CNA Newsroom, Sep 10, 2022 / 21:28 pm (CNA).
In a move aimed at achieving what critics have compared to communist councils in the Soviet Union, participants of the German “Synodal Way” on Saturday voted to create a “Synodal Council” that would permanently oversee the Church in Germany.
At the Frankfurt meeting on Sept. 10, the controversial suggestion won almost 93 % of all votes. Only five bishops rejected the document, CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language Partner agency, reported.
The bishops’ names are a matter of public record because the vote was not by secret ballot — a change of proceedings after bishops blocked a pro-LGBT document earlier.
Like others arising from the controversial German event, also known as the “Synodal Path,” the proposal has met fierce criticism.
In June, Cardinal Walter Kasper, a theologian considered close to Pope Francis, said there could be no “Synodal Council,” given Church history and theology.
“Synods cannot be institutionally made permanent. The tradition of the Church does not know a synodal church government. A synodal supreme council, as is now envisaged, has no basis in the entire history of the constitution. It would not be a renewal, but an unheard-of innovation.”
The president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, who was bishop of the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart from 1989 to 1999, said the German process had invited comparisons to communist structures in the Soviet Union: “It was a political scientist, not a theologian, who recently expressed this notion somewhat strongly, referring to such a Synodal Council as a Supreme Soviet.”
The cardinal continued: “Soviet is an old Russian word that means exactly what we call a Rat, a council in German. Such a Supreme Soviet in the Church would obviously not be a good idea. Such a council system is not a Christian idea, but an idea coming from quite a different spirit or un-spirit.”
The German theologian and prelate also warned this “would choke off the freedom of the Spirit, which blows where and when it wants, and destroy the structure that Christ wanted for his Church.”
Further concerns were raised by a professor of theology from the University of Vienna in June.
The dogmatist Jan-Heiner Tück warned that a German “Synodal Council” would transfer leadership authority “from sacramentally ordained persons to bodies, a conversion of power that shows a clear closeness to synodal practices in the Protestant Church in Germany.”
How would a controlling “Synodal Council” operate?
According to the Frankfurt document, a Synodal Council would first require a “synodal committee” to be formed, which then would deliberate the details of the new council.
This committee would consist of the 27 diocesan bishops, 27 members elected by the ZdK, and 10 members jointly elected by them.
The committee would be chaired by the president of the bishops’ conference and “the president(s) of the ZdK.”
The permanent Synodal Council would function “as a consultative and decision-making body on essential developments in the Church and society,” the German proposal states.
More importantly, it would “make fundamental decisions of supra-diocesan significance on pastoral planning, questions of the future and budgetary matters of the Church that are not decided at the diocesan level.”
In order to make the council work, “it shall be supported by a permanent secretariat, adequately staffed and financed.”
Rejection of request for secret ballot
Before the vote within the synodal assembly, five participants on Saturday requested a secret ballot under the statutes.
The bylaws state, “In principle, votes shall be taken in public. Exceptions to this are personnel decisions and votes that may be taken by secret ballot at the request of at least five members of the synodal assembly.”
In other words, a vote is taken by secret ballot as soon as five members make a corresponding request.
However, the moderators of the assembly, with backing from the presidium under Bishop Georg Bätzing and ZdK president Irme Stetter-Karp, had all members of the “Synodal Way” vote on this motion, resulting in its rejection.
A motion to examine the legal interpretation, which several participants characterized as questionable, was also rejected by the majority of the synodal assembly.
Early departure of at least two participants
In response to this handling of the motion by organizers, at least two participants declared their intention to depart from the assembly.
The eminent theologian and Ratzinger Prize winner Marianne Schlosser, who teaches theology of spirituality in Vienna, told EWTN at the event that she found it “emotionally speaking sad and objectively speaking outrageous” how the motion had been handled.
She justified the decision to sign and submit the request for a secret ballot in writing by saying the point was “to allow people who are not so aligned with the mainstream or the majority to vote freely on a text or on a bill.”
Schlosser herself had taken a public stance against the document. However, organizers had earlier dismissed concerns of pressure on bishops rejecting a pro-LGBT document, with president Stetter-Karp labeling bishops even attacking such concerns as “whiny.”
Following the fallout on Saturday, Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, a noted philosopher, also announced she would leave early because of how the Synodal Way was being handled.
Dorothea Schmidt, one of the few participants who regularly expresses clear criticism of texts under discussion, supported the two women’s decision in an interview with EWTN. She accused the leadership of the “Synodal Way” of not tolerating minority opinions and “simply pursuing their own line” in the pursuit of goals that had been “fixed from the outset.”
“I find this whole situation highly unbearable,” the Catholic laywoman told EWTN.
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We read of “pastoral planning” and the permanent synod as “a consultative and decision-making body on essential developments in the Church and [!] society.”
Dear me, on such matters and in Fratelli Tutti, even Pope Francis quotes John Paul II’s “Veritas Splendor”:
“Is not the indifference and the heartless individualism into which we have fallen also a result of our sloth in pursuing higher values, values that transcend our immediate needs? Relativism always brings the risk that some or other alleged truth will be imposed by the powerful or the clever. Yet, [John Paul II taught in Veritas Splendor]”: “when it is a matter of the moral norms prohibiting intrinsic evil, there are no privileges or exceptions for anyone. It makes no difference whether one is the master of the world or the ‘poorest of the poor’ on the face of the earth. Before the demands of morality we are all absolutely equal” (#209).
All are absolutely equal before the Truth, except for the bubble-world ZdK and their very strange clericalist bedfellows, who are more equal than others. Been there, done that. Let the old-hat and red-hat German gulag remain in permanent reverse!
Been thinking about the similarity of red-hat Germania with old-hat Anglicanism as well as old-hat Lutheranism…
In retracing his own conversion from Anglicanism to Rome, St. John Henry Cardinal Newman considers the two-step path he offered to his followers: first exposing the fallacy of the Via Media, and then concluding in favor of historical Rome. Likewise, now, the perverse conversion of the “synodal way”: first, the fallacy of rejecting the natural law and Christian morality, and then the creation of an autonomous and permanently open-ended (so to speak!) “Synodal Council.”
Writes Newman: “I heard once from an eye-witness the account of a poor sailor whose legs were shattered by a ball, in the action off Algiers in 1816, and who was taken below for an operation. The surgeon [think ZdK] and the chaplain [think Batzing] persuaded him to have a leg off; it was done and the tourniquet applied to the wound. Then, they broke it to him that he must have the other off too. The poor fellow said, ‘You should have told me that, gentlemen,’ and deliberately unscrewed the instrument and bled to death” (Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Image, 1956, p. 291).
So, now, the draining fluidity, if you will, of the “permanent Synodal Council.” And, so much for still “walking together” (!) within the Church in synodality!
Of course, in 2023 Cardinal Hollerich might try to keep the Synod on Synodality in step, by likewise detaching the entire Church from its own lifeblood, just as earlier the ideology of fluid “synodality” was smeared onto the final pages of the totally unrelated Synod on Young People in 2018.