The Cathedral of the Archdiocese of Freiburg. Image taken in 2021 by C. M. under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license, here.
One prime example of the attempts at systematic destruction of the Catholic Church in Germany is a project called “Kirchenentwicklung 2030” (“Church Development 2030”) in the Archdiocese of Freiburg.
This archdiocese is located in the southwest of Germany, in the state of Baden-Württemberg. It contains the major cities Karlsruhe and Mannheim. They have around a thousand priests in a thousand parishes.
The archdiocese is “led” by Stephan Burger. He was named by antipope Bergoglio in 2014. In addition to being named by an antipope, he also participated in the heretical “Synodal Path” series of meetings, where he voted for multiple heretical proposals.
Given the fact that public manifest formal heretics are not members of the Catholic Church and can hold no offices, the status of Burger should be clear to any Catholic.
Burger has started the project in 2019. In the following years, there have been discussions in the diocese about different ideas.
In 2024, the bishop declared that he wants to reduce the number of parishes to 36, starting January 1, 2026. The large cities of Karlsruhe, Mannheim (both 300k), Konstanz (90k) and Freiburg itself (240k) will have only one parish each instead of 6, 7, 6 and 8, respectively.
Each of these parishes will be led by a “leadership team” made up of the parish priest and lay people. There will be other priests ministering there as well.
In the FAQ section of the site they claim that:
“Canon law provides for a pastor to manage a parish, whereby he can delegate tasks associated with his office. As part of Church Development 2030, for example, additional functional positions have been created in the form of senior advisors (“Leitender Referent”) and parish economists, to whom the pastor will delegate various management tasks in future. This will allow him to devote more time to pastoral care tasks and promote pastoral diversity, creativity and scope for action. In future, the senior advisors will manage and coordinate pastoral processes and contribute to the strategic development of the parish.”
The author has seen German parishes before and knows from his own experience that in parishes where lay people are in charge, the priest still doesn’t celebrate Mass every day or hear confessions for an hour or two every Saturday evening before Mass or Sunday after Mass.
Later in the FAQ however, they admit that lay people may lead congregations in the archdiocese:
“Volunteers will play an even more important role in the context of Church Development 2030: they will be given more responsibility, for example by leading congregations.”
There is a non-committal answer in the FAQ to the question whether churches will be closed. A document titled “Development of real estate for congregations” (“Immobilienkonzeption.pdf”) states that if a parish has a “renovation or construction needs subject to approval in accordance with §10 KBauO”, then “[t]he congregation must give detailed reasons why the construction is necessary due to pastoral reasons”.
Other German dioceses have similar plans to reduce the number of parishes. The Diocese of Aachen started the “Today with you” (“Heute bei dir”) program in 2018. They want to reduce the number of parishes from 328 to 8 in 2028.
The Archdiocese of Hamburg has already reduced the number of parishes from 94 to 28 in a process starting in 2009 and ending in 2022.
The Diocese of Trier at first planned to reduce the number of parishes from 887 to 35 until 2020, but it was stopped due to intervention by the Vatican under Bergoglio. Later, they settled on reducing the number of “pastoral units”, though not as drastically as planned.
Even the “conservative” Cardinal Woelki, “Bishop of Cologne”, plans to reduce the number of “pastoral units” from 177 to 65.
The high altar of the cathedral in Freiburg. Image taken in 2018 by Uoaei1 under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license, here.
