Many fewer Catholics than usual last week attended one of the biggest bi-annual events in the German Church.
The 102nd German Katholikentag, a lay-led Catholic convention that has been held every two years since the 1840s but postponed for two years because of the Covid pandemic, was finally held in Stuttgart from 25-29 May.
The last Katholikentag, held in Münster in 2018, attracted 50,000 permanent visitors and 20,000 day visitors. This year there were only 19,000 permanent visitors – 7,000 of whom were contributors. Mainly because of the abuse crisis in the Church, the overall number of participants this year, including day visitors, was around 27,000 – that is 45,000 fewer than in 2018.
The revelation shortly before the four-day event began that bishops’ conference president Bishop Georg Bätzing had promoted a priest who had previously, under Batzing’s predecessor, been accused of “harassment” was a further blow. Today he would have consulted the victims’ council, Bätzing explained. Speaking on 26 May at the Katholikentag, Batzing said that physical or verbal harassment of women was “an absolute no-go”.
The conference president said there was “massive” opposition to the German church reform process and recalled the open letters he had received from the US and the northern European bishops. “In the situation we are in, we are depriving many people of a bridge to God, which causes me intense suffering, but from it I draw the strength to do everything within my power to change the situation,” he underlined on the German state TV programme ZDF.
Saturday was devoted to peace ethics and the war in the Ukraine. The stance “create peace without weapons” had “in a sense abdicated”, German military Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck of Essen told KNA. While Bishop Gebhard Fürst of Rottenburg-Stuttgart told domradio.de that Ukrainians must be able to defend themselves, and in order to defend themselves they needed weapons. “The message must be that peace means so much to us that someone who wishes to live in peace must be able to defend themselves. We must adjust our peace ethics and help to make self-defence possible,” he argued.
Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich especially criticised the Church’s “speechlessness” in regard to the clerical sexual abuse scandal and the language used in Vatican documents. Above all the Vatican’s “No” to gay blessings in 2021 was “not only theologically skimpy”, Marx said but “decidedly offbeat”. It left one “aghast”, he lamented.
The president of the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), which hosts the Katholikentag, Irme Stetter-Karp, said the ZdK was already thinking about a “major renovation” of the Katholikentag.
Conservative German bishops Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki of Cologne and Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer of Regensburg, who are in a minority in the bishops’ conference, were invited to the Katholikentag but chose not to attend.
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