Europe "is called to keep moving towards unity, while remaining accountable in front of God and man": this is the wish expressed by card. Karl Lehmann, president of the German Bishops Conference, and by bishop Wolfgang Huber, president of the Council of the Evangelical Church (EKD), in a joint letter to Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany and president on duty of the EU Council. In the letter, which has been published at the same time in both Bonn and Hanover today, Lehmann and Huber recall "gratefully a process of fifty years of peaceful unification of Europe, that makes peace, security and the wellbeing of the men and women of the current European Union possible". The unification process, they highlight, "was and is a great goal for the Churches, it is a great aspiration that we have expressed on several occasions". The leaders of the German Churches expressed the wish to help Merkel in her "efforts to resume the works for an EU Charter adapted to the current state of Europe" and reasserted the "special meaning" of the "historical, cultural and spiritual foundations of Europe", "all substantially marked by Christianity".
