From June onwards it will be obligatory to hang a cross in the entranceway of every public building in Bavaria.
“A cross as the visible commitment to the basic values of Bavaria’s and Germany’s legal and social order must be positioned so that it can be clearly seen in the entrance way of every public building in the Bavarian Free State as an expression of Bavaria’s historical and cultural formation”, the Bavarian State Chancellery announced on 24 April.
The cross is not to be seen as a religious symbol but as a “commitment of identity” and of “Bavaria’s cultural formation”, the Governor of Bavaria, Markus Söder (CSU) explained shortly afterwards.
"Clear commitment to our Bavarian identity and Christian values. Have decided today in the cabinet that a cross should be suspended in every state authority from 1 June. I hung a cross in the entrance area of the State Chancellery right after the meeting," he tweeted on 24 April.
Asked what he thought of Söder’s explanation by domradio.de, Archbishop Ludwig Schick of Bamberg recalled that the cross was not any state’s or country’s sign of identity “God’s sign to us so that when we look at it we learn what love and solidarity are.”. The cross did not exclude but included, he recalled. It was always a sign for all people, he emphasised.
Hanging crosses in the entrance ways of public buildings was a good thing if at the same time the cross was interpreted in the way Jesus meant it to be interpreted, Schick observed.
The Bavarian State’s decision has been welcomed by the chairman of the German Protestant Churches, Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strohm.
Söder’s decision was, however, immediately sharply criticised not only by the Greens and the Left in Bavaria but also by Fr Burkhard Hose, who is in charge of university students in the diocese of Würzburg. In an open letter to Söder published on facebook, which attracted great attention all over Germany, Hose accused Söder of “abusing Christianity in order to drive out people of other faiths”. I urgently ask you to stop abusing Christianity and its symbols as a bulwark against Islam in this way,” he wrote.
PICTURE: Markus Soder © Twitter
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