Why the German church is different
Behind the synodal pathway
German Catholic identity, shaped and galvanised by its history, feels itself to be ahead of church teaching. The traumas of the past explain why that feeling need not mean the same as secularisation or Protestantism.
“We’ve already got a perfectly good Protestant Church in Germany,” Pope Francis last year recalled telling Bishop Georg Bätzing. “We don’t need another one.” Bätzing, president of the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference, has since 2019 been the most visible representative of the German “synodal pathway”, the controversial process instituted in the wake of the clerical abuse scandal to involve bishops and laity in seeking far-reaching reforms to the German Church.
The German initiative, which pre-dates and is separate from Pope Francis’ synodal exercise in the worldwide Church, held its fifth and final “synodal gathering” in Frankfurt in March, and work has now passed to a partially elected “synodal committee”. The pathway has called for reforms in all the specific areas that critics see as comprising the progressive songbook: lay decision-making, women’s ordination, admission of the divorced and remarried to Communion, priestly celibacy, teaching on homosexuality. So far, its calls have been rebuffed, though at no stage has Francis moved to shut the process down. Because it is an autonomously functioning national process seeking fundamental changes in church structures and teaching, it is easily seen, by opponents inside and outside Germany, as leaning towards schism – or Protestantism. Yet Bätzing and others vigorously protest its Catholic credentials, with a confidence and intellectual heft it would be hard to imagine in Britain.
To understand how the German synodal pathway could emerge not just as a response to a crisis and an attempt to reckon with social change, but as a heartfelt expression of Catholic identity, it is necessary to go further back: to the so-called “zero hour” of 1945, when Germany lay in ruins, but also further still, to ask what ended then. And Pope Francis is right to sense that in the German Catholic story, Protestant-ism is never far away. What came to an end in 1945, at least in what became West Germany, was the long history of German absolutism. At the time of the Reformation, the princely rulers of various German territories threw in their lot with Luther. Where this occurred, the Church became part of the state. Subsequently, in the form of full-blown state-worship, a secularised or “enlightened” Protestantism became the authoritarian backdrop to Germany’s great eighteenth-century cultural revival.
In the nineteenth century, state-worship was the oppressive vehicle of nationalist strivings, centred in the state of Prussia, that culminated in unification in 1871. Following the end of Bismarck’s empire in 1918, and shattering the fragile democracy of the subsequent Weimar Republic, absolutism reasserted itself in a terrible, madly reconstituted post-monarchical form called National Socialism. This time explicitly anti-Christian, and led by a former Catholic who struggled to understand much about the cultural tradition he claimed to fulfil except its inbuilt longing for power, it nonetheless drew on the machinery of state, and the quasi-divine role of the state itself, which had been the foundations of Protestant monarchism.
Protestant monarchism proved itself perfectly capable of taking a Catholic form. Many on the right of the Bavarian People’s Party (founded in 1918) who nostalgically wished for the return of the Bavarian kings, then in due course voted for far worse, were an example of this. Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich and Freising and later a formidable critic of Nazi anti-Catholicism, considered the revolution of 1918 to be high treason, and refused to let church bells in his diocese be rung on the death of Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democrat first president of the Weimar Republic. But the absolutism that had preceded the Republic, and which then resurged to destroy it, was Protestant in origin as well as in what might be called political theology, and its most dynamic drivers had always been the Protestant states of northern Germany.
Here and elsewhere, Catholics had been almost entirely excluded from the institutions of power (the administration, the universities, and of course the Protestant Church), even though in Bismarck’s Germany there were twice as many Catholics in Prussia as in Bavaria. The Catholic Centre Party was founded in 1870-71, making it contemporary with the unification of Germany and the proclamation of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council. The latter became Bismarck’s domestic pretext for launching his vicious Kulturkampf against the Church. The Centre Party became the political home of Germany’s sizeable Catholic minority, and an important though circumscribed force in the Weimar Republic. With a party of their own, Germany’s Catholics, scarred and galvanised by memories of the Kulturkampf, had little initial difficulty recognising National Socialism as the manic offspring of absolutist Protestantism.
