Ed Condon wonders what the Pope will do about the Germans:
.- The year 2020 is one month old and already stacked high with expectation for Pope Francis.
The long-awaited McCarrick report is due “early” this year; so too is an expected apostolic exhortation following the Synod on the Amazon. Also on the horizon is a long-trailed but still to be delivered new constitution reforming the Roman curia.
But bubbling under the surface is one question which could ultimately define the whole of Francis’s papacy: what will he do about the Germans?
The German bishops’ conference has been on a collision course with Rome ever since they announced a two-year “binding synodal process” to address – and reform – universal Church teaching and discipline on issues ranging from clerical celibacy to women’s ordination to same-sex unions.
As they publicly staked out their intentions last year, in partnership with the Central Committee of German Catholics (who hold opposite views to the Church on all of these issues), every effort was made to make them change course.
Pope Francis himself wrote a letter to the whole Church in Germany, warning against a false synodality, one rooted in making the Church conform to modern secular morals and thought, which he called “a new Pelagianism” which seeks “to tidy up and tune the life of the Church, adapting it to the present logic.”
The result, Francis said, would be a “well organized and even ‘modernized’ ecclesiastical body, but without soul and evangelical novelty.”
When Francis’s pastoral concerns went unheeded, different curial heads gave explicit warnings, first in private, then in public: the German plans were a challenge to the universality of Catholic teaching and discipline and not valid.
Undeterred, the German bishops began the first session of their synodal process in Frankfurt yesterday.
It is unclear what Pope Francis will do in response, but what is clear is that the German agenda touches every major issue on the papal desk this year.
Go here to read the rest. What will the Pope do? Other than empty verbiage to appease Catholics stupid enough to think he gives a fig about orthodoxy, PopeWatch assumes he will do nothing as the gangsters at the helm of the Catholic Church in Germany carry out a mass apostasy.
“binding synodal process”
I find it amusing everytime I read that. Every bishop is an heir of the apostles and sole authority in their diocese. No national groupings has any “authority” over them. It is very clear in Canon Law. Any bishop who follows what this “binding synodal process” come up with does so willingly.