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German bishops to discuss Synodal Way with Vatican amid controversy

The cross of the German “Synodal Way.” (Credit: Maximilian von Lachner/Synodaler Weg)

CNA Newsroom, Mar 21, 2024 / 07:00 am (CNA).

A delegation of German bishops is expected in Rome this Friday for talks with the Vatican about the German Synodal Way.

While the precise agenda is not a matter of public record, the encounter will likely focus on plans to install a permanent Synodal Council to oversee the Church in Germany.

Raising several concerns, the Vatican reminded the Germans ahead of the meeting — in a letter dated Feb. 16 — that the Holy See has not mandated them to set up such a council.

Addressing Bishop Georg Bätzing, president of the German Bishops’ Conference (DBK), Vatican officials told the Germans “that neither the Synodal Way, nor any body established by it, nor any bishops’ conference has the competence to establish the ‘synodal council’ at the national, diocesan, or parish level.”

Previous warnings from Rome have not always been well received, and the February letter, signed by Cardinals Pietro Parolin, Victor Fernández, and Robert Prevost — the heads of the Secretariat of State, Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the Dicastery for Bishops — may suffer a similar fate.

“I have the impression that we are not properly understood in Rome,” Bishop Helmut Dieser of Aachen told news agency KNA this week regarding the Friday meeting in Rome, reported CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner.

While hoping for progress, Dieser, who supports changes in Church teaching on sexuality and gender, also criticized the Vatican: Noting Rome had invited bishops, not laypeople, the bishop said this was “not the style of leadership that we are trying to establish in Germany.”

A private letter from Pope Francis

The question of how Church leadership is understood is a burning one. While Pope Francis told the Synod of Bishops on Oct. 4, 2023, that “the synod is not a parliament,” one of the key organizers of the German process, ZdK President Irme Stetter-Karp, has called for the council to provide for majority decisions, CNA Deutsch reported.

The German bishops were expected to vote on the statutes for a preparatory committee during their plenary assembly in February.

However, that vote was suspended following the Vatican intervention. At the same time, plans to establish a council by 2026 clearly have not been abandoned. According to the official portal of the Church in Germany, katholisch.de, the committee will still meet again in June to discuss plans.

Furthermore, the lay organization ZdK already approved the committee’s statutes on Nov. 25, 2023, despite earlier warnings from Rome of the risk of a new German schism.

Pope Francis criticized the work of the preparatory committee in a private letter in November. Calling the committee one of “numerous steps being taken by significant segments” of the Church in Germany, he warned that these “threaten to steer it increasingly away from the universal Church’s common path.”

Striking a carefully optimistic tone, the new archbishop of Paderborn, Udo Bentz, called for patience with a view to fostering “good synodal processes,” even if this sometimes meant walking an extra mile, but doing so together, CNA Deutsch reported on Wednesday.

The Synodal Way — “Synodaler Weg,” sometimes called Synodal Path — describes itself as a process bringing together Germany’s bishops and selected laypeople to debate and pass resolutions based on a 2018 sexual abuse study.

Participants have voted in favor of draft documents calling for the priestly ordination of women, same-sex blessings, and changes to Church teaching on homosexual acts.


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8 Comments

  1. How do we interpret, to wit, explain a parallel of what appears to be occurring in the greater universal Synod and the German Synodale Weg? Referenced in my comment to Fr Pokorsky’s article ‘Pope’s remarks about the +LGBT community’ that “Francis’ main objective is the approval by the Church of same sex consensual adult relations, noticed in the change of messaging by Cardinals Hollerich and McElroy in favor of the adult more compatible with scripture interpretation advocated by McElroy. The danger for the Church is the subtleness of a seeming policy of the lesser evil eventually accepted as a good”.
    While the Vatican perceives schism with the German Synod’s objective, whose “Participants have voted in favor of draft documents calling for the priestly ordination of women, same-sex blessings, and changes to Church teaching on homosexual acts”, what distinguishes that from the Synod on Synodality except that the same propositions are at the discussion stage in the universal Church Synod. Does it display a symbiotic relationship as a subtle means of developing change to doctrine in practice, rather than by a more formal means causing too much stir?

