The Cathedral of Regensburg at night. Photo by Z-Lux14 under the CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0 license, here.
The structure
According to official data, about a quarter of Germany is Catholic, mostly in the south and the west of the country. Germany is made up of 27 dioceses, seven of which are archdioceses.
In 2023, there were 11.702 Catholic priests and 9418 parishes in Germany.
The peculiarities of the German church
The most important feature of the so-called Catholic Church in Germany is the church tax (Kirchensteuer). Depending on which state of Germany one is in, it is 8% or 9% of the income tax. This is a non-trivial extra tax, which can only be avoided if one formally “leaves the Church”, which hundreds of thousands of people do every year. Due to this “leaving the Church”, the percentage of Catholics has been greatly reduced.
Ever since the Vatican signed the Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany, the bishops have to take on oath of allegiance to the state. It reads: “Before God and on the holy Gospels, I swear and promise, as befits a bishop, loyalty to Germany and the state of N. I swear and promise to respect the constitutionally constituted government and to have it respected by my clergy. In my dutiful concern for the welfare and interests of the German state, I will endeavor to prevent any harm that could threaten it in the exercise of the clerical office entrusted to me.” (for example here)
The Catholic Church in Germany also employs a lot of people. For example, the Caritas employs 700.000 people, which makes it the second-largest employer after the state.
The “Catholic” organizations
There are many “Catholic” organizations in Germany, like the BDKJ (Federation of German Catholic Youth), KDFB (Catholic German Women’s Federation), KfD (Community of Catholic Women in Germany), KLJB (Movement of Catholic Rural Youth), KAB (Catholic Worker’s Movement), FkM (Forum of Catholic Men), etc.
The most important of them is the “Zentralkomitee der deutschen Katholiken” (Central Committee of German Catholics, ZdK). This organization goes back to the revolution of 1848. It claims to represent the faithful in Germany and collaborated with the bishops in the “Synodal Way”, which we will discuss below.
The KDFB officially demands the admission of women to the priesthood. The same is true for the KfD. The other organizations have also made heretical remarks over time.
“The Synodal Path”
The German bishops and the representatives of the ZdK have held a series of meetings from 2019 to 2023 called “The Synodal Path” (“Der Synodale Weg”). They claimed to have organized this “in particular to combat the systemic causes of sexual abuse and at the same time to achieve an inner renewal of the Church in Germany.” In reality, they talked about how to transform the Church into something entirely different and how to abolish sexual morality.
The heresies in the “Synodal Path” documents are too numerous to be discussed here. However, there is one crucial point. In some cases, the votes taken on the individual documents on “The Synodal Path” were public. So we know which bishop agreed to these heretical documents. In this article, I am going to focus on the heresies in five of these documents and attempt to show the formal heresy of the bishops.
“Preaching of the Gospel through laymen/women by word and Sacrament” (5th meeting)
women should be allowed to preach the homily during Mass (3); lay people should be allowed to administer Anointing of the Sick (4); lay people should be allowed to lead parishes (4) (link)
“Blessing ceremonies for couples who love each other” (5th meeting)
dioceses should institute liturgical blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples and for “couples who love each other” but cannot marry (1-2) and these ceremonies should later be taken up into the Benedictional (book of blessings) (link)
“Dealing with gender diversity” (5th meeting)
people should be able to change their gender in the baptismal registry (4); transgender people should be allowed to join a religious order; “gender diversity” should be a topic in the further education of priests (link)
“Reevaluation of homosexuality by the Magisterium” (4th meeting)
God created certain people to be homosexual (2); homosexuality is ethically no different from heterosexuality; passages condemning homosexuality should be removed from the catechism; homosexuals should be admitted to all Church offices and to the priesthood (3) (link)
“Women in the ministries and offices of the Church” (4th meeting)
The only directly heretical demand in this document is that “in future, gender should no longer be a deciding factor in the allocation of offices”. (p. 36)
The only bishops who didn’t vote with “yes” on any of the five documents mentioned above and who were instituted in their dioceses by Benedict XVI were: Rudolf Voderholzer, Bishop of Regensburg; Gregor Maria Hanke OSB, Bishop of Eichstätt; Wolfgang Ipolt, Bishop of Görlitz. Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki was named a Cardinal by Benedict XVI, but he was nominated Archbishop of Cologne by Bergoglio. (He was the Archbishop of Berlin before that.) Stefan Oster SDB (“Bishop of Passau”), Stephan Burger (“Archbishop of Freiburg”) and Bertram Meier (“Bishop of Augsburg”) were all named by Bergoglio.
