Politicians and artists have condemned a German archbishop who described modern art as “degenerate”, the term used by the Nazis in their persecution of artists. Cardinal Joachim Meisner, archbishop of Cologne, said art which had no link to religion was “entartete Kunst”, a term that in German has strong connotations linked to the Third Reich and its ban on paintings and other culture. “When culture becomes disconnected from religion, from the worship of God, religion becomes ritualism and the culture becomes degenerate,” Cardinal Meisner said in a sermon in Cologne Cathedral on Friday. Meisner, 73, was commenting on the opening of an exhibition of medieval and medieval and modern art from the diocese’s art collection. “To use the word ‘degenerate’ in relation to art, as Cardinal Meisner did, is a serious faux pas,” Richter told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper. Other politicians in North Rhine-Westphalia were appalled by the cardinal’s words. The Nazis removed or banned an estimated 20,000 works of art, especially Expressionist art, from German museums after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. Painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Edvard Munch were persecuted and stigmatised.