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.
None of these claims withstands a reading of the text they claim to interpret. That Jesus had an inclination toward alcohol is not said by the Bible: it is said by his adversaries. Luke 7:34 records the Pharisees’ reproach, “a glutton and a drunkard,” as an accusation that the evangelist himself presents as slander, in parallel to what they said about John the Baptist having a demon. Turning the insult of the accusers into a biblical description of the accused is a methodological error that a first-year exegesis student would not commit. That Jesus “struck people” in the Temple does not appear in any of the four accounts: John 2:15 says he made a whip of cords, drove out the sheep and oxen, scattered the coins and overturned the tables; the disciples recall the psalm, “zeal for your house consumes me.” The episode is, in all four evangelists, a deliberate act with prophetic meaning, not an outburst.
Catholic doctrine on this point admits no ambiguity. Christ, says the Letter to the Hebrews, was tested in every way as we are, “yet without sin.” The Third Council of Constantinople defined that his human will was perfectly subject to the divine. Saint Thomas teaches that Christ assumed the common defects of human nature—hunger, fatigue, death—but not those arising from personal fault nor those incompatible with the fullness of grace and knowledge; his passions were, in the vocabulary of the school, propassions fully ordered by reason. An impulse-control disorder is, by definition, a passion that escapes rational control. Attributing it to Christ is not a bold reading: it is the denial of what the Church defines about the humanity of the incarnate Word. Neither katholisch.de nor Domradio devote a single line to recalling this.
The Paganinis shield themselves with the anti-stigma argument: the Bible, they say, does not stigmatize the mentally ill and many of them are “bearers of hope” in the history of salvation. This is a defensible thesis regarding Saul, Elijah or Jeremiah. Applied to Christ, it works in reverse: it does not dignify the sick person; it lowers the Redeemer to the condition of patient. And the nuance the authors themselves introduce, “we find no anamnesis reports in the Bible,” does not prevent the episcopal portal from placing the diagnosis of Jesus in the headline.
What is relevant is not that two professors publish a popular book with reckless theses at a Lutheran publishing house. What is relevant is the circuit. The interview appears in a secular weekly. It is picked up by KNA, an agency owned by the German dioceses. It is published by katholisch.de, the official portal financed by the dioceses with the Episcopal Conference as a partner. It is broadcast by Domradio, the radio station of the country’s richest archdiocese. At each station there was a Catholic editor, paid by the Church, with the capacity to add a single phrase of the type “Catholic doctrine holds that Christ was free of all disorder.” None did so. Twenty-four hours later, no German bishop has requested a correction or said a word.
This is the same media apparatus that for years has demanded from Rome the revision of the magisterium on sexual morality, the ordination of women and the synodal structure of the Church, and that has presented those demands as the fruit of a particularly rigorous German theology. The same structure, with the same money and the same editors, today distributes without filter that Jesus drank, that he lost control and that God is a narcissist. There is no need to attribute intention to anyone. It is enough to note the functional consequence: in the German Church, the only content that passes no editorial control is Christology.