The German bishops who voted for heresy on the “Synodal Path” have been warned
Fraternal open letter of 70 cardinals and bishops
On April 12, 2022, over 70 cardinals and bishops published a “fraternal open letter” to the participants of “The Synodal Path”. Among the signatories were Cardinal Arinze, Cardinal Burke, Cardinal Pell, and Cardinal Napier. They said that the “Synodal Path” has caused “the potential for schism in the life of the Church that will inevitably result”.
Letter of the Nordic Bishop’s Conference
The Nordic Bishop’s Conference published a letter dated March 9, 2022. They don’t directly accuse the German bishops of heresy or schism. Instead, they say that “method and content of the Synodal Path of the Church in Germany fill us with worry”.
Other bishops and cardinals
Cardinal Walter Brandmüller published a statement in 2022, condemning the “Synodal Path”. He wrote that “[i]n the elaborated texts – as to be expected – demands are raised which are in clear contradiction to the authentic Catholic faith, to the hierarchical-sacramental constitution and to the binding moral teaching of the Church.” He added that the bishops were “openly contradicting the truths of the faith”.
On March 11, 2022, Cardinal George Pell called on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to condemn Georg Bätzing, the “head” of the German Bishop’s Conference for his “wholesale and explicit rejection” of sexual morality in an interview with the TV station K-TV.
Gerhard Ludwig Müller, the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, supported Cardinal Pell’s statement. On March 17, 2022, Müller told the German Catholic weekly “Die Tagespost” and the news portal “Lifesitenews”: “Cardinal Pell is fully justified in reminding the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of its responsibility to safeguard the truth of the faith and the unity of the Church of Christ in the authority of the Successor of Peter against the open heresy of German Synodalism (cf. Vatican II, Lumen Gentium 18). Whoever wants to prescribe to the faithful other sources of revelation besides the Holy Scriptures and the Apostolic Tradition, has fallen away from the Catholic faith (cf. Vatican II, Dei verbum 9f). Heretical bishops must not be obeyed, and every Catholic is called upon to bear witness to the truth against them, even if they enforce their power with brute force, just as the Arian and Donatist bishops once persecuted true Catholics.”
On May 5, 2021, Cardinal Joseph Zen, Archbishop emeritus of Hong Kong; Marian Eleganti, auxiliary bishop emeritus of Chur and Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Astana have published an appeal urging Bergoglio to intervene. They wrote: “The German Synodal Path, initiated in 2019, has been, during the past two years, fertile ground for the planning and subsequent homogenization of ideas and theories that are blatantly contrary to the immutable and perennial Magisterium of the Holy Catholic Church, founded by the Divine Savior on the solid rock of the Apostles”. The signatories then mention the attacks on marriage at the “Synodal Path”.
Petitions of lay people
Not only bishops, but also lay people have voiced their concerns to the German bishops. I will just quote one example.
A group of Catholic professors, journalists and former politicians have published on February 26, 2020 a “Call to Resistance Against the Synodal Path”. The text was written by the priest Prof. Hubert Windisch. They warned about the desire of the bishops to in effect protestantize the Church in Germany. They declared: “We oppose this synodal path. We remain Catholic.”
In light of all these public statements, it is very hard to claim that the German bishops who voted in favor of heretical documents would be blameless. If they are not blameless, they are formal heretics and to have lost membership in the Catholic Church, which means they cannot hold any office.
In my opinion, these conclusions can be drawn
The only three dioceses in Germany, where the bishops were named by Benedict XVI and they didn’t vote for heretical documents are: Regensburg (Voderholzer), Eichstätt (Hanke) and Görlitz (Ipolt).
Those dioceses where the bishops were named by Benedict XVI and voted for heresy are probably empty. Thus, the dioceses of Essen, Speyer, Münster, Trier, Magdeburg, the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising and the military diocese would be in a state of sede vacante.
The situation of the other dioceses is not entirely clear. In church law, a bishop has to submit his resignation to the pope when he becomes 75 years old. The pope can either accept the resignation, reject it or accept it with after a delay. In these dioceses, the bishops who participated in the “Synodal Way” have been nominated by Bergoglio. If their resignation was not valid, then they are in fact still bishops, and they did not vote for the heretical documents.