The previous Auxiliary Bishop Herwig Gössl has been appointed by Pope Francis as the new Archbishop of Bamberg. This was announced by the Franconian archdiocese and the Holy See in Rome. He has already led the archdiocese on an interim basis since Ludwig Schick retired in November 2022.
Gössl, 56, was born in Munich and grew up in Nuremberg. He is considered moderately conservative. So far he has worked as a community pastor and in priest training; most recently he was primarily responsible for Caritas.
After two foreigners, Pope Francis has now again opted for an in-house solution at the head of the second Bavarian archdiocese. Gössl’s predecessors were priests from Fulda and Augsburg.
It was also announced on Saturday who Pope Francis had chosen to head the Archdiocese of Paderborn: The previous Auxiliary Bishop of Mainz, Udo Markus Bentz, will succeed Hans-Josef Becker, who left in October 2022 for reasons of age. With 1.36 million members, the Archdiocese of Paderborn is the sixth largest of the 27 Catholic dioceses in Germany.