Turkey is not yet fit to join the European Union because of its poor treatment of its Christian minority, Cardinal Karl Lehmann has said. In an interview in the January edition of the German monthly Cicero, Cardinal Lehmann, president of the German bishops' conference, was asked if he considered Turkish religious policy "unfit for EU membership". The cardinal said that was correct "to a certain extent". Cardinal Lehmann said that Turkey was not yet up to European standards in the area of religious freedom, and accused the Turkish authorities of not taking Christians' appeals for full legal status seriously.

He noted that Christian communities in Turkey could not acquire land to build churches and that there were signs that intolerance of Christianity in Turkey was increasing rather than diminishing.

The cardinal said that Christians would have to be more assertive in future. "While it would certainly be wrong to respond to fundamentalism with fundamentalism, responding with false liberalism isn't the right way either," he stressed, saying that full reciprocity was called for. The cardinal's comments came as the Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party came out in support of a plan by a number of German bishops to obtain permission to build a church and pilgrimage centre in Tarsus, the birthplace of St Paul. The CDU has written to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan asking for his support for the initiative. The Pope has declared 2008 - taken to be the two-thousandth anniversary of St Paul's birth - the Year of St Paul.

The Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, has appealed to a Turkish-Islamic organisation based in Germany, Ditib, which plans to build a Grand Mosque in Cologne, for help in gaining permission to build the church in Tarsus.