December 1, 2009: In a decision announced today, Germany's Constitutional Court has agreed with a legal challenge made by the Catholic and Protestant churches to Sunday being used as a day for shopping, ruling on a clause in the German constitution that Sunday should be a day of rest and "spiritual elevation." In the past, many visitors to Germany found themselves standing outside a closed department store, surprised to find that they could not shop on Sunday. Beginning a little over a decade ago, the Sunday "store closing law" began to be challenged, even by individual stores like the Kaufhof department store in Berlin.

Since then, many of Germany's 16 federal states have made some exceptions to the Sunday law, allowing stores to open a few Sundays a year. The city-state of Berlin had done the most to liberalize the ban on Sunday commerce. In 2006 the German capital gave the green light for retailers to open on 10 Sundays a year from 1 to 8 p.m., including the four Advent Sundays preceding Christmas. In June 2007 the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches announced a legal challenge to Berlin's decision. In announcing his church's decision to go to court, Berlin's Catholic archbishop, Cardinal Georg Sterzinsky, accused the Berlin senate of making Berlin the federal state in Germany that least respects the value of Sunday. "I deeply regret that Berlin has to be the example for eroding the constitutional protection given to Sunday," Cardinal Sterzinsky emphasized, adding that Sunday should be a day of rest and spiritual elevation.

While rendering a decision in favor of the Lutheran and Catholic churches, the Constitutional Court did not completely prohibit Sunday store openings. However, Sunday shopping should not be allowed on four consecutive Sundays. The court's ruling will not affect shopping this month, but takes effect in the new year.

At a preliminary hearing in June some wondered what the real issue for Germany's main denominations was. The shopping hours on the four Advent Sundays are set to begin at 1 p.m., leaving plenty of time for churchgoers to attend a worship service in the morning. But the churches did not argue only from a religious perspective. They argued that Sunday is the only day when workers have a mandated day of rest, enabling them to spend time with their families.

Since 1891 Sunday work in general has been prohibited in Germany by law, although the legislation enacted at the time was probably more a victory for social democratic thought and unionism over capitalism than a victory for perceived biblical righteousness. In today's Germany a paragraph adapted from the prewar Weimar Constitution provides constitutional status for Sunday as a day of rest from work: "Sunday and state recognized holidays enjoy legal protection as days of rest from work" (paragraph 139).

In decisions rendered in 1992, 1995 and 2004, Germany's Supreme Court in Karlsruhe has confirmed that employers have the constitutional obligation "to protect the rest from work on Sunday and holidays." Oddly enough, the 2004 decision involved the department store Kaufhof. Over the years special allowances for Sunday openings were made for stores in "travel centers" like airports and major railway stations. As a result, some of Germany's large railway stations have become small-scale shopping centers on Sunday. Kaufhof challenged the "store closing law" for its general prohibition of Sunday store hours by arguing that allowing stores in railway stations to open on Sunday violated the "equal treatment before the law" provision in Germany's constitution, the "Grundgesetz" ["basic law"].