The “Day of open monuments” will be held in Germany on Sunday 14 September. The Catholic Church is participating in the event with an information campaign on ecclesiastical monuments, with the aim of sensitising public opinion on the thorny question of the maintenance of the many Catholic monuments in Germany. “God’s houses in the hands of man”: that is the slogan of the campaign promoted by numerous German dioceses, which have organized a programme of visits, conferences and excursions for the occasion. Some ninety million people, many of them tourists, visit German ecclesiastical buildings each year. An appeal is made to them to contribute to the safeguard of ecclesiastical monuments, in which the German Catholic Church has invested over 2 billion euros between 1996 and 2000. Faced by the decreasing revenues of the Catholic Church, due to cuts to the funding granted by most of the Länder and to the dwindling resources of the episcopates themselves, the Episcopal Conference emphasises the need for wide support by the Church, the State and society, because “the safeguard of the cultural heritage of the West is a task that belongs to the whole of society”.