In 1930, 75 per cent of the Nazi vote was non-Catholic. Despite Nazi inroads into some previously resistant Catholic areas, this tendency persisted in 1933. Electorally, Hitler’s takeover was enabled by Protestant votes. The Catholic Church in Germany had from the beginning seen National Socialism as a heathen pseudo-religion of the state, and remained a considerable thorn in the regime’s side after 1933. The bishops – but certainly not individual priests – were slow to speak out about the treatment of Jews, though in 1943 they produced a joint pastoral letter condemning all mass killing, including of “people of foreign race and descent”. When German society began to face the need for remembrance and reconstruction after 1945, the Catholic Church was able to see itself in continuity with its immediate and more distant past because of one very important fact. At no point had it succumbed to institutional Nazification, unlike Germany’s Protestant Church, which had driven itself into schism following the emergence of the Deutsche Christen, a completely affiliated wing of the state, literally the Nazi Party at prayer. Cardinal Kurt Koch’s recent invocation of the Deutsche Christen in his criticism of the German synodal pathway may have been implausible, but it took aim at the deep underlying moral self-image of the post-war Catholic Church.
After the absolutist machine finally imploded in 1945, one consequence of “zero hour” was that Protestantism lost the political and cultural privilege it had enjoyed for so long, and Germany’s two main Churches were on an equal footing which they have shared ever since. The major figures of the pre-war Centre Party became founding fathers and leading lights of the post-war Christian Democrats (CDU): the most prominent being Konrad Adenauer, the Rhineland Catholic who was the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic. Indeed, the borders of the Bonn Republic, and the settlement within those borders of large numbers of people who had migrated westwards from German-speaking eastern Europe, gave it a Catholic majority. This suited Adenauer, but in the longer term the end of Catholic under-representation, and of Protestant cultural dominance, meant in both Churches the severance of any direct connection between altar and ballot box.
There was of course another German Republic, where absolutism continued in Communist form until 1989. But the double minority status, and extreme ideological marginalisation, of Catholicism in historically Protestant then officially atheist East Germany, make the pre-history of current debates an essentially West German affair. For a time after the war, Catholicism in the Federal Republic could carry on in the emotional mindset of a subculture – sequestered in its traditions, meekly grateful to find itself an accepted part of the status quo, and politically docile towards the CDU, in which a number of former Nazis had found a home. But as the children of wartime came of age – often in big towns and cities – they saw little reason to cleave to the markers of a marginalised identity, such as distinctly Catholic social milieux and a self-reassuring insistence on church authority, or to think that being Catholic entailed the political preferences of their parents. The process was also underpinned by wider sociological shifts. German universities were no longer training grounds for the state administration and the Protestant academic elite, but institutes of mass education.
On the campuses of the new republic, young Catholics began relationships with young Protestants without confessional difference appearing a major consideration. Over the course of their married lives, they would find it increasingly strange to be officially excluded from full participation in each other’s traditions. Current debates about the German synodal pathway, and arguably the pathway itself, have their origin in the 1960s, when a young and newly empowered Catholic middle class began to define itself outside traditional forms of allegiance, and to put away the defensive bulwarks which had sustained Catholic identity for generations, indeed for centuries. At this point, an educated and socially confident laity found itself looking to a hierarchy many of whose members embodied a Catholicism shaped in the Weimar Republic and the Nazi period. The bishops were hit thick, fast and eloquently with the post-war facts of life: the need for a Church attuned not only to the interdenominational context of religious identity in Germany, but also to the complex social realities of the urbanised world in which most of the younger generation had grown up.
By extension, such a Church would be in sympathy too with the international panoply of social and political concerns animating the youth movements of the 1960s. So it was that in Germany the Second Vatican Council seemed to give official form and sanction to a pre-existing dynamic. After all, going out into the wider world as Catholics had been the lived experience of younger adult members of the Church for some time before Gaudium et Spes. Moreover, because their view of society could be felt to have mandated the Council just as much as the other way round, it could easily impose an interpretation of what the Council had meant, in the face of which no subsequent assertions of central church authority would be entirely secure. Humanae Vitae was given a merciless kicking at the annual lay congress (Katholikentag) of 1968. Yet precisely because there was such felt intimacy between the aims of the Council and the historical identity of Germany’s younger Catholics, the sense of betrayal would be all the greater as the decades wore on.
