There are three masts on the square in front of the main portal of the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and flags are flying on all three.

There is actually nothing to celebrate in the weeks before Easter, and it is still too early for the Corpus Christi procession.

But the first refugees from the Ukraine have arrived in Düsseldorf-Flingern, 25 in number - and rainbow flags are now waving for them.

Employees and volunteers of the "Flingern mobil" association quickly got some apartments in church property in good shape for the Ukrainians.

Daniel Deckers

responsible for “The Present” in the political editorial team.

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Thomas Jansen

Editor in Politics.

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For those active among the approximately 15,000 Catholics in the districts of Flingern and Düsseltal, not far from the main train station, emergencies like these are almost routine.

In 1997, the parish councils of the three churches of what was then the community association “Flingern mobil” came into being.

With the purchase of a minibus for outreach work with drug addicts, they wanted to set an example against the increasing impoverishment in some corners of their district.

Social and educational work in the day-care centers and schools and the commitment to the needs of the homeless and migrants were soon added.

"The issues are on the street," says Deacon Klaus Kehrbusch, the board of directors of the association.

Flingern is not a Catholic cozy corner, but a dazzling amalgam of all conceivable life situations and a massive fluctuation on top: The losers of the affluent society can be found here as well as corporate bosses and a large queer community, immigrants from all over the world mix with an increasingly hip artist scene - long-established like new Catholics right in the middle.

"Solidarity - diverse - open", so it can be read three times on the rainbow flags of the church, which all here only call "Liebfrauen".

A message that is self-disclosure and self-aspiration at the same time.

Is this a split in the church?

Not only the arrivals from the Ukraine should see where and what they are.

If the "Committee for Current Affairs" has its way, your signal should spread far beyond the district, even beyond Düsseldorf.

At least one addressee lives in Cologne: Archbishop Rainer Maria Cardinal Woelki.

Is this the schism in the church that bishops around the world paint as warning signs on the wall, because meanwhile not only lay people, but also diocesan leaders from Germany have freed themselves from the corset of the teaching ban on thinking and speaking?

This is what the "dictatorship of relativism" looks like, against which Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger once recommended himself as an antidote and to succeed Pope Benedict XVI.

was chosen?

Does the "Current Affairs Committee" come under the rubric of subversion with anti-Roman affect?

Or rather in the cliché of left-wing clergymen in a circle of chairs?

Pastor Ansgar Steinke and the five members of the "committee" are actually sitting in a circle on wooden chairs, but through the wide window front you can see the mobile shelves of the inviting parish library.

But they are serious about their concerns.

Their conversation revolves around a map.

They use it to address everyone who has turned their backs on the community.

The front of the card is decorated with the motif of the rainbow flags, on the back it says: "For us, the church is more than the crisis in which it finds itself."