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HIn the Catholic Church in Germany reacted appropriately to the crisis of the Crown in recent months? Cologne Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki reported at least doubts on Friday during the regional conference of the “Synodal Way” in Frankfurt: the issues of disease, suffering and death had been pushed to the center of society by the pandemic, but the Church had not given an answer. – and “who, if not us, could we give answers”, said Woelki.
The cardinal did not go as far as Christine Lieberknecht. The former prime minister of Thuringia had accused the churches of failing in May because they had left hundreds of thousands of old, lonely and dying alone. But Woelki’s assessment stood out clearly from the president of the German Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Bätzing, who reaffirmed his position in Frankfurt: The Church did not leave people alone with their existential questions. For him, the main result of the Corona crisis is that the church must pay more attention to the issue of justice in view of growing social inequality.
The Presidium of the Synodal Way had not actually planned such a fundamental debate. According to his ideas, the deliberations in Frankfurt, as well as the four regional conferences meeting at the same time, should focus on the question of what effects the pandemic will have on the “synodal path” of the Catholic Church in Germany. In other words, the four thematic areas dealt with in the dialogue process that was opened in January by the Central Committee of German Catholics and the German Bishops’ Conference: women’s access to church positions, the distribution of power among priests and laity, the sexual morality of the church and priestly celibacy. The regional conferences replaced the synod assembly, which was originally supposed to meet in Frankfurt on September 3-5, but could not be held due to the pandemic.
The working document, which was published by the Presidium as a basis for the Corona debate, also described the pandemic as a catalyst: “The impulses for reform of the Synodal Way are more urgent than ever”, is the result of the text, which was written by theology professors Thomas Söding, Julia Knop and Gregor Maria Hoff had been written. Woelki objected to such an approach.
Known camp limits
The front lines in the following debate about the church in the Corona crisis ran along the known boundaries of the field: Woelki received a decisive contradiction from Brigitte Vielhaus, the federal director of the Catholic women’s community in Germany. She pointed out that during the crisis, various forms of worship and prayer had developed in the family circle and that the relationship with God in these “house churches” had never been more intense. Woelki’s auxiliary bishops supported their cardinal: Dominikus Schwaderlapp said the church had not been committed enough to provide pastoral care for the dying. Ansgar Puff asked if the pandemic had a prophetic dimension and if it could make sense.
Of course, just under an hour and a half was not long enough for a real debate. The first hour of the afternoon was reserved for the first interim report of the Synodal Forum “Women in the services and offices of the Church”. The document, entitled “Participation of women in services and positions under current conditions of canon law,” does not directly address whether women should be admitted to the priesthood or the diaconate. However, it had sparked protests before the regional conference. The bishop of Regensburg, Rudolf Voderholzer, criticized the lack of theological level in a letter of complaint. He was particularly disturbed by the statement in the biblical part of the text that Jesus had disciples, but that no one was consecrated by him, which remains without further explanation. It should also have been mentioned that according to the account of the evangelist Luke, Jesus called twelve men to be apostles, to whom he had given a special commission, according to Voderholzer. Even among well-meaning members of the Synodal Assembly, the document was secretly described as “weak.”
The sharpest criticism, however, was not formulated, to the surprise of some participants, by Cardinal Woelki, but by Bishop Bätzing: “We need a clean theology. I don’t want that, ”he had to agree with Voderholzer, he said. Sometimes the discussion turned into a New Testament seminar with ping-pong of Bible passages. Then the federal president of the Katholische Landvolk movement spoke: She was not a theologian and could not say anything about the Biblical findings, Nicole Podlinski said, but what she could say was this: “If even the veterans of Westphalian Catholicism, women rural Westphalia, they did overflow to Maria 2.0, then it is time for changes “.
