After a couple had sex in an Upper Bavarian church, the altar there was re-blessed. The blessing took place before Christmas, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising told the German Press Agency. The altar in the Catholic church in Schechen in the Rosenheim district was cleared for the rite, and the local priest then blessed it with incense and holy water as part of a liturgy of the word.
The case made headlines last year: the couple who had sex in the church and documented it had to answer to the judiciary because of it. The woman involved has now accepted the corresponding penalty order against her. The trial planned for the beginning of February 2024 will therefore not take place, as the Rosenheim district court announced. How high the penalty was was not disclosed because penal proceedings are generally not public.
Your partner must answer before the Traunstein regional court because he is also accused of other serious crimes. The trial against him continues and is scheduled to be heard again at the end of January. The Rosenheim native, who according to the court did not comment on the numerous allegations against him at the start of the trial, is accused, among other things, of disrupting the practice of religion. In a “place dedicated to the worship of a religious society,” he committed “insulting mischief,” the indictment says. He is also charged with assault, false imprisonment, threats and fraud.
The fact that an altar has to be re-blessed after a so-called desecration – for example due to vandalism – only happens very rarely, as a dpa survey among the Catholic dioceses in Bavaria showed at the end of 2023. This has happened four times in the diocese of Augsburg in recent years, a spokesman said. All other dioceses reported no known cases.
In the Augsburg diocese, for example, this was the case in Vöhringen and Bellenberg in the Neu-Ulm deanery in 2017. There, the church rooms, including the altar and statues, were extensively smeared – including with anti-Christian slogans. According to the information, another case occurred in Gersthofen in 2018. Consecrated hosts were stolen and scattered.