Last Sunday, Algermissen claimed in a speech to an audience of almost one thousand people in Fulda Cathedral that people without Christian faith represented a “major security risk for the world around us”.
The bishop literally said: “The person without Easter lives under the merciless motto: What you have not achieved by the time you die, you have lost forever; what you have not hunted down by the hour of your death, you will never catch up with; what you do not bring to an end here on earth, perishes in the truest sense of the word. The person without Easter therefore becomes a great security risk for the world around him, because his inner hecticness, this expressed or unexpressed fear of existence, then causes him to strike blindly in the end and destroy everything.” Algermissen also said that people without Easter faith would “walk over corpses”. The Bishop of Fulda had already made similar statements in April 2007. Frieder Otto Wolf described Algermissen’s comments as “a Catholic hate sermon that not only lacks any empirical basis and defames the large part of the population without a Christian faith, both in the diocese and throughout Germany. With his speech, Mr. Algermissen offered insights into an alarmingly undifferentiated and unrealistic picture of the lifestyles and value orientations of the large number of non-religious people and people of other faiths in our country. The views derived from this renewed image are in no way suitable for contributing to social peace,” said Wolf. Florian Zimmermann, member of the HVD Federal Presidium and Chairman of the Humanist Association in Hesse, described the bishop’s comments as “also unacceptable because Mr. Algermissen receives his income directly from the state budget and is therefore also financed by non-denominational taxpayers.” The statements therefore provide an urgent reason to repeat the question of why non-religious people and people of other faiths have to pay the salaries of church representatives “who are paid like high-ranking civil servants, while they are not subject to any democratic control in their work, are exempt from prohibitions on discrimination and hold inflammatory speeches against sections of the population at will”, said Zimmermann.
