The Dispatch: More from CWR...

Analysis: Who are the Central Committee of German Catholics?

By Ed Condon

Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich-Freising, president of the German bishops' conference, (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

Berlin, Germany, Sep 6, 2019 / 08:00 am (CNA).- Following the news that the Church in Germany will proceed to form a new Synodal Assembly as part of a “binding process,” questions have been raised about the Central Committee of German Catholics, a lay group which will play a key role in the new structure.

The ZdK is one of the most prominent Catholic organizations in the country, counting a number of active and former politicians, including its current president, Dr. Thomas Sternberg, among its members. It has about 230 members, up to 90 of whom are elected by diocesan councils. Another 100 members are drawn from the Association of Catholic Organizations in Germany, an umbrella group which includes the Church in Germany’s overseas aid agencies, the Catholic Teachers’ Association, and other similar groups. This body then selects a further 50 members, usually politicians.

As leader of the ZdK, Sternberg would serve as co-president of the new Synodal Assembly being established now in Germany. The group would also provide 70 of the new assembly’s members.

While the statutes for the Synodal Assembly have yet to be completed or formally approved, several of its working groups, called Synodal Fora, have already been established by the German bishops and the ZdK, and have begun examining the announced synodal topics of clerical power in the Church, sexual morality, priestly life, and the role of women in the offices and ministries of the Church.

Despite a history of dissent from Church teaching on a range of issues, including those covered by the synodal process, the group has remained a close collaborator with the German bishops. It played a leading role in the Church’s response in Germany to the abuse crisis which, the ZdK has repeatedly said, requires a zäsur, or radical “break” in response.

A major study of clerical sexual abuse in Germany concluded, with ZdK support, that clerical celibacy was a primary cause of sexual abuse, as was the Church’s rejection of homosexual acts as intrinsically disordered.

Julia Knop, a theologian and senior figure in the ZdK, and a member of one of the Synodal Fora has stated that the Church’s teaching on homosexuality is a cause of sexual abuse and must be changed.

“There can be no doubt that not homosexuality as such, but its ecclesiastical tabooing and pathologization is a risk factor for sexual abuse by narcissistic or even sexually immature clerics,” she said in a widely publicized speech to the German bishops in May, 2019.

“This is a specifically Catholic problem. The Catholic Church will only gain credibility and persuasiveness in this question if one corrects the outdated ecclesial defamation of homosexuality and integrates corresponding findings from humanities and cultural studies as well as social learning processes into the teaching and liturgy of the church.”

Other ZdK members have a long track record of working with the German hierarchy while disputing established Church teaching.

In the 1990s, Pope St. John Paul II directly intervened to halt Caritas and other Catholic groups from providing government-mandated counselling services women are required to receive before they can obtain an abortion.

In response, in 1999, ZdK members founded Donum Vitae, a “private group” which continued to provide counselling services and issue the necessary paperwork for women to obtain abortions. Despite numerous interventions by the Vatican, including a 2007 directive from the CDF that all Catholics “renounce not only a leading collaboration with Donum Vitae, but any form of support,” the ZdK continues to defend the orgaization’s participation in the abortion process.

In 2018, Cardinal Marx issued a letter to ZdK, praising the work of Donum Vitae and allowing those who work in its “pregnancy conflict counselling centers” to also work in official Catholic pregnancy centers, provided they “respect the rules and regulations that apply there.”

In 2015, ZdK members also voted to demand the Church offer liturgical blessings for same-sex couples, and this is expected to be one of the first recommendations of the Synodal Forum on sexual morality. Such calls have been repeatedly made by prominent ZdK members, including the former German Minister for the Environment Barbara Hendricks, who has publicly criticized the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. Hendricks entered a same-sex partnership in 2017.

In February this year, a number of senior ZdK members published an open letter in the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, calling for a “fresh start” on sexual morality in the Catholic Church.

While the ZdK has called for such blessings for several years, several German bishops have indicated an increasing amount of support for the idea.

In August, 2019, the official media outlet of the Church in Germand carried an interview with emeritus Bishop Dieter Geerlings in which he said that in order to advance reform of Church teaching on sexual morality it is necessary to discard the “problematic understanding of unity of the Church.”

“In agreement with the diocese of Münster, I submitted a paper on changing the Church’s sexual morality for the synodal path,” he said.

Cardinal Marx has also made numerous statements suggesting an openness to the idea of same-sex blessings in churches.

In a February 2018 radio interview, Marx said that he “did not see any problems” with allowing priests or pastoral workers “to give people in concrete situations some encouragement.” Earlier this year, as he announced the German’s “binding synodal path,” Marx said that “We have lost the ability to talk to people about this. The Church does not understand what sexuality means to the individual.”

In May 2019, the ZdK Plenary Assembly discussed the group’s participation in the Synodal Way, while at the same time voting “to set up a forum in parallel to the forums already proposed by the [German Episcopal Conference] on the subject of ‘women’s access to ordination offices’.”

In a recent interview, Sternberg was quoted in support of female ordination, saying that “We have been demanding female deacons for a long time.”

