Germany: Pornography published by the church

Bernhard Müller

Die Welt

Germany’s Catholic Church is a leading purveyor of smut, said Bernhard Müller. Very few of us realized until last month, when a book-industry newsletter broke the news, that Germany’s largest bookseller, Weltbild, is wholly owned by the Catholic Church. Weltbild has a 20 percent share of the conventional bookstore market, and its online business is second only to Amazon.

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One of its publishing subsidiaries, Blue Panther Books, is an erotica imprint that carries titles such as Sluts’ Boarding School, Lawyer’s Whore, and F---able. And that’s not all. Weltbild also “earns a lot of money” from books that glorify violence or promote “magic and Satanism,” as well as those by noted atheist Richard Dawkins.

In response to the revelations, Germany’s Catholic bishops put out a terse statement last week saying that Weltbild “tries to prevent the distribution of possibly pornographic content.” But apparently it’s not trying very hard. It’s been more than three years since a group of concerned Catholics wrote the bishops a letter listing some of the offensive books and asking that the company cease printing such materials—yet nothing has changed. That leaves the church “still preaching chastity while selling porn.”