German ‘Synodal Way’ to Vote on Controversial ‘Permanent Synodal Council’

Organizers have confirmed that participants in Germany’s “synodal way” will vote next month on a controversial proposal that would create a powerful permanent “synodal council” to oversee the local Church.

 Newsroom (26/08/2022 10:15 AM Gaudium PressGermany’s “synodal way” organizers announced on August 22 that 14 papers would be put to the vote at the initiative’s fourth plenary assembly in Frankfurt on Sept. 8-10.

They include a text entitled “Sustainable strengthening of Synodality: A Synodal Council for the Catholic Church in Germany,” which will have its second reading on September 9.

If the document passes its second reading, it will be formally adopted as a resolution of the synodal way, a multi-year process bringing together German bishops and lay people to discuss four main topics: power, the priesthood, women in the Church, and sexual morality.

The vote will be watched closely as it follows a Vatican intervention in July underlining that the synodal way has no power “to compel the bishops and the faithful to adopt new ways of governance and new approaches to doctrine and morals.”

A handful of German bishops signed a document known as the Frankfurt Declaration, promising to enact synodal way resolutions “in our dioceses and parishes, in schools and charitable institutions.” They include bishops’ conference chairman Bishop Georg Bätzing and deputy chairman Bishop Franz-Josef Bode.

The push for a synodal council has generated a backlash in Germany, with the theologian Cardinal Walter Kasper leading the criticisms.

“Synods cannot be made institutionally permanent,” the former president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity said in June. “The tradition of the Church does not know a synodal church government. A synodical supreme council, such as is now taken into the prospect, has no support in all constitutional history. It would not be a renewal but an outrageous innovation.”

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The revised text that will be voted on next month calls for creating a “synodal committee” comprising 27 diocesan bishops, 27 members elected by the influential lay Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), and ten members elected by both the bishops and the ZdK.

The synodal committee would lay the groundwork for the creation of the synodal council while making “fundamental decisions” on budgetary issues at a national level.

The text sets out the features of the synodal council, saying that its decisions would have “at least the same legal effect as the resolutions of the synodal assembly.”

The council would meet in public and be chaired jointly by the German bishops’ conference chairman and ZdK president. It would also be “supported by a permanent secretariat, adequately staffed and financed.”

At next month’s meeting, five texts will face their first vote. Nine will be voted on for a second time, including papers on the “Magisterial reassessment of homosexuality,” “Women in ministries and offices in the Church,” and ending mandatory priestly celibacy.

– Raju Hasmukh

(Via The Pillar)

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