Bishops in prayer © Harald Oppitz (KNA)
Germany's Catholic bishops will meet for their spring meeting in Ingolstadt on Monday. On the agenda are the youth synod and the dialogue with Catholics in Eastern Europe, but also the topic of church and money.
On Monday, the German bishops will experience a premiere: For the first time in the 150-year history of their conference, they will meet in the diocese of Eichstatt for a plenary session. But the host bishop, Gregor Maria Hanke, might not feel like celebrating. After all, his diocese has been making headlines since the beginning of February because of a financial scandal. The loss of up to 60 million U.S. dollars (48.3 million euros) due to unsecured loans for real estate projects in the U.S. ensures that church and money are once again discussed – even if it is not officially on the agenda.
The Eichstatt case is only one part of the current discussion. While here, possibly with criminal energy, the good faith and lack of control on the part of those responsible in the diocese was exploited, in the archdiocese of Hamburg, the debate about the closure of eight Catholic schools is about the question of which tasks the church should still finance – and that is when it is in the red. All of this will be of interest to the public – agenda or not.
Exchange with Eastern European Catholics
The current 66 members of the Bishops' Conference have set themselves other priorities. They are concerned with the relationship of Catholics within Europe, especially with a view to the East. On Wednesday, they will dedicate their traditional study day during the plenary assembly to this topic. The EU countries of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are particularly in the spotlight.
Together with guests such as the theologian Tomas Halik, they want to find out how Catholics think there. The different attitudes to current topics, such as migration – a mirror image for the whole of Europe – will certainly also be discussed. But it should not stop there. The goal of the Commission for the Universal Church under Archbishop Ludwig Schick of Bamberg is dialogue.
Pope's topics in focus
Another main topic of the bishops' meeting is the upcoming youth synod in Rome in October. First of all, there are personnel ies to be dealt with in Ingolstadt, specifically: three representatives from the Conference must be elected for the meeting in the Vatican – and, of course, the content must also be discussed.
In general, this plenary assembly is again dominated by the Pope's themes. In addition to current ies of refugee work and a report on the church's own refugee work in the past year, the bishops again want to discuss the environmental and social encyclical "Laudato si".
In addition, the topics of pregnancy counseling and the possible blessing of homosexual couples have recently dominated the debate within the church – although the bishops' statements on these topics sound anything but unanimous. But even these points are – at least officially – not on the agenda in Ingolstadt. But while old rifts on pregnancy counseling don't seem quite as deep as they did a few years ago, the broad debate in the German episcopate on blessing same-sex partners is just beginning.
Christian Wolfel