Frankfurt, Germany, Feb 4, 2022 / 11:57 am (CNA).
Participants in the German Catholic Church’s “Synodal Way” voted on Friday in favor of a text calling for the ordination of women priests.
CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner, reported that the text was passed by 174 votes in favor, 30 against, and 6 abstentions on Feb. 4 during a plenary session of the Synodal Way, a controversial multi-year process bringing together the country’s bishops and lay people.
The vote will be seen as a direct challenge to the Vatican, which has underlined that the Church has no power to ordain women as priests.
The document, entitled “Women in Ministries and Offices in the Church,” said: “It is not the participation of women in all church ministries and offices that requires justification, but the exclusion of women from sacramental office.”
The vote came on the second day of a meeting of the Synodal Assembly, the supreme decision-making body of the Synodal Way, in Frankfurt, southwestern Germany.
The assembly consists of the German bishops, 69 members of the powerful lay Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), and representatives of other parts of the German Church.
In a debate before the vote, several speakers criticized the text, which will form the basis of further discussions before the Synodal Way’s expected conclusion in 2023.
Critics included Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer of Regensburg, Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, a philosopher who won the 2021 Ratzinger Prize, and the theologian Marianne Schlosser.
The vote came a day after members of a German group called “New Beginning” urged bishops around the world to speak out against the Synodal Way.
“The next schism in Christendom is just around the corner. And it will come again from Germany,” they said.
Earlier on Friday, members of the Synodal Assembly backed an appeal to relax the celibacy requirement for priests in the Latin Church, when they endorsed a text on “the pledge of celibacy in priestly ministry.”
The document called for priestly celibacy to be optional and for the ordination of “viri probati,” or mature, married men. It said that the topic should be discussed at a future ecumenical council, a solemn gathering of the world’s bishops.
Later on Feb. 4, the assembly voted in favor of further debating a document calling for women deacons by 163 votes in favor, 42 against, and 6 abstentions.
On the first day of the Synodal Assembly, which ends on Feb. 5, members approved an “orientation text,” setting out the Synodal Way’s theological underpinnings, as well as a document on “power and the separation of powers in the Church,” reported CNA Deutsch.
Recent popes, including Pope Francis, have emphasized that priestly ordination in the Catholic Church is reserved to men.
In his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II wrote that “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”
During an in-flight press conference in 2016, Pope Francis was asked whether there were likely to be women priests in the Catholic Church in the next few decades.
“As for the ordination of women in the Catholic Church, the last clear word was given by St. John Paul II, and this holds,” he replied.
Last month, it emerged that a website overseen by the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican had linked to a group campaigning for women’s ordination.
Thierry Bonaventura, communication manager of the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops, told CNA that the website was not promoting the group.
“I would rather speak of ‘sharing,’ as the title of the website,” he said.
Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis has asked two commissions to study the question of a female diaconate in the Catholic Church.
The first, established in 2016, examined the historic question of the role of deaconesses in the early Church but did not reach a consensus.
He instituted a second commission in 2020, following discussion of the female diaconate during the 2019 Amazon synod.
He changed Church law in January 2021 so that women can be formally instituted to the lay ministries of lector and acolyte.
Pope Francis addressed concerns about the Synodal Way in an interview with the Spanish radio station COPE aired last September.
Asked if the initiative gave him sleepless nights, the pope recalled that he wrote an extensive letter that expressed “everything I feel about the German synod.”
Responding to the interviewer’s comment that the Church had faced comparable challenges in the past, he said: “Yes, but I wouldn’t get too tragic either. There is no ill will in many bishops with whom I spoke.”
“It is a pastoral desire, but one that perhaps does not take into account some things that I explain in the letter that need to be taken into account.”
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In the years after the Second Vatican Council, the first encyclical by Pope St. John Paul II, “The Redeemer of Man” (Redemptor Hominis, 1979), is said to serve almost as an index to all of his later encyclicals. Likewise, the first encyclical of Pope Francis, “The Joy of the Gospel” (Evangelii Gaudium, 2013) is reflected in all of his later encyclicals.
FIRST, the core for Redemptor Hominis might Christ as the center of human and personal history:
“The Church wishes to serve this single end: that each person may be able to find Christ, in order that Christ may walk with each person the path of life, with the power of the truth about man and the world that is contained in the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption and with the power of the love that is radiated by that truth” (n. 13).
SECOND, the core of Evangelii Gaudium might be the four dynamic but also manipulable “principles”:
“Time is greater than space” (n. 222); “unity prevails over conflict” (n. 226), “realities are more important than ideas” (n. 231), and “the whole is greater than the part” (n. 234).
HOW, then, to advance Pope Francis’ missionary New Evangelization (actually, Pope John Paul II’s initiative and term) under the Holy Spirit, and hypothetically synodally, without losing the personal walk with the historical, concrete and once-only Jesus Christ? And without derailing into historicism, managerialism, nominalism, globalist ideology–and ecclesial graffiti?
We say “manipulable” principles, as in the wrong hands and now enabling a rigidly pre-Christian, rigid and bigoted German plebiscite toward invalid ordinations in addition to moral depravities.
Lutherans 2.0
If a church leader is going to quote a document as referenced in the article: “In his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II wrote that “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful” it should be noted that PRIESTLY Ordination is addressed and does not exclude diaconal ordination. This is a gross distortion of what the document say.
These Bishops need to be charged as heretics. How can woman represent Jesus (Persona Christi) in the Mass? As the Church is is the bride of Christ. Doesn’t that seems disordered?
Priestly garments do not suit the female figure!
Nor does the female figure suit well the divinely ordained role as alter Christi in the Mass…
But, then, maybe the progressive (regressive!) goal, or at least the end result of the German synodal derailment, is to undermine the constitution of the Church itself? As still being in a nuptial relationship as the Bride of Christ. (After all, during the French Reign of Terror, Notre Dame Cathedral was converted to a Temple of Reason, and the female dancing on the alter was not too concerned about clothing at all!)
Today, with the emerging German [c]hurch of Unreason, and in civil society with the binary human sexes likewise rendered arbitrary or extinct—as in oxymoronic gay “marriage” and overall indistinct gender theory—the Church itself is to be equally transfigured (!) either as
(a) an inclusive host (!) for the parasitic homosexual lifestyle, or as
(b) a lesbian thing with a female God cloned into female priestesses, or as
(c) a barely equal remnant for quaint traditionalists…affirming a profoundly nuptial relationship with the “Other.” Still expressive of the inner life of the Triune Oneness of the Creed, with the distinct “Father” (not Gaia), and the distinct and only begotten “Son” (not partner), and the distinct but, again, also not separate Holy Spirit.
Thank God that the Second Vatican Council’s “Sacrosanctum Concilium” (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy) has been carefully followed from the start. Wait, what?. https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html