Thirty fire trucks rushed to the famous cathedral in Cologne at dawn on Friday.
They received a phone call from an eyewitness who claimed that smoke was coming out of the symbol of the city on the Rhine.
After 45 minutes of searching, the firefighters found nothing.
They assume that a man saw a haze around the high towers of the cathedral and thought it was smoke.
This alarm could well depict the state in which the Archdiocese of Cologne is.
Cardinal Rainer Maria Velki is the target of criticism from priests and believers because he hesitates to confront cases of sexual abuse.
The waiting lists in the city administration are getting longer and longer, where citizens have to make an appointment in order to officially withdraw from the church and stop paying the church tax.
Thus, probably the richest Catholic diocese in the world remains with fewer and fewer believers.
Many see the culprit in Velki.
"Unique in history"
For ten years, cases of sexual abuse have haunted the Catholic Church in Germany.
In 2018, Cardinal Welki ordered a Munich office to produce an exhaustive report and not to spare any of his priests if they had sexually abused children.
But then Velki himself blocked the publication of the report.
It was learned that the cardinal did not report his friend, an old priest - now deceased - even though he knew that the latter was suspected of sexual abuse.
Velki replaces his spokespeople as if on tape and constantly says that the malignant media is to blame for his archdiocese being portrayed in a bad light.
This week, however, something unheard of happened, "unique in the history of the archdiocese", as the local newspaper Staat Anseiger writes.
Namely, the Council of the Diocese - a kind of assembly that brings together priests and Catholic associations - canceled its support for the cardinal due to his "unclear" attitude towards cases of abuse.
It is equally sensational that, just a few hours before that assembly, two groups of priests sent open letters to the cardinal.
More than fifty clergy criticize the "failed clarification of cases of abuse" which leads to "an atmosphere of mistrust".
This is confirmed by the fact that more and more people are leaving the Catholic Church.
Other cardinals also criticize
It is unusual that other German bishops do not refrain from criticizing the events in Cologne.
Until now, they have maintained that each boss is in his own backyard and that they do not meddle in other people's dioceses.
But now there are fears that the Cologne fire could spread throughout Germany.
In December, Cardinal Georg Bezing, chairman of the German bishops' conference, spoke of the "catastrophic" confrontation with the scandals in Cologne.
Popular Munich cardinal Reinhard Marx said that his colleague Velki's course was "disastrous" for everyone.
On Friday, a study was presented in Berlin on the attitude of the diocese there towards sexual abuse from 1946 to 2020.
On almost seven hundred pages, you can find everything there - but not Cardinal Velki's notes on the hearing of those accused of sexual abuse.
Between 2011 and 2014, Velki was in charge of the Berlin diocese.
"There, two images of the church collide. Velki clings to the old image with a miter and a bishop's scepter. That is why he is isolated inside the church," Christian Wiesner from the "We are the Church" movement told Deutsche Welle (DW).
"If the credibility of one diocese is damaged, it ruins the reputation of the entire church in Germany."
Wizner demands what is heard more and more often from Cologne - that the sexual abuse of children be clarified as soon as possible.
This, he says, must not be delayed even a day longer.
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