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If Herbert Reul looks out of his office, he sees the Church of Saint Peter on Düsseldorf's Kirchplatz.

There are usually around 20 to 25 senior citizens who make a pilgrimage to the few devotions that still take place - who lose themselves in the vastness of the 71-meter-long church.

Mathematically, everyone there has a distance of at least 3.5 meters to the next.

They pray silently for half an hour and listen to the priest, then they disperse.

As heard from church workers, many of these senior citizens, who often live alone, have hardly any other group experiences in their gloomy lockdown everyday life.

Has Reul ever attended such a corona devotion?

Probably not.

Otherwise the CDU interior minister would hardly have appealed to all churches this week to cancel the attendance services during the lockdown.

In the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger” he asked whether “face-to-face fairs were really necessary”.

One lives "in a time in which we have to accept all restrictions".

He therefore appeals to the churches "to live up to their social responsibility".

Most churches adhere to the requirements

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The reason was the Corona outbreak in a free church in the Euskirchen district.

It is said to have been triggered by services with allegedly up to 300 participants.

But why didn't Reul turn to this one church?

Or the few thousand Free Church members who have become known because of such incidents?

Why did he address the churches as a whole?

It was about 300 of about 12.5 million church members in North Rhine-Westphalia.

And around 185,000 of them are Free Churches.

Even their large organizations, such as the Mülheim Association, welcome the waiver of attendance services.

In many congregations of all churches they have long since been abandoned.

Reul did not say a word about the sophisticated protection standards in the celebrations still taking place in the major churches and most of the free churches.

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About the fact that there is a distance of at least 1.5 meters between two visitors - usually much more.

That there is no singing or common prayer, that the duration has been reduced to 30 minutes in some places and the number of participants in many places has been reduced to one person per ten square meters.

And that the whole thing has more to do with disinfection orgy than with worship, with disinfectant spray than with incense.

Unjust accusation from Reul

And he didn't say a word that the pandemic "represents a huge challenge for community life," as Antonius Hamers, head of the Catholic office at the state parliament, told WELT.

Due to the extensive collapse of the on-site offers, the alienation from the church is progressing dramatically.

The churches assume that many of the alienated will not return. Reul wasn't worth a word about any of that. Instead, he reprimanded 12.5 million, referring to a few hundred. It is remarkable when even Christian Democrats participate in church bashing with allegations.