The Catholic Church in Germany maintains, with funds from the church tax, a news agency, an official portal and an archdiocesan radio station. Between September 2 and 3, all three disseminated, without a single word of theological reservation, the thesis that Jesus Christ had an inclination toward alcohol, an impulse-control disorder and the habit of confusing mental illnesses with demons. None of the three considered it necessary to remind their readers what the Church that pays their salaries teaches about Christ.
The text was published by katholisch.de on September 2 at 14:45 under the headline “Experts: many biblical figures show mental anomalies” and the subheading, with a question mark, “Jesus with a tendency toward alcohol and impulse-control disorder?” The portal presents itself as the website of the Catholic Church in Germany, is published by a company whose shareholder is the Association of German Dioceses and lists the Episcopal Conference as a partner. The piece summarizes an interview in Christ & Welt, the religious supplement of the weekly Die Zeit, with the Paganini couple: Simone, professor of Biblical Theology at RWTH Aachen, and Claudia, philosopher, psychotherapist and professor of Media Ethics at the Hochschule für Philosophie in Munich. They are promoting a book, Zwischen Wahn und Weisheit (“Between Delusion and Wisdom”), released on April 29 by Gütersloher Verlagshaus, a Protestant publishing house of the Penguin Random House group.
The method consists of applying psychiatric diagnoses to biblical characters. Moses suffers from depression because after defeating Egypt he cannot rejoice. Job presents an obsessive-compulsive disorder because he offers preventive sacrifices for his children. And Jesus, as katholisch.de reproduces in indirect style, “is described in the Bible with an inclination toward alcohol,” while “his reaction to the livestock merchants in the Temple allows one to infer an impulse-control disorder.” Simone Paganini explains it this way: “Jesus is the one who says: if someone strikes you, turn the other cheek as well. And then he enters the Temple, gets upset with the livestock merchants, and bam, he loses it.” In the version that Domradio, the radio station of the Archdiocese of Cologne, published today from the KNA wire, the quote continues: “He starts hitting people, driving out the animals and overturning tables.” Domradio adds, without comment, that the biblical authors themselves describe God “often as unpredictable, narcissistic and lacking impulse control.” The seven demons expelled from Mary Magdalene were, “probably,” mental illnesses.
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