A satirical parade float that links Jesus with the church abuse scandal has been criticised as “tasteless” by church leaders.
Germany’s Catholic Church said the float, made for a street parade within the western city of Cologne, shows an altar boy in front of a confessional with an arm protruding and an outstretched hand luring the boy inside.
On the side of the confessional, daring letters read “Jesus loves you.”
The Cologne archdiocese condemned the float as “tasteless.”
“The inscription on the confessional — ‘Jesus loves you’ — directly associates Jesus, the Son of God, with the abuse,” it wrote in a letter published Tuesday on its website.
“It is recommended that Jesus himself is sitting within the confessional and needs to tug the altar boy into it with a wave of his hand; on the very least, Jesus is being instrumentalised here,” the letter said.
The floats for Cologne’s annual Shrove Monday parade are famous for poking fun on the powerful and mockingly referring to controversies. But the church’s response suggested that the town’s carnival committee went too far this time.
“If one assumes that the Son of God is partly accountable for the terrible acts of abuse which have also and particularly occurred within the Catholic Church, a line has been crossed that can’t be justified for any reason on this planet,” the archdiocese’s letter said.
Several members of the centre-right Christian Democratic party, including a former Cologne mayor, also expressed anger over the float. In a letter they said the image, “which can’t be surpassed by way of embarrassment and tastelessness, shouldn’t belittle the Cologne Shrove Monday procession and carnival as an entire,” German news agency dpa reported.
Cologne is a historically Catholic city, known for its iconic, double-domed cathedral. It was one of the vital essential European places of pilgrimage within the Middle Ages.
However, many German Catholics, also in Cologne, have turned their backs on the church lately. Many say they felt betrayed by the size of the sex abuse allegations and dissatisfied by what they describe as inadequate prosecution of perpetrators by the church.
In 2018, a church-commissioned report concluded that at the very least 3,677 people were abused by clergy in Germany between 1946 and 2014. More than half of the victims were 13 or younger, and nearly a 3rd served as altar boys.
The head of the Cologne Carnival Committee, Christoph Kuckelhorn, rejected any criticism of the provocative float.
“It’s not the depiction of abuse that’s tasteless and embarrassing, but moderately the abuse itself and the way it’s handled,” Kuckelkorn told dpa, adding that carnival is all about satire and to make people think.