    • Exactly so, not “causing too much stir.” Is the concern not the (mis)direction being taken in ambulatory Germania, but rather that all of the lemmings go “forward” together?

      And, yet, is there another distinction between Germania and Synod 2024…this being the former’s “walking together” into a permanently-ongoing focus group–as its parting step from such fixities as backwardist “propositions;” whilst Synod 2024, still only in its discussion phase, remains less evolved?

      Moreover, unlike Germania, the polyhedral Synod 2024 and its “experts” and facilitator-bishops still retain a roundtable setting (with pen and notepad!) for a peripheralized papacy.

      So, for example, of an ordained female diaconate we consult Alice in Wonderland: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where–” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

      Just go there together…

      • Charles Dodgson [pen name Lewis Carroll] suffered adults as badly as he suffered several maladies but loved children, took to Alice Pleasance Liddell, the daughter of the dean of Christ Church Oxford. Alice delighted in an ad hoc fairytale he created which became the rabbit hole adventure of Alice in Wonderland.
        Whether you’re aware of the literary history, Alice, as a child, loved Carroll’s nonsense. Nonsense was his signature even in his more serious mathematics riddles [he taught math]. Alice grew up like most women and grew out of her child’s infatuation. Carroll was displeased with the adult woman. She had three sons two lost on the battlefield during the Great War. She sent flowers when learning of his death. Wonder whether the women of our Synodal wonderland will follow (historic outline taken from Rebecka Ferneklint Historic UK).

  2. We read: “[Pope Francis] warned that these [steps in Germany] ‘threaten to steer it increasingly away from the universal Church’s common path’.”

    And, what is that common path? If clearly “not a parliament,” then how does the synodal path differ from the ambulatory path of, say, Ijtihad–the path of consensus in (pre-parliamentary) Islam at least until the 9th-century? A process of occasional abrogation (!) still recognized today by one major faction of sectarian Islam but not the other.

    How might our synodal “experts” retrack the synodal “common path” to also fully recognize the voted Documents of Vatican II, and the Magisterium, in both doctrine and practice, and the continued stature of those “special cases,” e.g., Africa, now being edged to the new periphery by both the Germans and Fiducia Supplicans?

  3. My feelings, given my ennui with regard to this entire world, and given the immoral opinions of the German Catholic people in general, who, in turn, are lead by the spineless immoral quasi-shepherds of the German Catholic Church — yes, the bishops who indirectly made Pope Francis come out with the immoral Fiducia Supplicans doctrine, a doctrine that has only proven to be one DIVIDING the Catholic Church; well, all I can say is that the German Church would be better off to not be part of the Catholic Church.

  4. Germany has a history of disagreeing with Rome; the Martin Luther is point in case. The Holy Spirit is not invoked. Let the leaders com to their senses to keep the Church as one. They are entertaining human weaknesses, especially sexually oriented. Gender issues. Let the rest of us pray for the Germans, especially during this lent. There is nothing impossible with God.

  5. If the Germans would just accept that pastoral heresies are the only way to go. Why do they always insist on open war with dogma? Time is greater than space, etc. The Germans have the wrong style!
    And yet, this pontificate is right to pamper these pesky prelates. Like Elon Musk and that Soros kid, there are billions of reasons why the Germans need private Synodaling…

  6. It would be interesting to know how large this “ significant segment” is in Germany. Is there a silent majority in opposition to this rebellion that we seldom hear from, both lay and clerical? If a schism were to result, how strong is the sleeping Church? Would it not be prudent for the Vatican to pay more attention to them now when their need is greatest? Fidelity should be rewarded and given more press coverage. The spotlight always seems to be on the rebels which only makes them stronger.

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