The Decline of the Catholic Church in Germany and the reasons for it
The controversy surrounding the gender flyer of the German Bishops Conference is symptomatic of the situation of the Catholic Church in Germany.
October 30, 2015 05:18 EST
Dr. Michael Schneider-Flagmeyer
Bavarian bishops walk in procession to the Basilica of the Fourteen Holy Helpers near Bad Staffelstein, Germany, in this 2012 photo. (CNS photo/Daniel Karmann, EPA) (July 28, 2014)
(October 29, 2015, Bonn, kath.net/Forum Deutscher Katholiken)
We are experiencing in our days a frightening decline of the Catholic Church in Germany. So many people have left the German Particular Church that it urgently needs to stop and reflect; an evaluation of the situation by the bishops is indispensable. The frightening thing about the whole development is that now the older generation is leaving in great numbers—the very Catholics who supposedly still benefited from catechetical religious instruction according to the doctrine of the Church. Besides the massive exodus of lay people, an especially alarming sign is the fact that many priests are abandoning their ministry, fleeing to foreign countries or retreating into niche positions, because they want to get away from the stress of the unholy diocesan bureaucracy with its oddly non-ecclesiastical business. In this regard the oldest German Diocese, Trier, stands out especially; it seems not to care at all about its priests, and consequently much too little about its congregations.
What are the reasons for this?
A flyer has just been published by the German Bishops Conference, that is, by its Secretariat with the “professionals” enlisted by it, entitled “Sensitive to the Sexes: A Catholic Interpretation of Gender”. And in it views are championed that contradict all the statements by the Pope, the cardinals, the recently concluded Roman Synod and in particular a declaration of the German-speaking group of Synod Fathers.
The controversy surrounding this flyer is symptomatic of the situation of the German Particular Church, as it has developed in recent decades, as we intend to show in the following remarks.
A lot has been written about the flyer itself. The retired Curial official Paul Cardinal Cordes protested in horror against this shoddy effort. The best qualified critique of the flyer was composed by the Ordinary of Regensburg and former full professor of dogmatic theology at the University of Trier, Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer, so that we do not wish to discuss the flyer in any detail here. [A link to Bishop Voderholzer’s article is given in the original German opinion piece.]
His response contains references and links to other statements as well. Among the official statements of the Magisterium about gender ideology, we should mention especially the opinion of Pope Francis as the Supreme Pastor of the Universal Church. He has made remarks about “gender mainstreaming” on various occasions. Probably his most severe comment was that this ideology is demonic. That matters to the makers of the flyer about as much as water rolling off a duck’s back, although these scribblers constantly pick and choose from among the Pope’s statements what they can use for their ideological battle on behalf of the spirit of the age. The Synod on the Family in Rome unambiguously spoke out against gender ideology. Indeed, the Austrian Catholic news website Kath.net reported that even the German-speaking Synod Fathers, a group including the President of the German Bishops Conference, Reinhard Cardinal Marx, declared in a special intervention during the Synod on October 21: “All theories that view the sex of a human being as a subsequent construct and try to make socially acceptable the idea that it can be changed arbitrarily, are to be rejected as ideologies.”
Even this very clear statement seems to fall on deaf ears in the Secretariat of the German Bishops Conference. Now one might object that the flyer had been prepared before this joint declaration in which the President of the German Bishops Conference and Archbishop Koch, who …