The changes heralded by the 1960s became societal commonplaces among all groups, including church-going Catholics, and the Church seemed to many to want to detach itself from the times rather than to read them. In the immediate aftermath of 1968, though, something else seemed possible. Cardinal Julius Döpfner of Munich, then president of the German Bishops’ Conference, saw the need for a visible effort at unity following the turmoil over Humanae Vitae. Between 1971 and 1975 he presided over the Würzburg Synod, convened to implement the Second Vatican Council’s reforms. It had a majority of elected participants, and allowed its 140 lay representatives full involvement in passing binding resolutions – something for which Paul VI had granted permission. The Synod changed the feel of German parish life, for example by creating the now staple figure of the “pastoral coordinator” (Pastoralreferent), a paid position, usually requiring a degree in Catholic theology, with responsibility for overseeing everything from youth work to pastoral care of the elderly. The Synod also identified a need for practical changes in a variety of areas later taken up by the synodal pathway – over which it hangs as a lost opportunity and the source of unfinished business. On the question of divorced and remarried Catholics, probably the most neuralgic pastoral issue to have gathered pace since the post-war period, it asked the German bishops to work on providing an “urgently needed clarification” of the pastoral and sacramental position, to be put as a votum to Rome. In the meantime it requested from the Pope a “pastorally satisfying solution”. Neither was forthcoming. Equally importantly, though, the feeling of solidarity – even amid differences of opinion – between laity and bishops became fragmented when the “process” represented by the Synod, as Döpfner tellingly referred to it, was met in the years and papacies that followed with an increasing emphasis on the Church as unchanging fact. Würzburg became a happy memory.
But throughout the ensuing decades, in the suburban churches that had sprung up since the war, it remained possible to think that the Second Vatican Council’s spirit was merely latent, awaiting its full realisation. Many priests had been formed by the same large-scale shifts as their parishioners, and their pastoral instincts were recognisably not those of a fortress Church. But those willing to credit their vocation to the heady times in which they had first heard it were not considered episcopabile in the years of John Paul II and then of Benedict XVI – the latter a product of the same history which shaped Germany’s generation of ’68. You did not need to owe your formation to the 1960s to challenge the spirit of retrenchment, though. Karl Lehmann, from 1983 Bishop of Mainz and eventually a cardinal, was an intellectually gifted pastor and, like Joseph Ratzinger, a former professor, who stayed true to the broader traditions of modern German philosophy which Ratzinger always viewed with suspicion, specifically the idea of philosophy itself as the secular intellectual expression of religious truth.
The theoretical insight that witnessing to that truth is a form of what the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger called “being in the world”, which underlay Lehmann’s doctoral dissertation on Heidegger’s work, was put to a severe practical test during his time as president of the Bishops’ Conference. In 1992, in the wake of German reunification, the Bundestag voted to revise abortion legislation. The new law provoked an intervention from Germany’s constitutional court, but in the modified version passed in 1995 its essential requirements remained unchanged. It stipulated that termination during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy was unpunishable (though still technically unlawful) if the woman had sought pregnancy counselling from any of a number of state-recognised advisory services, who in each case would issue a document certifying that the counselling had been obtained. Closely followed and egged on in Rome, controversy erupted over whether Catholic pregnancy advice services should participate in such a system, providing certification which could be used to access abortion.
