Church between blue light and red light

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Sexton Kaster © Kern (DR)

Welcome to Heaven © Kern (DR)

St. Pauli is an exceptional world: between the amusement district, the Schanzenviertel and the fish market, the small parish with its 200-year-old st. Pauli Church in the middle of Hamburg. The place of worship is a contact point for people of all religions.

The church is like an island for the people in the community, is how Pastor Siegard Wilm describes the 200-year-old red-brick house of worship in St. Pauli. In the recent past, this became particularly clear when the "Welcome to Hell Demo" escalated between demonstrators and police near the church during the G-20 summit in early July. The church opened its doors and both police officers and demonstrators found refuge on the premises. "Here lay severely injured. There was tear gas everywhere in the churchyard and the main job was to calm everyone down," says the sexton Philippe Koster.

Welcome to Heaven

The church's motto was more peaceful during the G-20 summit. A large banner still stretches between the old trees on the church grounds: "Welcome to Heaven". "We couldn't have just closed down while the whole world was taking to the streets outside the door," says Pastor Siegard Wilm. "To have this peace under these beautiful ancient trees on the church grounds, that was great. But also permanently disturbed by clashes right on our doorstep and billowing clouds of CS gas. The violence was terrible and very frightening."

The political reappraisal of the G-20 riots is still underway, while calm has long since returned to the streets. St. Pauli, however, remains a neighborhood visited by up to 20 million tourists a year, but where only 21.000 people live there. "We are like islanders," Pastor Siegard Wilm describes the situation. The St. Pauli Kirche is a very important place not only for parishioners, but also for non-religious people or people of other religions. "You trust the church and just feel at home there. We are within this exceptional world St. Pauli himself an exceptional world."

Belonging together in diversity

Especially in the church choir, it becomes clear that very different social classes are represented in the congregation, observes church organist Tina Schneeweib. "Everything collides, but it still works out really well. That's what I like about St. Pauli also so great. Everyone can come, no matter whether he is a doctor, a lawyer, an artist or a Hartz IV recipient." The concept is to value each other and to belong together in diversity, says Pastor Wilm. Catholics also come to the services and are welcomed, which Wilm sees as an important sign within ecumenism that Christians belong together.

"More people live here today than 10 years ago," says the pastor. This is also reflected in the congregation with its 4700 members. Nevertheless, she says, even in St. Pauli many church outreach. Nevertheless, the Protestant pastor does not see the future in black: "The church is still needed. After all, it all breaks down into micro-groups and sentiments that few people can bind together. And the church can actually still bind a lot of people and also from very different milieus: We bring people together who would not normally meet in everyday life."

Adult baptism © KNA

Old Catholics and Lutherans in Germany take a step toward each other. The Synod of the Diocese of Old Catholics in Germany agreed to the mutual recognition of confirmation and confirmation. Even the baptism is approaching.

Already in November, the synod of the United Evangelical Lutheran Church (VELKD) had approved the mutual recognition.

The text of the Mainz agreement states: "Lutherans and Old Catholics see in confirmation a personal confession of the baptized, a life-historically significant act of blessing and an actualization of the entire baptismal event as a life-long present reality."With this agreement, it is also possible for Old Catholics and Lutherans to be each other's godparent at a baptism.

Since Friday, the synod has also been discussing a contemporary understanding of marriage and how to deal with same-sex partnerships. One of the ies discussed was whether the blessing of same-sex partnerships, which has been practiced for some years now, could be equated with marriage – also in sacramental terms. In a discussion process that goes beyond the synod, the Old Catholic Church wants to find its position here.

Against arms trade

The church parliament unanimously decided that the diocese should join the action alliance "Action Outcry – Stop the Arms Trade". Ecumenism was not neglected either. The Catholic diocesan administrator of Mainz, Dietmar Giebelmann, visited the synod, as did the church president of the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau, Volker Jung, and representatives of the Anglican Church.

The Old Catholics had separated from the Catholic Church after the First Vatican Council (1869/70) in a dispute over magisterial infallibility and the pope's primacy of jurisdiction.

