German reformers see positive signs in Synod conclusion
“Sustainable synodal structures will bring about a significant change in the Church,” said German lay leader Thomas Söding.
Pope Francis
praying with delegates at the Synod on Synodality in Rome on 12 October.
Vatican Media / CNA
German bishops and lay leaders said the conclusion of the Synod on Synodality left the door open for their once-controversial reform ideas, despite disappointment at its failure to approve women deacons.
They were cautiously positive about the Synod’s final document. “Synodality for all levels of the Church is set and cannot be reversed,” said Bishop Felix Genn Münster.
Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg, the president of the German bishops’ conference, said the text was “timid but irreversible”.
Irme Stetter-Karp, president of the influential Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), criticised the lack of progress on women but called Pope Francis’s immediate adoption of the Synod’s final document “a small sensation”.
“Sustainable synodal structures will bring about a significant change in the Church,” said the ZdK vice president Thomas Söding.
Bätzing said the German Church’s Synodal Way initiative, which initially aroused strong Vatican opposition, “got a boost” from the Synod. He said they would continue discussions with the universal Church to find solutions to the challenges it raised.
Among other things, the Synodal Way meetings proposed a re-examination of priestly celibacy and female ordination and a “synodal board” to govern the Church with clerical-lay parity.
Bätzing noted that the final document’s most controversial article kept the question of women deacons open. “The attempt to remove this issue from the synodal debate has failed,” he said.
He also saw possible reforms to the role of bishops: “Should we stay among ourselves or do we at least open the bishops’ conference to believers from our country for a guest status with the right to speak?” he asked.
However, not all the German responses were positive. Stetter-Karp criticised the Synod for not dealing enough with Church structures. “They are one of the reasons why abuse of power, sexual violence and cover-ups have been able to happen for so long,” she said.
The “We Are Church” group said the Synod was a “turning point in Church history” but said: “The continuing discrimination against women shows how little respect there is for the baptismal dignity of women.”
Synodal Way organisers announced the reform movement would meet in early 2026, three years after their final session last year, to review how its decisions had been implemented.
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