After Berlin Attack, German Catholics Wrestle With Solidarity and Its Limits

A spontaneously organized memorial for the Christopher Street Day attack victims, just outside Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.

Following the deadly vehicle-and-machete attack on Berlin’s Christopher Street Day celebration at the end of July, voices within Germany’s Catholic Church have offered solidarity to the queer community while acknowledging that the church’s own record on LGBTQ+ inclusion remains unresolved.

The attack, which killed a 65-year-old visitor and injured roughly 30 others in Berlin’s Tiergarten park on July 25, has drawn condemnation from Muslim associations, the Central Council of Jews, and Catholic bishops alike.

Katrin Brockmöller, director of the Catholic Bible Society, called this unified response encouraging but incomplete. Writing on katholisch.de, Brockmöller noted that even as church leaders denounce the violence, discrimination still occurs within a church that draws on the Bible to justify it. 

“Discrimination, even within church circles, is repeatedly justified by claiming to be God’s will, not only on social media but also in Christian communities, families, and circles of friends. But how clearly do we respond?” she writes.

Peter Otten, a pastoral assistant at  St. Agnes parish, Cologne, offered a different response in a separate essay: comfort in shared religious ground. Reflecting on a book by orientalist Navid Kermani, Otten argued that Christianity and Islam are both threaded through with the principle that love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable, and that hatred, by contrast, only destroys. 

“Of course, no one needs any religion to recognize that hatred can never be the basis for human coexistence,” Otten writes.  “Our [German] constitution guarantees fundamental rights, and these are inalienable and non-negotiable. And yet, the religiously inspired person will rediscover in them a principle that permeates Christianity and Islam like leaven permeates a loaf of bread: that love for God and love for the other (who, after all, is always the one who remains a stranger to me) are two sides of the same coin,” he writes.

He closed by invoking a line from Islamic mysticism describing saints as offering flowers rather than returning the stones thrown at them.

Meanwhile, Green Party Bundestag member Max Lucks, who is also active in the Central Committee of German Catholics, an official church advisory lay board,  and describes himself as a “gay Catholic,” praised Hamburg Archbishop Stefan Heße for publicly backing that city’s CSD march. Heße had said queer people deserve respect, protection, and the freedom to live visibly, adding that hatred and exclusion are incompatible with a Christian view of humanity. Lucks called for the church to use the moment to open a new chapter of outreach to queer believers, saying the archbishop’s solidarity had moved him deeply.

—Matthew Gorczyca, New Ways Ministry, August 5, 2026