Following the conclusion of the Synodal Path at the weekend, the eastern German theology professor Julia Knop has sharply criticised the outcome of the Catholic reform project in Germany and the behaviour of the bishops.
In particular, she said, the three-year process of consultations had had no healing impact on the problem of abuse in the Church. “At the crucial point where healing could actually begin, the bishops refused to take action on the Synodal Path: they won’t relinquish any of their power,” Knop told the Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper on Monday.
The theologian from Erfurt was one of the 230 members of the Synodal Assembly which held its last meeting for the time being in Frankfurt at the weekend. The most sensitive area for the bishops, she said, was power, their own privileges and their own role in the system. “This isn’t to be touched in any way. And any attempt to do so immediately triggers their defensive reflex.”
A reform resolution for greater co-determination for laypeople was taken off the agenda of the meeting because of resistance from the ranks of the German Bishops’ Conference. In terms of the role of women in the Catholic Church, Knop said that the resolutions passed on this issue did not go beyond the state of the 1970s. “The Catholic predicament is that no regression amounts to progress today.”
The Synodal Assembly had decided by a large majority that the bishops should lobby Rome to permit the female diaconate, i.e. the lowest level of ordination, but not the ordination of women priests. “It is hardly possible to be even more defensive, even weaker,” said Knop. She called the exclusion of women from ordination as priests and bishops “discriminatory and deeply unjust”.
Originally reported by KNA Germany.
