When the Alternative for Germany, an extreme-right party, came in a close second in general elections at the end of February, German bishops reiterated their previous instruction to German Catholics that the party could be no home for them in exercising their civic duties.
In a rare move, the German bishops’ conference called out the AfD, the German abbreviation for Alternative für Deutschland, by name. In “Racial (Völkisch) Nationalism and Christianity Are Incompatible,” released in February 2024, the bishops expressed their concern about the rise of far-right ideologies in national politics.
“Germany and Europe experienced the rise and fall of several extremist ideologies and movements in the 20th century,” the bishops wrote. “Their catastrophic consequences remind us to remain vigilant today. The Church therefore emphatically rejects all forms of extremism. They are irresponsible threats to the common good and the liberal order. Right-wing extremism currently poses the greatest extremist threat to our country and to Europe.”
Extremist tendencies
Not all of AfD’s positions seem bound to offend Germany’s bishops. The party opposed efforts by the last German government to loosen abortion restrictions. Its social platform includes delivering monetary support to families with children, elevating the social prestige of motherhood and protecting life from conception. AfD’s current leader, Alice Weidel, is a gay woman who stands against gay marriage.
But the AfD strongly laments the arrival of the poor and low-skilled immigrants in Germany, accepted in previous decades, and views “the ever-increasing number of Muslims in the country…as a danger to our state, our society, and our values.” AfD’s pro-natalist and pro-life policies are touted as alternatives to allowing more immigration.
And statements by leading party members betray extremist tendencies. Björn Höcke, who heads the party in the state of Thuringia, was twice fined for using the slogan “Everything for Germany!” the cheer of Adolf Hitler’s “brown shirts,” the Nazi paramilitary group that helped propel him into power. Its use has long been banned. Mr. Höcke has also called on Germany to stop memorializing Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
An attempt by party insiders to oust Mr. Höcke failed. Instead the AfD won elections in Thuringia in 2024 with Mr. Höcke at the top of the party’s ticket.
Another AfD politician has used the Nazi term “German racial corpus,” and other ranking members of the party have made statements trivializing or downplaying the horrors of the Nazi era.
Joining Germany’s Catholic bishops, many German Jewish groups issued statements against the AfD. Even though the AfD has expressed some support for German Jews and for the state of Israel, these groups see it as fertile ground for antisemitism and anti-democratic impulses—to the point of suggesting that the party be banned from the Bundestag, the German parliament. While some German Jews consider the AfD a needed counter to antisemitism among Muslims in Germany and the extreme left, these Jewish leaders believe the AfD merely uses Jews as a foil to buttress its anti-Islam platform.
The German bishops add that even where the party has not tipped into extremism, it has failed to thoroughly reform itself of such tendencies. They charge that a nationalism incompatible with Christianity has become the AfD’s animating ideology.
“Right-wing populism is the fickle fringe of right-wing extremism, from which it is ideologically charged,” the bishops said in their 2024 statement. “In both cases, stereotypical resentments are given free rein: against refugees and migrants, against Muslims, against the supposed conspiracy of the so-called global elites, and increasingly also against Jews.”
The AfD’s nationalism emphasizes ethnic and cultural homogeneity to the point that “the coexistence of people of different ethnic origins, religious affiliations and cultural backgrounds is…fundamentally questioned, if not rejected.”
“The focus on the culturally homogeneous concept of one’s own people necessarily goes hand in hand with a narrowing of the principle of solidarity, which is of central importance in Catholic social teaching and is a guiding principle of the German constitution,” the bishops said, adding that the common good is always universal in scope.
An impossible dialogue?
Despite such admonitions, the AfD has become more popular than ever. National Catholic leaders have begun to accept that they face a long, difficult struggle to persuade German Catholics of the long-term threat posed by the AfD’s policies and sensibilities.
The Rev. Karl Jüsten, head of the Catholic Conference in Berlin, told the German news site Cicero that the church needed to consider “how we reach the people who voted for the AfD.”
But how to proceed? Even as bishops have urged dialogue among Catholics across Germany’s political spectrum, Claudio Kullman, head of the Catholic Conference in Erfurt, an AfD stronghold, told America he has been instructed not to engage with AfD members. That is a political firewall also established by mainstream parties in the German parliament.
German Catholics who support the AfD say concerns about its extremism are overblown. “We’re just saying we don’t want endless immigration. You can’t even maintain the welfare state with infinite migration,” Natalie, a Catholic AfD voter who asked not to share her last name, told America. “The church is universal, but nation-states are not.”
“People want law and order,” she said, adding that preserving the viability of Germany’s welfare programs is also a Christian value.
Among the AfD’s signature issues, alongside severely curtailed immigration, is its advocacy for the traditional family and efforts to promote higher birth rates among Germany’s native-born. Endorsing those positions through support of the AfD “doesn’t make us Nazis,” Natalie said.
She also lauded the AfD’s opposition to many of the restrictions put in place during the Covid-19 pandemic and its call for a negotiated peace in Ukraine instead of continuing German military support for Ukraine.
“I’m proud that [the AfD is] a party of peace,” Natalie said. “We’re asking: ‘What is Christian?’” “Is it Christian to make families sit apart during Mass?” she asked, repeating a regular criticism of measures undertaken by German authorities during the Covid-19 pandemic that were opposed by the AfD.
The bishops recognize in their statement that the party “oscillates between authentic right-wing extremism and right-wing populism” and that many German Catholics vote with the AfD in protest of the mainstream parties. Church leaders know many people in the pews find the bishops’ assessment of the AfD too harsh, according to Mr. Kullman.