In January 1998 John Paul II required German dioceses to stop Catholic advice services issuing the certificates, whereupon a majority of bishops, led by Lehmann, proposed that Catholic services should remain in the state system but provide a comprehensive, and legally binding, plan of support for individual women rather than just a stamped form. As Rome well saw, though, this document too would fulfil the state’s need for proof of counselling, and it was important that it should: the bishops argued that if acquiring this proof was ruled out in advance then women would seek advice elsewhere, and the Church would lose the opportunity to dissuade them from terminating. In what now looks like a dress rehearsal for the synodal pathway, a flurry of German bishops shuttled back and forth to Rome to propose ever new, and invariably rejected, definitions of what Catholic pregnancy counselling entailed and what the documentation might state, while a minority hardcore of opponents sought and received support from Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congreg-ation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
In November 1999 Lehmann was forced to concede that in accordance with the Pope’s wishes the Church’s pregnancy advice services could not remain in the state counselling system, and as the millennium turned dioceses began withdrawing from it. A last pocket of resistance was mopped up by Rome in 2002. Lehmann had fought for a vision of the Church meeting the world on the world’s terms in order to change it. Mean-while the Cardinal Prefect, instrumental in shaping the Vatican’s response to events in his homeland, had offered a powerful practical demonstration of the Church’s “unworlding” (Entweltlichung), which would become a central pillar of his later theology. Joseph Ratzinger, it should not be forgotten, was once the great theological hope of a modernising German Catholicism that understood how the ground had shifted after 1945.
Yet he was promoted through the German Church on the back of little pastoral experience, and this, coupled with his lack of Karl Lehmann’s sympathy with secular intellectual culture, meant he encountered nothing that might dislodge the emotional cornerstone of his own generation: a bastion Church, symbol of the life-world that had withstood barbarism. He shared with Hans Küng, his one-time Tübingen colleague and later theological adversary, whom John Paul II stripped of the right to teach, a tendency to invest the idea of “being a Christian” – Küng’s famous book title – with an overweening ethical pathos which they both sublimated in love of Mozart. Benedict XVI’s apostolic letter of 2007, Summorum Pontificum, relaxing restrictions on the use of the pre-Vatican Council liturgy, was a swansong to the Bavaria of Joseph Ratzinger’s youth.
There was no clamour in German parishes to make use of a licence to pretend twentieth-century Catholic emancipation had never happened, and the moral meaning the old rite held for Benedict was lost on many of his fans in the anglophone culture wars. During the tenure of Benedict’s successor, those who were children at the time of the Council have entered positions of authority. The wider aims of Francis’ pontificate have encouraged recovery of the unafraid energies of their parents’ generation: the Church of the 1968 Katholikentag and the Synod of Würz-burg, and with it the pastoral sensibilities of Döpfner and Lehmann. Representing the synodal pathway, Bishop Bätzing (born 1961) makes up one half of an embattled double act whose other member is Irme Stetter-Karp (born 1956), president of the influential lay body the Central Committee of German Cath-olics. They speak with the voice of those whose memories are long, yet entirely post-conciliar.
Those memories are haunted by the feeling not only that reform’s true course was cut short, but that commitment to reform simply reflected the historical truth of the German Church once it had achieved the political and social meaning long denied it. Seen like this, not to want to rescue the 1960s vision, to freight it with the major social questions of the intervening decades, and to be guided by the voice of an empowered laity, is to be in denial about what it means to be German and Catholic. Critics of the process in the German Church do not have a monopoly on accusations of identity loss. The most vociferous of those critics owe their preferment to Benedict XVI, and so to a competing, but not finally distinct, analysis of what the Church meant in post-war German society. More moderate sceptics able to take longer views, notably the 90-year-old Cardinal Walter Kasper, recognise how the modern social history of German Catholicism gives rise to some unattractive features of the synodal pathway: its tendency to appear academic, entitled, and too quick to assume that its concerns are those of the world. But even if, as seems likely, the synodal pathway hits a brick wall in Rome on everything from women’s ordination to a national synodal council involving bishops, priests and laity, the energies which the pathway is channelling will not be diffused.
Perhaps Pope Francis, who after all once intended to pursue doctoral studies in Frankfurt, has let the German discussions continue for this reason. For in the case of Germany he is dealing with a situation in which, for longstanding historical reasons, Catholic identity feels itself at a deep level to be ahead of church teaching. That feeling need not mean the same thing as secularisation or Protestantism. Maybe a point will come when Rome too can see the Holy Spirit at work in the complexity of the German Church’s fraught opening to modernity which it reflects.
Ian Cooper is senior lecturer in German at the University of Kent and co-director of the Centre for Modern European Literature. He has published widely on German and English literature and on German philosophy.
No comments:
Post a Comment