Catholic bishops have called for consequences after nine people with immigrant backgrounds were shot in the German town of Hanau, 20 km from Frankfurt, on 20 February.
The killer was Tobias Rathjen, a 43-year-old native German who published violent racist and misogynist views in a video on Youtube a few days before the shootings.
Several German bishops immediately condemned the attacks, declaring solidarity with the victims and demanding consequences.
Bishops’ conference president Cardinal Reinhard Marx criticised a “tendency towards an ostracising and aggressive nationalism and racism” in modern Germany. “Hate-filled, inhuman crimes have again and again turned out to have a right-wing extremist background,” he recalled.
The chairman of the German Protestant Churches, Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strohm said the Hanau murders were “sad proof of the brutal consequences of the poison right-wing populist and extremist circles have been trying to disseminate”.
In an interview with Vatican News, Bishop Michael Gerber of Fulda, the diocese in which Hanau lies, underlined how important it was for the Church to create places of encounter and “social arenas of experience” where native Germans could meet with immigrants. Forty per cent of the Hanau population is of immigrant descent.
Bishop Heinrich Timmerevers of Dresden said that the assassination of German politician Walter Lübcke of the Christian Democratic Party in June 2019 by a neo-Nazi extremist because of his pro-migrant views, the “abominable” attack on the Synagogue in Halle in October 2019 and now the shootings in Hanau posed the question as to whether “we are sensitive enough when hatred of other religions and cultures threatens to pervade our society”.
At the opening ceremony of the 70th Berlin International Film Festival on 20 February, the Catholic and Protestant Churches held a minute’s silence for the victims of the Hanau attack.
Chancellor Angela Merkel deplored that the perpetrator had been motivated by right-wing extremist and racist motives and “hatred of people of different origin, belief or who look different”.
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