Throughout Europe today there are about 75.000 Old Catholics united in the Union of Utrecht. The diocese of the Old Catholic Church in Germany includes about 15.000 Christians with 50 full-time parish priests. Since 1996, the church in Germany has also ordained women priests. The church rejects compulsory celibacy. Since 1985, there has been an agreement with the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) on a reciprocal invitation to participate in evening mass and the celebration of the Eucharist.

The discussion about equal tax treatment for homosexual couples has been going on for weeks. For Joachim Cardinal Meisner, marriage between a man and a woman is "the nucleus of the state". our site documents its debate contribution for the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" of Friday in full length.

"It is considered modern to cut off old braids and to decisively adapt supposedly stuffy ideas of bygone times. More or less consciously, this is also the widespread attitude in the discussion about the equality of homosexual partnerships with marriage. But here more thoughtfulness is very appropriate.

It is in the state's own interest that marriage exists between a man and a woman, because marriage is the birthplace of the family and its nucleus and guarantor of its existence. Every person and citizen has exactly one mother and one father. This is why our Constitution places marriage between a man and a woman under special protection, because marriage is thus much more than the mutual amption of responsibility for each other. This should actually be a truism.

But the result is: if the state no longer promotes and protects marriage in particular as a community of a man and a woman, but same-sex partnerships as well, then it is actually only promoting one form of sexual cohabitation. But this is something completely different from the protection of the marital form of life as a generative nucleus, and the state should even be forbidden to intervene here in a regulatory way: For the criteria according to which its citizens organize their private cohabitation belong legally solely to their personal sphere of decision-making.

After all, sexual orientation is only one of many possible reasons for forming a cohabitation relationship – economic or political considerations are just as conceivable as purely pragmatic ones. From an environmental point of view, for example, the state could then also make carpooling legally equivalent to marriage. What fundamentally distinguishes all these criteria of possible cohabitation from marriage is the generative aspect: it is inseparable and uniquely connected with marriage because it is inherent in it, even if it is not realized in every case. The sexual orientation is only constitutive for marriage because it is a prerequisite for the transmission of life.

Now one can object: procreation can be organized in a different way than marriage; the techniques are available. Apart from the question, which own and value a child then still has: also this does not change anything about the fact that every human being has exactly one mother and one father – and he has moreover a human right to know who his biological parents are. Father and mother are not mere functions, but fundamental modes of human existence.

But the existentially significant terms "mother", "father", "family" are more and more often defined in a purely functional way, filled with the term "responsibility", as it were, in a new socio-technical way, superficially seen, but at a closer look they are robbed of their essential content at the same time. By believing that family can be redefined in merely functional terms, the bodily component of the concepts of mother and father is suppressed. Corporeality is being replaced by a strange form of "corporeality". As essential and also worthy of recognition as responsibility for each other is: it can never replace the substance of the modes of being "mother" and "father". Looking at it more closely, one could say: In the midst of the self-indulgent exhibitionism of our society, a subtle form of new hostility towards the body is surprisingly revealed. The natural conditions no longer apply. Everything is possible! Cost what it may! And be it their own identity! Or more precisely: that of the children. Because the bodily parent-child-relationship as well as vice versa the child-parent-relationship is constitutive for the identity of every human being. Who is my mother, who is my biological father?? As we can prove scientifically today, these questions, like most questions about children, are anything but trivial.

So whether or not procreation is realized in every marriage and the marital partnership thus becomes a family: Marriage preserves in a natural way the knowledge of and respect for the origin and transmission of life from man and woman. As a form of life and model, it is therefore unique, out of competition and the point of orientation that stands out from all other possible forms of mere partnering.

And something else becomes clear: if a same-sex partnership is only a form of sexual cohabitation, but marriage is an indispensable nucleus of the state, then the legislator treats unequal things the same. This contradicts ironclad principles of law and therefore cannot go well. I am therefore glad that among the politicians, especially in the CDU, there are also those who have recognized this and are emphatically calling attention to it."

Joachim Cardinal Meisner, Archbishop of Cologne, in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" of Friday (31).08.2012).

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