The congress "Joy of Faith" of the Forum of German Catholics has called for a Christian shaping of Europe. The European Union is a "spiritual battlefield" where Christians must prove themselves, says a statement presented in Fulda on Saturday. "Europe will return to its Christian roots, or at some point it will not," the text continued. The three-day meeting had begun on Friday. The organizers see themselves as a loose association of Catholics who are "loyal to the pope and the church".
In another statement, the congress participants condemned the so-called gender mainstreaming. It is an "atheistic ideology" that rebels against the order of creation and fights Christianity. Under the guise of a policy of equality, it dissolves the gender identity of men and women, aims to destroy the family, and is directed against the child because it declares abortion to be a human right. Congress called for resistance to gender mainstreaming, "especially as taught in sex education classes". He appealed to politicians to work instead to strengthen the family as a way to overcome a cultural decline and demographic crisis in the long term. The current "Joy of Faith" congress is the eighth to date. Twice the congresses took place in Regensburg, otherwise always in Fulda. There, the organizing forum, based in Kaufering, Bavaria, was founded in September 2000.