The German Catholic bishops can no longer get out of the crisis mode. From this Monday on they will meet for their annual autumn plenary meeting in Fulda, but this time the accompanying music is particularly booming and dissonant. Just last week Pope Francis decided – after months of silence – not to accept the resignation offer from Hamburg’s Archbishop Stefan Heße. The former Cologne Vicar General Heße had been accused of eleven breaches of duty in the Cologne abuse report. The Pope has still not decided on the fate of Cologne’s Archbishop Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki.
The rejection of Heße’s resignation met with sharp criticism from those affected by abuse and Catholic lay people. “I can understand that really well,” says the chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Georg Bätzing, at the start of the autumn plenary meeting. The decisive factor for the Pope was that he had found no evidence of an “active, deliberate cover-up” by Hesse. That’s why he left him in office. But it is also clear, according to Bätzing, that a new start for Heße and the Archdiocese of Hamburg will not be easy. “This will have changes in the reputation of the bishops, and it will have consequences for us as a conference of bishops,” he said. “It is not possible to simply continue to be a bishop. There will have to be a greater participation of lay people in diocesan processes.”
Fear for the unity of the church
But it is precisely this topic that is one of the most controversial on the Synodal Way, the intra-Catholic reform debate between clergy and lay people. The second synodal assembly is planned for next week in the Frankfurt exhibition halls, where a basic text on more separation of powers is to be discussed. This text goes too far for Regensburg Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer, however, he fears for the unity of the church and that the German Catholic Church is “driving too far” from the perspective of Rome. Together with four other participants in the Synodal Way, Voderholzer had own homepage activated and published an alternative text there. Bätzing called the advance of his confrere on Monday a “moment of surprise”, but he pleaded for it: “The work on the Synodal Way must be done in the Synodal Way.
However, Voderholzer received a tailwind from Rome on Monday: The Pope’s ambassador in Berlin, the Apostolic Nuncio Nikola Eterović, warned the German bishops on behalf of the Pope to preserve the unity of the Church. Eterović recalled an interview with Francis on a Spanish radio station. When asked whether the Synodal Way of the Germans deprived him of sleep, Francis had said in it that it was not bad will that drives the German bishops, but “a pastoral request”, which, however, “does not take into account” some of the Pope’s instructions. . Eterović also quoted Pope Paul VI, who in 1968 criticized a “desire for change and renewal” on the part of some Catholics, saying that “the truths of Christian teaching should not be compromised”.
“We are experiencing crumbling power structures”
For numerous reform groups that, like the bishops, have gathered in Fulda these days, it cannot go on like this. For them, the church is “at a crossroads”: “We are experiencing crumbling power structures,” said Christian Weisner of “We are Church”. The deputy federal chairwoman of the Catholic women’s community in Germany (kfd), Agnes Wuckelt, said that more and more women were turning their backs on the church, including many older ones. But, according to Wuckelt: “It is also our church, not just the church of the bishops.”
On the agenda of the bishops is also the procedure for the payment of recognition benefits for those affected by abuse, which was only decided at the last autumn plenary meeting in 2020. At that time, the bishops had agreed on a uniform and standardized procedure for all dioceses and the establishment of an Independent Commission for Recognition Services (UAK), a body made up of external experts. However, its work has been sharply criticized for some time. In the past few weeks, individual affected persons and affected groups had repeatedly spoken out in open letters to bishops and politicians. Like the magazine Public forum reported, the Bishops’ Conference Affected Advisory Board has now called on the bishops to stop the controversial procedure: “The rulings have already caused a significant number of retraumatisations with the corresponding consequences, including inpatient placement in psychiatric clinics,” the report says according to the letter. The recognition system lacks “a considerable degree of transparency and therefore traceability.” Https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/. “That cannot be the purpose of this program that we have launched.”