According to the German Catholic website Kreuz.net Monsignor Walter Mixa, the Catholic Bishop of Augsburg, is being “knifed in a brotherly fashion” by Cardinal Karl Lehmann, the Chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference. Cardinal Lehmann admonished the Bishop on his statements on German family policy. Mixa said last week that mothers who are encouraged to hand over their child directly after birth to a child day care centre are being degraded into “child bearing machines.”

Cardinal Lehmann considers the drastic choice of words by the Bishop of Augsburg to be wrong. “Bishop Mixa should have considered more deeply that many parents have no relatives living near them and have to rely on children’s nursery facilities,” the Cardinal said. Bishop Mixa remains steadfast. He told the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung on Wednesday that he would use the term “child bearing machines” again.

On 22nd February Bishop Mixa criticised the plans of Ursula van der Leyen, the Christian-Democrat German Family Minister, because she wants to extend children’s nursery places from 250,000 to 750,000 by the year 2013. The Bishop called these plans “harmful for children and families and one sided” concentrating an active increase in working mothers with small children. He said that it was “a socio-political scandal” to cut other family allowances in order to finance new crèche facilities. “Frau van der Leyen’s family policy does not serve the welfare of the child or the strengthening of the family but is solely concerned to recruit young women as workforce reserves for industry.”

The Augsburg diocese said in a press release that “the thought pattern of the Family Minister recalls in a worrying way the ideology of state-run nurseries of the former East Germany where children were looked after not by their parents but by strangers. East Germany had the highest number of state-run nurseries and at the same time the lowest birthrate in Europe.” The diocese, which is the second largest in Bavaria, attacked “the repeated attempts by the Family Minister to discredit the quality of parental upbringing.” Bishop Mixa said that “women who bring up children on their own are given a bad conscience because the child can develop less at home than by so called professionals,” adding that “the real professionals for the upbringing of a child are its parents, especially its mother”. The efforts by the state for a modern family policy should therefore be aimed at the situation where more mothers could be won over to spend the first three years with the child at home to benefit its upbringing.

Mgr Mixa supports the demands of the Catholic Family League for the parents to receive a childcare allowance, so that parents have a choice either of spending some of it on some care outside the family or to compensate parents if they bring up their own children. The Bishop also supports an extended recognition of the period spent bringing up one’s own children reflected in pension rights as well as the state’s improved financial support of single and socially dependent mothers who are forced for economic to go to work, even in the first year of their child’s life. “Young mothers in a prosperous society are forced to give their children to a state-run childcare systems where the care is undertaken outside the family in order to economically survive. This is contrary to a modern and humane family policy,” Mixa said.

“Frau van der Leyen however clings to the already old-fashioned ideological model of a working mother in the earliest years of a child’s development and she cannot be distinguished from the erroneous family policy of the previous Socialist/Green coalition government. [...] There are still the old socialist ideas prevalent and the new Family Minister simply puts the label ‘Christian Democrat’ on the same policies. Two income families have been elevated to an ideological fetish by the Christian-Democratic Minister van der Leyen. Those who seduce mothers to leave their children shortly after birth to place them in state-run nurseries and support this with state subsidy, they degrade the women to become a ‘baby making machine’ and disregard all scientific understanding of the child/ mother relationship in the child’s first year.”

The Augsburg Diocese called the Catholic voters to use the democratic opportunities as a strong and creative minority and asked them to be vigilant about the family policy which is coming off the rails and to engage in a socio-political debate.
 
Bishop Mixa criticism has led to great controversy. The Bavarian Family League supports Mixa’s position. “The needs of the family are only met in family policy at the moment if this is in the interest of the economy,” Johannes Schroeter of the Family League said. “The result is the one-sided emphasis on the mother’s earnings which Bishop Mixa quite rightly criticises.” He pointed out that the background to the latest family policy is in actual fact a strategy paper published by the national Family Ministry and the National Association of German Industry, dated November 2004. The aim of this paper was to ensure availability of a large workforce for the economy, despite a reducing population.

Mixa has, however, found critics within both the Protestant churches and the Catholic Church, including Cardinal Lehmann, one of the Catholic Church's leading liberals. The Protestant bishop Margot Kaessmann told the Passauer Neuen Presse that she could not agree with Mixa’s critical position. “The Christian churches should do everything to make Germany child-friendly,” she said. Stephan Vesper, the General Secretary of the German Catholic Central Committee ZDK, has also criticised Mixa. The Parliamentary State Secretary of van der Leyen, Hermann Kues, said that the demand for an extension of the nursery provision is an old demand of the German Bishops’ Conference. Ursula Heinen, the spokesperson of the Christian Democrat Party for family issues, reproached Mixa for being distant from reality. Bishop Mixa’s stance would lead to a childless society, she said. Van der Leyen herself warned the Christian Democrats of a return to the 1950s. She considers her critics “almost cynical”. The Minister told the Frankfurter Rundschau “We should not try to go back to the 50s, when we are in the year 2010.”

Frau van der Leyen has herself seven children. She tries to ‘play for both teams’ having set up an “Association for Upbringing” with the churches last year. With her right hand she does this, yet with her left hand! If her ministry has been captured by the left, she may also have been stung into action by the left, which portrayed her as the Sleeping Beauty for her previous inaction.