Excerpt:
With an eye to the increasing number of PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) demonstrations across Germany, church leaders have called for solidarity and community spirit in 2015.
Cologne's Archbishop Rainer Maria Woelki (pictured above) said in his New Year's Eve sermon that "it is not us in wealthy Europe who have a refugee problem, but the poor neighboring countries of the crisis regions."
"This is a truth we declare too little, too timidly, and too quietly," he added, referring to the fact that of the 45 million displaced people in the world, 86 percent are sheltered in countries directly neighboring their homelands.