Organizers of Germany’s “synodal way” are expected to draw up draft statutes for a “national synodal body” in the coming months, after the Vatican rejected an initial blueprint for a permanent decision-making institution composed of bishops and lay people.
Members of the “synodal committee” — a transitional body established by synodal way participants — discussed the new plans for a permanent institution at a Dec. 13-14 plenary assembly in Wiesbaden-Naurod.
The push for the new institution dates back to September 2022, when the synodal way adopted a resolution calling for a national “advisory and decision-making body,” known as the “synodal council,” by 2026.
The resolution said the body would “take fundamental decisions of supradiocesan significance on pastoral planning, future perspectives of the Church and financial and budgetary matters of the Church that are not decided at diocesan level.”
But the Vatican vetoed plans for the “synodal council” in January 2023, because it “would place itself above the authority of the German bishops’ conference and in fact appear to replace it.”
At talks in Rome in June, Vatican officials and German bishops agreed that a future “national synodal body,” no longer known as the “synodal council,” would not be “above or equal to the bishops’ conference.”
At the two-day meeting in Wiesbaden-Naurod, around 60 of the 70 synodal committee members discussed “questions regarding the composition of this body at the national level, as well as its competences and modes of decision-making,” according to a Dec. 14 press release.
The press release described the new institution as a “body for joint consultation and decision-making,” but did not specify what kinds of decisions it would take or define its relationship with the German bishops’ conference.
Irme Stetter-Karp, president of the lay Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK) and co-president of the synodal committee, said: “For the future committee that we are now preparing, I expect participation on an equal footing, decision-making among equals, and joint representation of these decisions in public.”
In an interview with the German Catholic news agency KNA, Stetter-Karp suggested the synodal committee was at a critical stage.
“We have now reached a decisive phase, because it is now a matter of drawing up a picture of how the Church in Germany wants to position itself at supradiocesan level in the future, how it can be a strong voice, and what content it must therefore discuss and decide together in a good synodal manner,” she commented.
German bishops and Vatican officials are expected to discuss the results of the Wiesbaden-Naurod meeting in the first quarter of 2025.
At the meeting, synodal committee members also voted to adopt a document called “Breaking with taboos and normalization – votes on the situation of non-heterosexual priests.”
Synodal way participants endorsed the text at its first reading in September 2022, but ran out of time before they could give it a second reading and vote on whether to adopt it.
The four-page text “demands that all ministers and persons in positions of responsibility treat non-heterosexual priests with the respect and sensitivity to which all other people are equally entitled, regardless of their sexual orientation.”
It also calls on bishops to “advocate that the ban on the training and ordination of non-heterosexual men … should be lifted at the level of the universal Church, and that all negative statements regarding their sexual orientation should be deleted from official Church documents.”
Synodal committee members called for revisions to two other texts held over from the synodal way, which formally ended in March 2023.
The first, “Magisterial statements on conjugal love,” demands changes to sections of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on “conjugal fecundity” and “regulation of procreation.”
“The spouses decide responsibly on the time to become parents, on the number of their children as well as on the different methods of family planning,” it says. “This is done in mutual respect and personal moral decision-making.”
The second text, “Measures against abuse of women in the Church,” sets out new measures to address “cases of sexual abuse of adults in pastoral care relationships.”
Germany’s dioceses will be surveyed in February and March 2025 about how they are implementing the synodal way’s resolutions, which total 150 pages.
Synodal committee members have reportedly expressed concern that the synodal way is making little impression at a grassroots level in the German Church.
Four diocesan bishops — Cologne’s Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, Eichstätt’s Bishop Gregor Maria Hanke, Passau’s Bishop Stefan Oster, and Regensburg’s Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer — are boycotting the synodal committee over concerns that the German initiative is at odds with the global synodal process launched by Pope Francis.
In the Dec. 14 press release, bishops’ conference president Bishop Georg Bätzing singled the synodal committee’s two new spiritual advisers for praise.
Bätzing, the synodal committee’s other co-president, thanked Sr. Katharina Kluitmann, O.S.F., and Konstantin Bischoff for taking up the position after the two original spiritual advisers withdrew from the role.
“Katharina Kluitmann and Konstantin Bischoff have given the meeting the spiritual dimension that we need not to just drown behind papers and files,” the bishop said.
The synodal committee’s fourth plenary assembly will be held in May 2025.
