German Catholic priest conducts a Halloween service dressed as Dracula

Priest in a Dracula costume during a Halloween service. Photo: Tribune Chrétienne

On 31 October 2025 in Freising, Germany, Catholic priest Michael Korell held an unusual service in the chapel of St. George’s Cemetery. He appeared before the gathered faithful wearing a Dracula cloak, supplementing the service with artificial fog and a half-open coffin. The report was published by Tribune Chrétienne.

The priest explained that his intention was to “reach out to those far from the Church” and offer them a format of prayer on the eve of All Saints’ Day. According to him, the Dracula figure was meant to show that “there is no need to fear death,” while the half-open coffin symbolized “the empty tomb of Christ.”

The initiative sparked wide controversy among Catholics. Some attendees called it original, but many sharply criticized the blending of Christian worship with pop-culture imagery. Several parishioners considered the service “unworthy” and “bordering on the occult.”

Following the wave of criticism, the Freising parish issued a clarification, stating that it was not a Mass but a communal prayer held outside the main church in order “to preserve the dignity of the sacred place.” The statement emphasized that no occult practices were involved and that all symbolism had an exclusively “Christian meaning.”

The scandal has once again intensified debates within the Catholic Church in Germany about the limits of adapting to contemporary culture and the consequences of the Synodal Path. For some believers, the event became a sign of a spiritual crisis in which the Church increasingly seeks “to please the world” at the cost of losing a sense of the sacred.

Earlier, the UOJ reported that in the United States a Catholic school erected a replica of the Auschwitz camp gate for Halloween.

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