One of the founders of the German “Synodal Way” acknowledged the intention to create a permanent “Synodal Council” just before the subsequent conference.
According to the agenda for the assembly’s meeting on September 9th, the action would establish a permanent body to regulate the Church in Germany.
Critics have compared the practise to communist Soviets and said that it is just repurposing Protestant institutions.
The fourth synodal gathering of “Synodal Way” participants will take place in Frankfurt from September 8–10.
Several papers are slated for a second reading and may consequently be formally accepted, according to CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner.
The texts contain requests for the Church’s views on ordaining women to the priesthood and on sexual morality, particularly with regard to homosexuality, to be changed.
The procedure, which is not a synod, has courted controversy from the beginning.
A “Synodal Council,” according to Sternberg, would be “a decisive, important continuation of the introduction of participatory structures, as it already began with the parish councils at the Würzburg Synod (1971-1975) and which is now proving increasingly urgent at the level of the bishops’ conference.” Sternberg made this statement on Monday in an interview with a German online portal.
The plan, like others resulting from the contentious German event also known as the “Synodal Path,” has drawn harsh criticism.
Given Church history and theology, Cardinal Walter Kasper, a theologian seen as close to Pope Francis, said in June that there could be no “Synodal Council”: “Synods cannot be institutionally made permanent. A synodal church governance is unknown in Church tradition.
The idea of a synodal supreme council, as it is now envisioned, is unsupported by the whole constitutional history. It would represent an unprecedented invention rather than a renewal.
The German “Synodal Way” organisers had previously been charged by Kasper of utilising a slack tactic that amounted to a coup d’état.
A political scientist, not a theologian, recently expressed this notion somewhat strongly by referring to such a Synodal Council as a Supreme Soviet, according to the president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, who served as the bishop of the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart from 1989 to 1999.
“Soviet is an ancient Russian term that indicates precisely what we call a Rat, a council in German,” the cardinal said. Clearly, the Church should not have a Supreme Soviet of this kind.
Such a council structure is not a Christian notion; rather, it originates from an entirely un-Christian attitude. It would undermine the framework that Christ desired for his Church and stifle the Spirit’s ability to blow whenever and wherever it pleases.
A theology professor from the University of Vienna expressed more worries in June.
A German “Synodal Council,” according to dogmatist Jan-Heiner Tück, would “transfer sacramentally ordained individuals to bodies, a conversion of power that displays a clear connection to synodal traditions in the Protestant Church in Germany,” he warned.
In a 19-page letter to German Catholics in June 2019, Pope Francis urged them to prioritise evangelism in the face of a “growing loss and weakening of faith.”
Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg, the head of the German bishops’ conference, has frequently dismissed concerns and, in May, expressed displeasure in Pope Francis.
Pope Francis reaffirmed that he informed Bätzing that the nation already had “a very excellent Evangelical [Lutheran] Church” and “we don’t need two” in an interview that was released one month later, in June.