Is the world church facing a “conflagration” that is once again starting from Germany? That question hung over the week-long meeting of German bishops in Rome. The “German schism” actually seems to be the fear in the Vatican.
Actually, the routine visit of the local bishops to the Pope in Rome is a rather unexciting affair. Every five years, the 5,300 bishops worldwide have to step up to the threshold of the tomb of the founder of the church, Peter: In Latin “ad limina petri”. This is the occasion of a visit to Rome for the bishops. Many of them studied theology here. People meet, eat good Roman food, see the Pope, meet the individual ministers, who are called “prefects of a dicastery” in the Curia, report and then leave happily. Until next time.
But the visit of the German bishops was under a different star. In Rome worlds met that hardly seem reconcilable anymore. On the one hand there is the German Catholic Church, which wants to come clean after the cases of abuse, and on the other hand a Roman Church, for which the mere naming of the problems seems to be a defection from pure faith, the beginning of a schism in the church, the “German schism”. The Germans again, you hear Vatican.
The chairman of the German bishops’ conference, Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg, tried to counteract this and saw the glass half full at the end of the visit to Rome: it was good that the problems were on the table. It is less good that there has not yet been an agreement on how to solve them. “But I didn’t expect that either,” said the 61-year-old.
The starting point of the dispute with Rome is the synodal path: in Rome it is suspected to be the path leading to a schism in the church. According to the Vatican, the Catholic self-criticism that began three years ago because of the numerous cases of abuse went too far.
Bätzing saw it differently: “The abuse scandals have shaken people’s trust in the church” and led to an enormous wave of resignations. The abusers were priests who sexually assaulted wards, minors and dependents. Bätzing said it clearly: “The church can only win back the trust of the believers with a new beginning”. That is why the church embarked on the synodal path in 2019 – an attempt to take the entire church with it in self-criticism and proposals for a church that people trust again.
To this end, the 67 German bishops, together with the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZDK), which consists of representatives of the diocesan councils and Catholic organizations, set up a synodal assembly – a kind of Catholic parliament made up of active lay people and bishops. After three and a half years of discussion meetings, decisions were made in four working groups.
The documents of the synodal path speak plain text: The “cases of sexualized violence in the Catholic Church, which were covered up by bishops and other church leaders for decades,” have shaken trust. The synodalists didn’t stop there: they took on the structure of the church, as suggested by the so-called MHG study on abuse, and demanded a revolution in Catholic sexual morality: no more sexuality “that is reduced solely to genital sexuality, as well as the primacy of biological fertility”.
Even if the resolution on sexual morality barely received a two-thirds majority of the bishops involved, a good eight out of ten participants in the synodal assembly were in favor. The demand for a “doctoral assessment of homosexuality” failed because of the bishops’ blocking minority.
The conservatives in the church have been up in arms against the synodal path for months. In April, 70 bishops, including four cardinals, signed an appeal to the German bishops not to adapt to the pressure of the “secular mentality” and to hold on to the magisterium on sexual morality. The Swiss Curia Cardinal Kurt Koch let it be known that this path of reform in the German church brought back “memories of apparitions and phenomena in Germany during the National Socialist period” when a “German Church” had been founded under Hitler.
A historically wrong comparison, the Swiss cardinal had to be criticized. Because the Nazi-affiliated church had been founded by evangelical church representatives and not by Catholics. Bätzing demanded a public apology from Koch for a comparison that suggested that “in Germany we would not face the terrible legacy of National Socialism”. Koch did not comply. The climate before the mandatory visit to Rome was very excited.
But it is also true: The synodal path is a frontal attack on parts of the Catholic catechism. One defends oneself against the “without exception condemnation of the methods of artificial contraception, the masturbation, same-sex and pre-marital sexuality”, against the discrimination against remarried couples, it says.
But all of this is in complete contradiction to Catholic moral teaching, which names adultery, masturbation, fornication, pornography, prostitution, rape and homosexual acts as “major sins against chastity”. “Living together freely” and “sexual intercourse before and outside marriage” are “concubinage” for the Roman Catholic moral teaching. Unworldly and a reason for the removal of the faithful from the Church, counter the Synodalists. Because the “normal” believers lived completely in sin in the sense of Catholic moral teaching.
Therefore, the German bishops in Rome set up a different vision: “We are Catholic, but we want to be Catholic in a different way,” said Bishop Bätzing. What that means in concrete terms, the Synodal Assembly had made a recommendation: The Pope should “professionally clarify and reassess homosexuality”. Since the homosexual orientation belongs to the human being as he*she was created by God, it should not be judged differently from the ethical orientation than the heterosexual orientation.
“We follow the research of human anthropology”, according to which sexual orientation is not a decision of the individual, said Bishop Bätzing. Nature creates not only two sexes, but more, including intermediate forms. All of them are therefore part of creation and should not be discriminated against. A cultural revolution. Rome accepted the resolutions of the synodal path as the beginning of a schism.
Bätzing, on the other hand, refuses: “We have only put problems on the table that cannot be explained away”. He knows that only the Pope can bring about a change in Catholic moral teaching. Here Bätzing bowed, but not on the question of blessing homosexual couples: “I will bless them, without ifs and buts”, even if it is officially forbidden.
The next question that worries German Catholics is the question of the role of women in the Church. “Should there be ordinations for women? Where’s the red line?” In Rome, the German bishops were advised to be patient. “The German believers have run out of patience,” said Bätzing.
The Pope’s deputy, Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, warned the German Church not to demand a “reform of the Church” but to leave it at “reforms in the Church”. On the other hand, Cardinals Luis Francisco Ladaria, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Inquisition, and Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, were more explicit: they did not like the “method, the content, nor the proposals of the synodal path”.
Pope Francis did not even take part in the last plenary session of the open exchange of blows with the bishops: “The pope is a clever Jesuit,” said Bätzing, “he wanted to let us deal with the problems on our own”. Francis had already explained his point of view on his most recent trip in a conversational tone: “There is already a good evangelical church in Germany, so there is no need for a second one.”
The German bishops are entering the next round. Bätzing and the vast majority of his bishop colleagues are convinced that the problems brought to the table in Germany are felt throughout the world. They would not be solved by ignoring them. Certainly, in the universal Church, the method of assembly with lay people and voting is not common. That would be something typically German. But Bätzing is hopeful: the world synod will begin next year, and that is the opportunity to continue talking. He assures us that they don’t want to found their own church, they want to reform it.
(This article was first published on Saturday, November 19, 2022.)