Although it had not been explicitly on the publicly available agenda of the DBK assembly, a vote on approving the committee preparing the Synodal Council had been widely expected to take place in Augsburg.
The DBK’s co-sponsor of the Synodal Way, the Central Committee of German Catholics lay lobby (ZdK), had previously approved the statutes of the preparatory committee on Nov. 25, and is likely to harshly criticize the bishops for not following suit.
The removal of the vote on the synodal committee from the bishops’ agenda marks perhaps the first time that Vatican pressure has caused the DBK to balk from moving forward with a Synodal Way priority since the alleged reform effort began in 2019.
Of all the Synodal Way’s priorities, the Vatican has been particularly critical of the Synodal Council. In January 2023, the heads of three Vatican departments wrote to the DBK criticizing the proposed council as incompatible with Catholic ecclesiology, emphasizing that neither the bishops nor the Synodal Way had any authority to establish it.
More recently, Pope Francis wrote a private letter to four German Catholic laywomen, describing the preparatory committee, and not just the Synodal Council, as one of “numerous steps being taken by significant segments” of the Church in Germany “that threaten to steer it increasingly away from the universal Church’s common path.”
The committee, which claims Germany’s 27 ordinaries among its members, held its first meeting November 10-11, but eight bishops were absent, with four of them rejecting the committee outright.
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