According to Cologne's Vicar General Dominik Schwaderlapp, spiritual advisors are just as important for politicians as PR consultants. Just as athletes are corrected and encouraged by coaches, politicians need people to hold a mirror up to them. Furthermore, Schwaderlapp recommended on Thursday evening in Bonn that Christian politicians should try to find a calming pole in their hectic everyday life.
Human involvement in family and friends is just as important as time for rest, recreation, prayer and worship. According to Schwaderlapp, Christian politicians are caught between conviction and majority rule. Thus, an elected representative of the people is virtually committing political suicide if he offensively represents the Catholic position according to which homosexual acts do not correspond to God's order of creation. For the vicar general, there is no action plan for how Christian politicians can stand up for their convictions without disappearing from the political scene. Nevertheless, he gave recommendations for personal action. In addition to spiritual advisors and periods of rest, he advised politicians to ask themselves about the impact on the weakest in society in all their decisions. "Does it help them up or does it rob them of life chances; does it even cost them their lives as in the case of aborted children??", said Schwaderlapp. He further pleaded for tying all legitimate tactical thinking to truthfulness. Without such a bond, a politician "becomes a completely unpredictable and thus incalculable interlocutor". The vicar general resolutely opposed "half-truths" in politics. While a lie is usually easy to recognize, the mixture of truth and lies is confusing. As an example, Schwaderlapp referred to the controversy over consumptive embryo research. The argument that this serves the fight against incurable diseases obscures the fact that the killing of a small human being is consciously accepted. A "further unpleasant clouding of the truth" is the motto: "True is what is enforceable."On the subject of abortion, for example, the temptation is great to simply endorse the current legal situation because an improvement is not politically enforceable. In general, people run the risk of justifying their actions, even if they are deficient. There should be no hasty "self-exculpation mechanism" here. Schwaderlapp spoke at the Theological Discussion Group for Federal Employees.