To mark World Tourism Day to be celebrated on 27 September twelve Catholic diocesan museums in Germany between Munich and Paderborn will be open for visits to enable the public to discover their cultural riches. “Travel and transport” is the theme chosen for this year’s Tourism Day, which was established 26 years ago by the World Organization for Tourism. “The Catholic Church says a press release of the German Bishops’ Conference has always considered itself ecclesia peregrinans, a pilgrim Church travelling along the road to the Kingdom of God”. So the motive of travel has been present also in diocesan museums, “through historic representations of all periods of art: as exodus of the people of Israel, as the journeys of the Apostles, as pilgrimage to the Holy Land or as symbolic voyage of the ship of the Church”. “From this point of view”, recalls the German Bishops’ Conference, “World Tourism Day was an occasion to discover a current theme through the symbolic representation of spiritual art”.
