sea watch 3

that number is nothing

Senior German Cardinal Reinhard Marx donated €50,000 to a charity that supports migrant rescues at sea. Germany's far-right AfD has demanded an explanation, arguing such sea missions boost business for people smugglers.

In an open letter published Thursday, Alternative for Germany (AfD) spokesman Stephen Brandner asked whether Munich Cardinal Reinhard Marx had approval from the church community to donate €50,000 ($55,000) to a sea rescue charity.

"I wonder whether my church taxes, which I've been paying at a high level for about 30 years, will be used for this purpose, even though I'm not willing to support traffickers," Brandner wrote.

The donation went to United4Rescue, an alliance backed by the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). The group had been seeking donations to fund a ship to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean Sea.

The AfD politician asked why Marx, Germany's top cardinal, had decided to draw on the archdiocese's funds, and demanded to know whether any of the contribution had come out of his own pocket. Brandner also argued in his letter that rescue boats in the Mediterranean were driving "more and more people to take the life-threatening route across the sea to Europe."

Another AfD MP Johannes Huber wrote on Twitter: "Marx misappropriates €50,000 from church tax money. In doing so, he is supporting the business of traffickers."

In Germany, church members have to pay Kirchensteuer (church tax), which typically amounts to a little under one-tenth of somebody's income tax.

According to the archbishopric, the money came from a special part of the Munich archdiocese's budget which is made available each year for the cardinal to donate to charitable and urgent causes as they see fit. Such tranches of funds are common in Catholic dioceses in Germany, with the money designed to be easier to deploy at speed with minimal consultation as the cardinal sees fit.

EKD council chairman, Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, thanked Marx for his donation, and told the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper that he had received death threats as a result of his support for migrant sea rescues.

Marx was also targeted with criticism in 2018 and 2019 after making two donations of €50,000 to other sea rescue missions.

So do you really thought that we ever thought that this was a real life saving?

The artist reportedly reached out to Pia Klemp, the former captain of several other rescue boats, last September to ask how he might be able to help her cause.

“Hello Pia, I’ve read about your story in the papers. You sound like a badass,” he wrote. “I am an artist from the UK and I’ve made some work about the migrant crisis, obviously I can’t keep the money. Could you use it to buy a new boat or something? Please let me know. Well done. Banksy.”

According to the Guardian, Kemp said that she initially thought the message was a joke but later accepted the artist's offer of help, with the understanding that his involvement would be limited to financial support.

“Banksy won’t pretend that he knows better than us how to run a ship, and we won’t pretend to be artists,” she says.

The Louise Michel is smaller but faster than most NGO ships used for the same purpose.

In June, three Banksy oil paintings which reference Europe's migrant crisis sold for £2.2m in a Sotheby's charity auction raising money for a hospital in Bethlehem.

The anonymous Bristol-born artist has long made works referencing the ongoing issue. Last year, he left his mark on the Venice Biennale with a stencil of a migrant child wearing a lifejacket holding aloft a neon pink flare. Other similar works include a 2105 image of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, with a black trash bag thrown over his shoulder and a computer in his hand spray painted on a wall in the Calais refugee camp called “the Jungle”. Around the same time, the artist also painted across several walls at the French port, including a riff on Theodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, which featured drowning migrants trying to wave down a passing luxury yacht.