BACKGROUND: Cardinal's speech used taboo word

Cardinal Joachim Meisner, the archbishop of Cologne, has triggered a storm in Germany by using the word "degenerate" to describe irreligious art.

The word was used by the Nazis as an extension of their racial-supremacy theories to describe contemporary paintings that departed from the Nazi-ordained style. The word is generally seen in Germany today as taboo.

In his sermon Friday at a mass inaugurating the Kolumba art museum, Meisner criticised the Nazis and said that the danger was that culture might turn its back on God. The sermon was later published on the diocesan website.

He began by saying that artists looked for a deeper reality and thus discovered God's secrets.

"It is part of the veracity of an artist to contemplate the reality of humanity in its full depth and breadth. If that is forgotten, one cannot do justice to humanity," he said.

Meisner then quoted the pope's remarks during a May 2006 visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp.

"I cannot forget how Pope Benedict XVI one year ago at Birkenau, in response to that place of inhumanity, said, 'The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth. Thus the words of the psalm: "We are being killed, accounted as sheep for the slaughter" were fulfilled in a terrifying way.'

"'Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid.

"'If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone - to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world.'"

After quoting the pope, Meisner continued, using his own words again:

"The early father of the church Irenaeus of Lyons says for this: 'The living human being is the glory of God.'

"We expect from our museum, the Kolumba, that it will be both a forum where artists and adepts, young and old meet to discover themselves and their task in the service of the world through the juxtaposition of modern and ancient art, or profane and sacred art.

"Let us not forget that there is a connection between culture and religion that cannot be surrendered.

"Wherever culture is disconnected from the cultic - the worship of God - religion atrophies as an obsession with ritual, and culture degenerates and loses its focus." dpa jbp mga