for peer learning” to educate and equip Church leaders to make better use of their properties in service of the Church’s mission.
To this end, they offer an undergraduate minor at Notre Dame that aims to teach students how to help the Church make strategic real estate decisions that align with the Church’s mission. The Institute also organizes a quarterly networking call with diocesan real estate directors, as well as an annual conference to allow Catholic leaders to convene, share best practices, and learn from each other.
Fr. Patrick Reidy, C.S.C., a professor at Notre Dame Law School and faculty co-director of the Church Properties Initiative, conducts a workshop for diocesan leaders on Notre Dame’s campus in summer 2023. Courtesy of David J. Murphy/Church Properties Initiative
In many cases, Catholic entities that have worked with FIRE have been able to repurpose properties in a way that not only provides income for the church, but also fills a need in the community.
Johnson said the Church is called to respond to the modern problems society faces — one of which is a lack of housing options, especially for the poor.
“Throughout its history, there have been so many different iterations of how the Church expresses its mission…through education, healthcare — those are the ones that we’ve gotten really used to,” Johnson said.
“In our day and age, could it be the need for affordable housing?…that’s a charitable human need in the area that’s not being met.”
Unlocking potential in California
Queen of Angels Housing’s first development, which has been in the works for several years, is being made possible now by a newly-passed state law in California that aims to make it easier for churches to repurpose their land into housing.
California’s SB 4, the Affordable Housing on Faith Lands Act, was signed into law in October 2023. It streamlines some of the trickiest parts of the process of turning church-owned land into housing — the parts most people don’t really think about. These can include permitting and zoning restrictions, which restrict the types of buildings that can be built in a given area and can be difficult and time-consuming to overcome. SB 4 even includes a provision allowing for denser housing on church-owned property than the zoning ordinances would normally allow.
Yes in God’s Backyard
The law coming to fruition in California is part of a larger movement informally dubbed “Yes in God’s Backyard,” or YIGBY — a riff on the term “Not in My Backyard” (NIMBY), a phenomenon whereby neighbors take issue with and oppose new developments.
Several Catholic real estate professionals with ties to California expressed excitement about the possibilities that SB 4 has created in the Golden State.
Steve Cameron, a Catholic real estate developer in Orange County, told CNA that he is currently working with the Diocese of Orange, which abuts the LA archdiocese, to inventory properties that could be repurposed for residential use.
He said their focus is on building apartment buildings and townhomes, primarily for rental rather than for sale, in an attempt to address the severe housing shortage and high costs in Southern California.
Unlike some dioceses, the Orange diocese has an electronic GIS (geographic information system) database showing all the properties it owns. Prepared by a civil engineering firm, the database includes details such as parcel numbers, acreage, title information, and demographic reports, which facilitate the planning and development process.
“Strategically, what we’re doing is we’re inventorying all of the property that the diocese and the parishes own, and trying to understand where there might be underutilized property that would make sense to develop some residential use,” Cameron said.
Cameron said he can’t yet share details about the housing projects they’re working on, but said they are looking to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the Queen of Angels housing project as a model for how to take advantage of the new incentives created by SB 4.
“I think it’s great, and it’s exciting that they’re taking the lead and that they are able to find an opportunistic way to repurpose an underutilized property to meet the housing shortage in California,” he said.
“[We] look at them as a role model for what we’re trying to accomplish here in the Diocese of Orange.”
Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago with One Chicago Square in the background, a residential tower constructed on the former cathedral parking lot, which was sold in 2019. Courtesy of Maddy Johnson/Church Properties Initiative
John Meyer, a former president of the California-based Napa Institute who now works in real estate with J2 Development, emphasized the importance of viewing the Church’s vast real estate holdings as an asset rather than a liability.
Meyer said he is currently working with two Catholic entities on the East Coast on ground lease projects, one of which will fund the construction of a new Catholic Student Center at a university. He told CNA he often advises Catholic entities to lease the land they own rather than selling it, allowing the church to maintain ownership of the property while generating income.
Naturally, he noted, any real estate project the Church undertakes ought to align with the Church’s mission of spreading the Gospel, and not merely be a means of making money.
“Any time we look at the Church’s real estate decisions, it’s got to be intertwined with mission and values,” he said.
