On May 12-15, 2024, the German Conference of the Superiors of Men’s and Women’s Religious Orders (In German: Deutsche Ordensobernkonferenz or DOK) conducted a General Assembly in Vallendar, Germany.
The Province of St. Elisabeth in Germany is a member of this Conference, which brings together approximately four hundred religious communities comprised of nearly 14,000 sisters and brothers. The current president is the Minister Provincial of the Province of Germany, Friar Andreas MURK, OFM Conv. In addition to the formalities of association law, the General Assembly addressed many facets of the topic of interculturality and adopted the following declaration:
“Our religious communities comprise women and men born in Germany and abroad. Living together under the same roof has been a daily and familiar reality for many decades. In many of our convents and monasteries we live in international communities. We work together in pastoral ministry and in other areas of work entrusted to us. When it comes to the work of care providers, it is difficult to imagine a scenario without foreign women religious. The ecclesial panorama would be much poorer without the pastoral work of religious people from other countries. Living and working together, we have had a lot of experience with the opportunities and challenges involved in intercultural cooperation.
“Bureaucratic obstacles often stand in the way, making it difficult for obviously qualified people to come to Germany to live and work. Against this backdrop, the severe shortage of skilled labor often seems to be of our own making, and complaints about it from politicians and society are ultimately not credible.
“However, our society’s xenophobic resentment is at odds with the first sentence of our Basic Law: ‘Human dignity is inviolable.’ Respecting and protecting the dignity of everyone, not just Germans, is the duty of all state authorities and a task for each of us as well. We religious are shocked to see that the way people of foreign origin are treated in Germany often does not correspond to the concept of equal dignity for all.
“As with our communities, the same goes for society as a whole: we want to do everything possible to ensure that Germans and immigrants or refugees learn to live together, rather than in parallel communities. Based on our Christian conviction, we want to do everything possible to turn strangers into sisters and brothers. As Christians we know that people of different origins are more united than divided. This perspective should guide our thinking, our actions and our discourse, in politics, in the church and in society, on a large and small scale.”
DOK Press Office
