A senior German cardinal has accused his nation’s bishops of being “completely unfit to work against growing secularism” after the president of the bishops’ conference said they could not wait for approval from Rome before allowing civilly remarried Catholics to receive Communion.
Cardinal Paul Cordes, the retired president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, attacked Cardinal Reinhard Marx after he told journalists at the end of February that the German bishops’ conference would pursue its own programme of pastoral care regardless of the outcome of the Vatican’s Synod on the Family in October.
The issue of relaxing the ban on divorced and remarried receiving the Sacraments is one of the hotly contested issues that will be debated at the Synod. Most German bishops are in favour of allowing civilly remarried Catholics to receive Communion in certain circumstances. In England and Wales almost 500 priests have signed a letter resisting any move to relax the ban on the divorced and remarried receiving Communion.
“We are not a branch of Rome,” Marx said in February at a press conference at the end of the bishops’ plenary meeting. “We cannot wait for a Synod to tell us how we have to shape pastoral care for marriage and family here.”
Cardinal Cordes, 80, issued a stout rebuttal, the US-based Catholic News Agency reported this week, in a 7 March letter to the German Catholic national paper Die Tagespost. Marx’s statements had caused confusion and betrayed a “theological blurriness that makes you wonder,” he wrote. Marx’s language was more suitable to a bar than to a theological discussion, and was certainly not “imbued with the spirit of communio,” he said.
He said it was beyond Cardinal Marx’s competence to enact any reform on the matter. “The president argues about the drama of the divorced and remarried! … This matter is bound to the very centre of theology. In this field not even a cardinal can loosen such a complex Gordian knot in a single swordstroke. He has [for reference] the sacramental theology of the Council of Trent.”
Cordes went on to say that the German bishops were no longer qualified to offer instruction to the Catholic world. He pointed to the sharp decline of Catholicism in Germany and cited a poll that showed only 16 per cent of self-identified Catholics there said they believed in a personal God, concluding “there is no reason to pride ourselves on our faith”.
“The existing German ecclesial apparatus is completely unfit to work against growing secularism,” he said.
Above: Cardinal Cordes. Photo: CNS
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