Pope Francis has encouraged the German Church to continue pursuing its synodal path for church reform, German conference president Bishop Georg Ba¨tzing reported on his return from a lengthy private audience with the Pope.
The main focus of their talk was “the situation of the German Church regarding the clarification of clerical sexual abuse cases” and the “difficult situation in several German dioceses”, Ba¨tzing said. Pope Francis was well informed about the German Church and hoped that the present tensions could be overcome, he reported.
He had informed the Pope about the German synodal path for church reform at which bishops and lay Catholics are discussing “power and checks and balances”, “sexual morality”, “the priestly lifestyle” and “women’s place in the Church” in four synodal forums. He had made it quite clear to the Pope that insinuations that the German Church wanted to pursue a Sonderweg, that is, a way of its own, or in other words a schism, were unfounded.
“Rumoured implications that the German Church wants to pursue a special way of its own are pulled out of thin air,” Ba¨tzing underlined.
“Pope Francis has encouraged us to continue along the synodal path we have set out on, to discuss the pending questions openly and honestly and to reach recommendations for a different way of handling the problems concerned,” he reported.
At the same time, Francis had requested that the German Church help shape the path of synodality that he, Francis, had called out in preparation for the world Synod of Bishops in 2023.
Meanwhile the crisis in the Cologne archdiocese has worsened. While the archbishop, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, sees it as his moral duty to carry on as archbishop, many priests, teachers and the majority of lay Catholics think relations with the cardinal have “reached a dead end”, according to the chairman of the archdiocesan council, Tim Kurzbach. “The decision now lies in Rome with the Congregation for Bishops and the Holy Father,” he told katholisch.de.
All the attention at the moment, however, is on the Archdiocese of Berlin, parts of whose abuse report was published in January. When the rest of the report was published in June, the archdiocese announced on 22 June that it recommended com- missioning another law firm to draw up a new report. Both the present Archbishop of Berlin Heiner Koch and Cardinal Woelki, the previous incumbent, were named in the abuse report, according to KNA.
On 23 June archdiocesan employees, together with a representative of the abuse victims’ council, held a 90-minute public hearing at the Catholic Academy in Berlin. The hearing was broadcast live with Koch and his vicar general Fr Manfred Kollig SSCC present the entire time.
The abuse report showed that those responsible in the archdiocese had “played down, covered up and hushed up” abuse, Tom Urig from the Berlin archdiocesan council said. “Protecting its own power structure was often far more important than the mental and physical health and the life of children and young people.” Archbishop Koch was so shattered by what he heard that he could hardly speak.
In the meantime, the former Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith prefect and new appointee to the Apostolic Signatura, Cardinal Gerhard Mu¨ller, strongly defended Cardinal Woelki and harshly criticised Cardinal Reinhard Marx and the German synodal path in an article in the Bonn General-Anzeiger. The Cologne crisis was not about abuse, Mu¨ller said, but an attack on Woelki, who is one of the few German bishops opposed to the German synodal path. The synodal path initiated by Marx was an “attempt to react to the abuse crisis with a heretical and schismatic agenda” and was therefore bound to fail, Mu¨ller underlined.
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