The speech in full:
“Dear ones,
the Pope’s anti-human gender and social policy – this, above all others, is the concern that unites us here and now.
Furthermore, there are many of us – including members of the German Bundestag who have been discredited by the Catholic Church in an exorbitant manner – who are committed to the separation of church and state. It is not only the Pirate Party, which celebrated a major election success here in Berlin last Sunday, that has set itself the goal of ending the financial and structural privileges enjoyed by individual religious communities. A broad spectrum of secular organizations, associations and federations – on whose behalf I speak here as President of the Humanist Association and as Chairman of the Coordination Council of Secular Organizations – are also of the opinion that Germany has a lot of catching up to do in terms of the separation of church and state – and that this papal visit to Germany is a striking demonstration of this.
Dear ones,
who are protesting with us here today because of this Pope’s visit to Germany – we should and can make some things clear to the people in this city and in this country:
We are accused of being anti-Catholic.
It may well be that there are some of us who have specific objections to the Roman Catholic tradition. But that is not the point that brought us together here today to protest. There are good reasons for rejecting the presumptions of considerable parts of this Roman Catholic tradition: It is by no means the ultimate authority for judging moral, religious or even just Christian issues, which can no longer be questioned. And therefore there is simply no longer any reason to hold on to their privileged status by the German state, which has long since become an anachronism. This privilege is exemplified today by the fact that the Pope, as head of the Catholic Church, speaks in the Bundestag as a head of state.
We are protesting against this privilege!
We are accused of being anti-Christian.
It is true that there are some among us who are aware of the “criminal history of Christianity” (to quote Karlheinz Deschner here). But that is by no means the concern that has brought us together here today to protest. We no longer understand why the Catholic Church in particular, as a Christian denomination, is privileged by the state on the grounds of religious freedom – no different from the former state churches on the Protestant side: In a situation in which only an ever-shrinking proportion of Germany’s population professes a Christian denomination, the former state churches continue to receive hundreds of millions of euros annually on the basis of so-called historical obligations, are given a completely disproportionate voice in the public media, for example, and are simply allowed to ignore the rights of dependent labor otherwise fought for in our society in their institutions. It is completely unacceptable that coercion in matters of faith is still being exercised here, based on state laws.
We are protesting against this privilege!
We are accused of being anti-religious. There are certainly people among us who are critical of religion. But again, that is not the point that brought us together here today to protest. Of course, we can certainly criticize the fact that people allow their self-determination to be taken away by religious authorities – because we cannot and do not want to deny that freedom of religion and belief also consists of binding oneself to such authorities. But the way in which this Pope defines the Catholic Church against all (weak) tendencies towards self-criticism and self-correction in terms of an outdated morality that is hostile to human rights and democracy, and invokes his hierarchical position of authority to do so, we consider to be completely indefensible and out of date. This Pope in particular is not a moral authority – the moral theological positions he advocates have long since become untenable for the enlightened public. We have no understanding for the fact that the Catholic Church, with its historically outdated morality, is reserved a prominent role in public ethical discussions on the basis of religious freedom: For example, also by our federal constitutional judges seeking it out as an authority, whereby a constitutional body violates the state’s duty of neutrality in matters of religion.
We are protesting against this privilege!
We are accused of being uncool and dogged – i.e. we presume to lecture and educate everyone else, and we want to ban any kind of ideologically influenced culture and attitude to life from the public sphere.
We also reject this: we do not want to dictate to others how they should live; self-determination is a valuable asset to us. We are certainly tolerant, but it would be quite unreasonable to tolerate openly declared intolerance in the name of tolerance!
Dear ones,
We are protesting here and now against an anachronism: a still strongly limping separation of church and state, as it may have corresponded to West German society in the 1950s – but today it has long since become completely inappropriate and politically unacceptable for the ideological and cultural plurality of our society in Germany.
We are thus protesting against the long outdated privileged status of the former state churches, whose lack of modernization and democratization Pope Benedict XVI exemplifies here and now with his appearance in the Bundestag.
All of us here who are protesting together against this appearance and against the way in which this Pope’s visit to Germany is being staged agree that Germany has a lot of catching up to do in terms of the separation of church and state!
If our protest helps to trigger a rethink and corresponding political action, then perhaps this papal visit will have had a positive effect after all.
So let’s make our protest clearly audible together now!”
