Germany's Catholic Church has sharply criticized a carnival float made for a big street parade in the western city of Cologne that linked Jesus with the church abuse scandal.
“If one assumes that the Son of God is partly responsible for the terrible acts of abuse that have also and especially occurred in the Catholic Church, a line has been crossed that cannot be justified for any reason in the world,” the archdiocese's letter said.
“It is suggested that Jesus himself is sitting in the confessional and wants to pull the altar boy into it with a wave of his hand; at the very least, Jesus is being instrumentalized here,” the letter said.
“The inscription on the confessional — ‘Jesus loves you’ — directly associates Jesus, the Son of God, with the abuse,” it wrote in a letter published Tuesday on its website.
In a letter they said the image, “which cannot be surpassed in terms of embarrassment and tastelessness, should not belittle the Cologne Shrove Monday procession and carnival as a whole,” German news agency dpa reported.
