Church in the World

Lehmann resigns as head of German Church

ONE OF Europe's leading liberal voices in the Church, Cardinal Karl Lehmann, is to step down as president of the German bishops' conference after almost 21 years.

The cardinal, a renowned mediator and a dedicated advocate of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, said this week he would resign on 18 February for health reasons. He will, however, remain Bishop of Mainz and thus a key voice in the bishops' conference.

In a letter to his fellow bishops the cardinal, who is 71, explained that he has a "life-threatening" heart condition. It is understood he suffered heart trouble last month, preventing him from celebrating Christmas services. Cardinal Lehmann wrote that he would continue to put his knowledge and experience at the disposal of the 72-member bishops' conference, but that he wanted to concentrate his energies on the "difficult ecumenical situation" in Germany.

The cardinal has criticised the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) on a number of occasions, most recently last September when he attacked its "One True Church" document. At the opening of the German bishops' conference plenary meeting he accused the CDF of setting off a "downright" anti-Catholic Protestant campaign.

In 1997 the then Bishop Lehmann found himself on a collision course with the Vatican over the German Church's provision of abortion counselling. Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect of the CDF and now Pope Benedict XVI, insisted that the Church withdraw from state-run pregnancy counselling centres, because they obliged Catholics to issue women who insisted on having an abortion with the certificate necessary to obtain the procedure.

Bishop Lehmann and most other German bishops were in favour of keeping the Church-run counselling centres open for the sake of the hundreds of women who were persuaded to keep their babies. Bishop Lehmann hoped a compromise could be reached but after a three-year struggle he complied with Rome, realising that the issue might split the Church.

It is believed that the disagreement over the abortion centres was the reason why Bishop Lehmann was not made a cardinal for 14 years after his appointment to the diocese of Mainz, one of Germany's oldest bishoprics. First elected president of the bishops' conference in 1987, Cardinal Lehmann was re-elected four times, each time for a six-year term.

He was born in Sigmaringen in south-west Germany in 1936. While studying philosophy and theology in Freiburg and Rome between 1956 and 1964 he was ordained in Rome in 1963 at the time of the Second Vatican council by the then Archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Julius Döpfner.

In 1964 he became Karl Rahner's assistant and attended many of the Council sessions with his mentor. Four years later, at the age of 32, he was appointed professor of dogmatics at Mainz and three years later, professor of dogmatics and ecumenical theology at Freiburg. In 1983 Lehmann became the eighty-seventh successor of St Boniface when Pope John Paul II appointed him Bishop of Mainz.

Possible successors as president of the bishops' conference include Lehmann's deputy, Bishop Heinrich Mussinghof of Aachen, Archbishop Reinhard Mark of Munich and Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of Freiburg.