COLOGNE, Germany — Germany’s Catholic Church has sharply criticized a carnival float made for a big street parade in the western city of Cologne that linked Jesus with the church abuse scandal.
The float, which was unveiled Tuesday, shows an altar boy in front of a confessional with an arm sticking out and an outstretched hand luring the boy inside. On the side of the confessional, bold 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 suggested that Jesus himself is sitting in the confessional and wants to pull the altar boy into it with a wave of his hand; at the very least, Jesus is being instrumentalized here,” the letter said.
The floats for Cologne’s annual Shrove Monday parade are famous for poking fun at the powerful and mockingly referring to controversies. But the church’s reaction suggested that the city’s carnival committee went too far this time.
“If one assumes that the Son of God is partly responsible for the terrible acts of abuse that have also and especially occurred in the Catholic Church, a line has been crossed that cannot be justified for any reason in the world,” the archdiocese’s letter said.
Several members of the center-right Christian Democratic party, including a former Cologne mayor, also expressed anger over the float. In a letter they said the image, “which cannot be surpassed in terms of embarrassment and tastelessness, should not belittle the Cologne Shrove Monday procession and carnival as a whole,” German news agency dpa reported.
Cologne is a traditionally Catholic city, known for its iconic, double-domed cathedral. It was one of the most important European places of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages.
However, many German Catholics, also in Cologne, have turned their backs on the church in recent years. Many say they felt betrayed by the scale of the sex abuse allegations and disappointed by what they describe as inadequate prosecution of perpetrators by the church.
In 2018, a church-commissioned report concluded that at 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 third served as altar boys.
The head of the Cologne Carnival Committee, Christoph Kuckelkorn, rejected any criticism of the provocative float.
“It’s not the depiction of abuse that is tasteless and embarrassing, but rather the abuse itself and how it is dealt with,” Kuckelkorn told dpa, adding that carnival is all about satire and to make people think.