How the (salvation) interests of believers were seriously disregarded during the Corona period.
Among those institutions that willingly submitted to the Corona narrative, executed the government’s “pandemic” regime and reprimanded critics, was the Catholic Church, with a good twenty million members still the largest religious community in Germany and thanks to immense wealth and wealth Church tax revenue is the most influential. In doing so, the German bishops demonstrated a loyalty to the state, one could almost say allegiance to the state, which is otherwise only known from the Orthodox or from Protestants affiliated with state churches, such as the German Lutherans.
Stefan Mückl, professor of canon law at the Pontifical University of Santa Croce in Rome and most recently legal advisor (Excitement about abuse reports: Stefan Mückl provides answers (benedictusxvi.org) by Pope Emeritus Benedict Today the question arises as to whether the church has learned from its behavior. A question that must probably be answered in the negative in view of the furor with which church leaders have now committed themselves to the “fight against the right”.
Mückl unearthed some bizarre instructions, such as those from a diocese from April 2020, according to which dying people could only be visited by a pastor “in really urgent emergencies and at the express request of the dying person”. Or the church official interpretation of the ban on “gatherings in public of more than two people” contained in the legal regulations of some countries. According to Mückl, church authorities interpreted this in the sense that “a maximum of two people” are allowed to stay in a church, regardless of its size. In a sense, equal legal treatment of the huge Cologne Cathedral with a house chapel.
“Measures of new quality”
After initially only larger church gatherings, including even a bishop’s ordination, were postponed and, among other things, the giving of oral communion was prohibited, the church authorities, according to Mückl, took “new measures” in the days before the 3rd Sunday of Lent, March 15, 2020 Quality”. The Archdiocese of Munich-Freising, headed by the arch-liberal pastor Cardinal Reinhard Marx, played a pioneering role.
These “measures of new quality” included, above all, the cancellation of all public church services in the area of the archdiocese, a very extraordinary decision that affected the core of church proclamation, for which the bishop even partially exempted the faithful from the “Sunday obligation” enshrined in canon law. Moral theologian welcomes return to Sunday obligation – katholisch.de freed from the church’s commandment to keep Sunday holy and to attend mass on that day. Even funeral masses were banned; only church burials were permitted.
When corona policy was centralized with the federal-state rounds led by then Chancellor Angela Merkel and in one of the first of these meetings on March 16, 2020, a ban on all “gatherings in churches. Mosques, synagogues” was decided, the (arch)dioceses immediately announced the suspension of all church services – a submissive gesture of anticipatory obedience, since these measures had not yet been cast into legally binding forms.
During this first phase of the “pandemic” measures, the state restrictions were accepted without objection, and the question of whether religious freedom could possibly be affected or even violated was “not even asked.” “The church fulfilled its civic duty to obey the law in an exemplary manner and waived its right to have the state restrictions reviewed by the courts,” summarizes Mückl. “More than that, she made them her own and defended them against many critical voices from among the believers.” Canceled services were presented “almost as a luxury problem”.
In the core area of pastoral care, there has been a conspicuous failure
From mid-March to the end of April 2020, church-sacramental life (church services, baptisms, marriages, confessions, anointing of the sick) came to an almost complete standstill. According to Mückl, the question arises to what extent the church has lived up to its own claim to be an “all-encompassing sacrament of salvation” under the difficult conditions of Corona. “So did she do what she was told to do in order to strengthen the believer (and other people who sought it on their own initiative) with her specific means in times of extraordinary challenges?”
Mückl’s answer is largely negative, regardless of a “noticeable leap in quality of the church on the Internet”: But the relationship of church members to God and other believers is not limited to mere virtuality, but requires “real presence in order to express the fullness of divine to experience promises of salvation.” In short: the church has conspicuously failed in its core area of pastoral care and has abandoned those entrusted to its care. “The salvation of souls, which the administration of the church sacraments primarily serves, must always be the highest law in the church, even and especially in times of hardship, war and epidemics,” said Mückl. Canon law contains precautions to do justice to this mandate beyond the normal situation.
Only one Decision of the Federal Constitutional Courtwhich left nothing to be desired in terms of clarity, encouraged the Catholic pastors to adopt a more critical tone towards state power. In their decision of April 10, 2020 regarding a believer’s constitutional complaint regarding the ban on Easter Eucharist celebrations, the judges viewed bans on church services as an “extremely serious interference with freedom of belief” and called for a “continuous review of their proportionality based on current findings.”
Now, in coordination with state authorities, the churches have presented their own security concepts with maximum permitted numbers of worship participants, minimum distances and a ban on folk singing. But here too the church did not make full use of the scope that was open to it, on the contrary. “Sometimes the church’s protective measures went beyond what was required by the state,” said Mückl dryly.
The profitable construct of state church tax collection
Why did the church act as loyally to the state as it did, at least in the first phases of the Corona crisis? One assumption is that the church leaders intended to soften the state power and the majority society that supports it with a particularly zealous fulfillment of civic “duties”, especially after the scandals of the last decades and in view of the fact that they still stick with their traditional principles is largely at odds with the social mainstream. Ultimately, it is not least about not questioning the construct of state church tax collection and other privileges that is so profitable for the churches.
Another example of this attitude comes from the fall of 2022: Although no one had asked the church to do so, in the wake of the hysteria surrounding oil and gas reserves that arose after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it decided not to open churches over the winter heat. After half of the places of worship had been emptied due to Corona, the remaining amount was reduced by half again – because the part of the population that is still present in the churches definitely values interior spaces that are at a reasonably comfortable temperature. The bird was shot down by a church official who said in all seriousness that in the Middle Ages the churches were not heated.
In addition, a deference to science has also spread in the churches, where there is apparently no longer any room for divine healing work. When the Pope gave an extraordinary blessing “Urbi et orbi” on March 27, 2020 in the deserted St. Peter’s Square in Rome, which also included a historic plague cross from the 16th century as a backdrop, German university theologians took exception to this “pre-modern worldview”. Such an epidemic, it was said, would be combated by medicine and medical progress, but not by supplication.
Source: The Catholic Church in the Corona Pandemic, in: Stefan Mückl (ed.), Religious Freedom in Times of Epidemic, Duncker&Humbot, Berlin 2021, pp. 135-162