“We’re not just developing for the sake of developing. What we want to do is we want to create value for the Church, and we also want to create value for the community. So working closely with the municipality to make sure that needs are met, and to be a good neighbor, is important.”
He said Church leaders should strongly consider taking advantage of incentives in various states such as California for projects like affordable housing, which align with the Church’s mission and provide both social and financial benefits.
“Priests and bishops aren’t ordained to do these things, and sometimes they have people in their diocese that have these abilities, and sometimes they don’t,” Meyer said.
“This [new law] in California has created an incentive that we can take advantage of, so we need to take advantage of that incentive…it’s allowing us to unlock potential value in land while at the same time serving a social good that’s part of the mission of the Church.”
Bishop Fernando Vérgez Alzaga, L.C. / legrc.org via Wikimedia (CC0).
Vatican City, Sep 9, 2021 / 04:50 am (CNA).
Pope Francis on Wednesday named the 76-year-old Bishop Fernando Vérgez Alzaga as president of the Governorate of Vatican City State…. […]
4 Comments
An ominous sign.
They can only do this because they know they can get away with it.
In modern Germany, perhaps the Catholics would be more easily identified if they wore mandatory patches on their outer coats. This time around, the star of Christmas comes to mind.
Since the church hierarchy is evidently powerless ( or more likely, unwilling) to assert itself in today’s morality, its a given that no non-clerical Catholic, no matter how devout, no matter political position, could manage anything either. The church is slipping due to its fear of calling a sin, a sin. Afraid of more folks leaving. But they leave nonetheless. Better to speak the truth and work with the genuine followers who remain. As for the Germans attacking people on the basis of religion, they have been down this road before. It didnt go well for them. Maybe someone ( like the Pope) should remind them.
America has set world cultural standards for many decades now, the most significant and deleterious is the dissolution between “religion and politics.” Watch America, view it on android screens, this vivid tutorial destroy itself politically, becoming in apocalyptic language a haven for every filthy bird. Religion in process of delegitimization here Germans are learning over there. Politics in Germany acquiring similar religiosity the immoral now the licit. If Catholics in Am as well as Germany raise their heads to criticize aberrant sexual behavior, vilification is passé, we’re already subject to legal sanction. Rights have evolved since the Sixties. Antithetical to Christian propriety transforming Christian beliefs into hatred. The disease is spreading inexorably to all Earth’s corners. Fearsome to what it portends nothing close to it historically, since we have a wicked ideological inversion from morality to immorality. Faith in Christ, Christ the cornerstone of order, diluted deformed and disbelieved. Brother Francis! Where art thou?
An ominous sign.
They can only do this because they know they can get away with it.
In modern Germany, perhaps the Catholics would be more easily identified if they wore mandatory patches on their outer coats. This time around, the star of Christmas comes to mind.
Since the church hierarchy is evidently powerless ( or more likely, unwilling) to assert itself in today’s morality, its a given that no non-clerical Catholic, no matter how devout, no matter political position, could manage anything either. The church is slipping due to its fear of calling a sin, a sin. Afraid of more folks leaving. But they leave nonetheless. Better to speak the truth and work with the genuine followers who remain. As for the Germans attacking people on the basis of religion, they have been down this road before. It didnt go well for them. Maybe someone ( like the Pope) should remind them.
America has set world cultural standards for many decades now, the most significant and deleterious is the dissolution between “religion and politics.” Watch America, view it on android screens, this vivid tutorial destroy itself politically, becoming in apocalyptic language a haven for every filthy bird. Religion in process of delegitimization here Germans are learning over there. Politics in Germany acquiring similar religiosity the immoral now the licit. If Catholics in Am as well as Germany raise their heads to criticize aberrant sexual behavior, vilification is passé, we’re already subject to legal sanction. Rights have evolved since the Sixties. Antithetical to Christian propriety transforming Christian beliefs into hatred. The disease is spreading inexorably to all Earth’s corners. Fearsome to what it portends nothing close to it historically, since we have a wicked ideological inversion from morality to immorality. Faith in Christ, Christ the cornerstone of order, diluted deformed and disbelieved. Brother Francis! Where art thou?