With the announcement of the Synodal Fora by the ZdK in cooperation with the German bishops’ conference, concern is growing in the wider Church, including in Rome, that the “binding synodal process” will lead to a series of public breaches with established Church teachings under the authority of the German hierarchy.

Pope Francis issued a lengthy letter to all the faithful of Germany in June, in which he told the German bishops that any synodal process who require years of careful preparation and study.

Francis wrote that the German bishops must avoid seeking to “adapt the Church to the zeitgeist” or proceed with “plans and mechanisms” which could prove “anything but helpful for a common path.” Instead, the Pope urged the bishops to focus on evangelization and respect for the sensus ecclesiae, which he said “frees us from self-loathing and ideological tendencies.”

The subsequent announcement in July of the membership of the Synodal Fora, and the emergence of near-final draft statutes for the Synodal Assembly appears to some sources in Rome to be an implicit rejection of the pope’s instruction, an impression seemingly underscored by the selection of the Central Committee as a key partner in leading the synodal process.

“No German bishop, no member of the ZdK wants to leave the universal church, which is not an issue at all,” Marx told reporters in July. “Reading the signs of the times in the light of the Gospel, that’s what matters,” Marx said.

Some senior Church figures, however, have expressed concern that the synodal process could lead to a de facto German national church at odds with the global Catholic community.


If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!

Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.


About Catholic News Agency 10093 Articles
Catholic News Agency (www.catholicnewsagency.com)

9 Comments

  1. Luther’s apostasy seems innocent compared with an ecclesiastical glorification of sin in among its most heinous forms. As for Cardinal Marx et al, his name couldn’t be more perfect. The first Marx encouraged the destruction of the family etc. This one goes a few better: the family, young people, virtue and the Church. Surely Satan must be smiling, and will undoubtedly cast his vote at the synod. May our dear Lord have mercy on us!

  2. “The Central Committee…”
    Have these narcissists no awareness of history? No self-awareness?
    Indeed, “The Central Committee…” speaks loudly the nature of this gang of secular materialists employing a “katholic” veneer, and with Marx at head of the table, appropriately, in more ways than one.

  3. In synodal Germania the universal Church is dragged to the side to be ingested whole, something like food scraps attacked by CROWS. One looks for a dove and at least expects better from cardinals…

    In the United States we are REMINDED of an identical road kill. Lo, nearly half a century back in 1976, it came to pass that a national Call to Action Conference was convened in Detroit’s Cobo Hall (site of the latest-model North American Auto Show!).

    As with Cardinal/Pope Reinhard Marx’s Germania today, the new-Church assembly was a KITCHEN-BLENDER MIX of ordained, religious, and laity. Perched atop the American Bicentennial and with Rousseau’s noble-savage face (North America like Amazonia!), the Call to Action featured folding chairs—very “folding”—for 100 bishops, and for some 1,200 other voting delegates and 1,500 hyperventilating observers.

    This counterfeit-Pentecost discovered that, above all else, the church must fix chronic racism, sexism, militarism and poverty. And, THEREFORE, that before all else, the Church—as a rite of passage—must fold on the celibacy of priests, the male-only clergy, homosexuality and contraceptive Technocracy—-

    And (still more, as now in mimic Germania), all levels of the Church must have their fingerprints on important decisions, with no clear distinction between the ROLES of the Apostolic/ordained and of the Laity—roles which according to the Second Vatican Council (a mere council!) differ in “kind as well as degree” (Lumen Gentium).

    After a biblical three days the Cobo Hall chairs were folded. And after three years the degraded bishops as a whole disowned the de-facto hijacking. And yet the skeletal remains still cling like a barnacle to the Barque of Peter. The diminished membership expresses perplexity at their predictable inability to attract the equally-superficial and ideological next generation. And today new-Church Germania remains clueless.

    Instead, with G.K. Chesterton, and in words that can be rendered universally in all languages including German: “The Catholic Church is the only thing that FREES A MAN from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.”

  4. Note well Catholic friends:

    The very words of Frau Julia Knop “of the Binding German Synod,” which are the very same that flowed from the lips of “His-Former-Eminence” McCarrick, who “instructed” the faithful that sexual abuse was caused by “sexually immature clerics.”

    Frau Knop, like Cardinal Marx, and “His Forgetfulness of Argentina” all share “the mind of McCarrick.”

  5. Martin Luther and Henry Tudor defaulted to their own religion when the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ did not suit their sensibilities. But Satan does not want to leave the Church, he wants the Church to abort, defy and divorce Jesus.

2 Trackbacks / Pingbacks

  1. SATVRDAY EDITION – Big Pulpit
  2. Synods and Sausages: Making a mess in Germany – Catholic World Report

Leave a Reply to Chris in Maryland Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

All comments posted at Catholic World Report are moderated. While vigorous debate is welcome and encouraged, please note that in the interest of maintaining a civilized and helpful level of discussion, comments containing obscene language or personal attacks—or those that are deemed by the editors to be needlessly combative or inflammatory—will not be published. Thank you.


*