“While the bishops have been praised by the majority for their clear stance, they have also been heavily criticized, even among their own members,” Mr. Kullman said. But he believes the church has little choice but to resist the AfD’s growing popularity among Catholics, given Germany’s experience with fascism and the Holocaust.
“The church must take a firm stance in a country that was responsible for the greatest crime against humanity of all time,” he said, adding that it is not impossible such a tragedy could happen again.
Containing immigration
The AfD did not begin its political life promoting the hard nationalist agenda it currently embraces. Founded in 2013 by a group of former members of the center-right Christian Democratic Union, journalists and economics professors, the party was launched in opposition to fiscal policies implemented in response to the 2008 financial crisis. Its most radical proposal at that time was to take Germany off the euro.
But from its earliest days it has attracted fringe and far-right elements. Between 2015 and 2017 the party underwent several leadership changes while Germany first began to accept what would become more than 2.5 million asylum seekers, mostly from the Middle East, especially Syria, and most recently from Ukraine.
In the 2017 elections, containing immigration became the defining aspect of the AfD’s political platform. Party leaders promised to turn back asylum claims, reduce immigration and end birthright citizenship.
One AfD campaign ad of that time featured a young, white pregnant woman with the tagline “New Germans? We make them ourselves,” a sentiment reminiscent of Nazi ethno-nationalism.
In January 2024, three important members of the AfD, including one of Ms. Weidel’s top aides, Roland Hartwig, participated in a meeting with leaders of known neo-Nazi groups to discuss how to carry out “remigration,” the removal of Germany’s asylum seekers. Mr. Hartwig was sacked following the report of his presence at the meeting, but the party made remigration, a combination of carrot and stick methods designed to get Syrian war refugees out of Germany, its primary campaign commitment for the elections just held in February 2025.
The Bundesambt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV, Germany’s national intelligence service, called the AfD a potential source of right-wing extremism in a report released last year. Within AfD ranks, according to the report, lurked a “certified right-wing extremist attempt against the free democratic order” in Germany.
Indeed, the party’s youth wing chose to dissolve itself rather than face a ban by the government after the main party cut ties with it—as it had with Mr. Hartwig. Despite such moves against its most extreme elements, German bishops warn that the AfD has not made a thorough reform and that its racial-nationalist ideology still prevails.
The bishops acknowledged that AfD’s popularity stems from Germany’s challenging economic and cultural times. Like other European states, Germany has been rocked by successive economic and social crises—among them the 2008 financial crash, the Covid-19 pandemic, ongoing economic stagnation, the war in Ukraine and technological change leading to significant job losses.
Mr. Kullman notes that Catholics are subject to the same stresses and temptations as everyone else in Germany, while the “constant need for compromise and balancing of interests” required by a mature democracy can feel daunting.
“Not a few feel overwhelmed by the rapid changes in the world,” he said of Catholic Germans. “The more insecure and irritated people are in society, the stronger populist parties like AfD in Germany become.”
Germany has also experienced a rash of violent crimes, some committed by immigrants or motivated by Islamist extremism. The bishops acknowledge that welcoming so many refugees since the beginning of a global migration crisis in 2015 has felt overwhelming to many Germans.
Mr. Kullman said the German church does not sponsor a specific ministry to counter support for the far right, though he and other church leaders did participate in widespread demonstrations against the AfD last year in reaction to media reports of its leaders meeting with neo-Nazi leaders.
Stefanie Wahle-Holach, a member of the leadership team in the Diocese of Tübingen, said the pastoral approach in Tübingen includes one-on-one dialogue with fellow Catholics to address their reasons for voting for the AfD.
A church agenda?
But opportunities for such encounters may be limited. The Catholic AfD supporters America spoke to said they were feeling increasingly isolated within the German church.
Amaya Lucilio said she participates minimally in her local parish because she found its homilies to be highly politicized admonitions on how to vote. She explained she thinks the German church has allowed itself to become politicized in alignment with left-leaning politics.
“I’m coming to church to be a better Christian, to be a better person, to hear Jesus’ message,” not to be pressured to accept a homilist’s position, she said. “The bishops’ and the Catholic church’s agenda in the past seven to ten years has been clearly left.”
To discourage her support of the AfD, she said Germany’s other parties would have to provide a convincing platform and follow through on it. Currently, she doubts that the center-right Christian Democratic Union is strong enough to remain firm even on key moral issues like birth surrogacy. She fears that the mainstream C.D.U. will compromise on the issue under pressure to loosen what are seen as restrictions on gay rights.
She believes AfD is the party most likely to uphold the separation of church and state, a bulwark against what she fears is the Islamization of Germany, citing its public funding of what some consider extremist Islamic institutions. At the same time, she is confident that even if an AfD-led government attempted to deport large numbers of immigrants, the courts would stop any actions that violated human rights.
The bishops emphasized that the key to routing the far right is effectively addressing the challenges Germany faces right now, including the integration of immigrants, in a manner “pre- and co-shaped” by the Christianity “that defines the foundations of our state and society in Germany.”
“Clear opposition to right-wing extremism also does not mean that existing economic and social problems—such as the realisation of social justice or the integration of migrants—can be minimised or ignored. They must be tackled. Anything else would only further strengthen the right-wing extremists,” the bishops warned.
The bishops, for their part, remain confident that their position in resistance to the rise of the far right and the AfD is the correct course at this time.
“The church remains a place of dialogue,” Mattias Koppe, a spokesperson for the German bishops’ conference, told America by email. “It is part of her pastoral mission to remain in conversation with all the faithful—even with those who have lost trust [in the church].
“The growing alienation of some Catholics who support the AfD is a challenge,” he said. “However, this must not lead the church to compromise its core convictions. The church is called to bear witness to the Gospel—even when that is uncomfortable.”
