The Synodal Assembly — which is focused on reforming the Church — adopted a paper in Frankfurt on Friday to allow for same-sex couples to have their relationships blessed by the German Catholic Church from 2026.
Of the 202 members of the Synodal Assembly, 176 voted in favor of the paper, while 14 against and 12 abstained.
Allowing blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples has been among the key demands in the Synodal Path reform process, which has been ongoing since 2019…. More
— Rorate Caeli on German Crisis
Synod using clerical abuse crisis as revolutionary pretext?
“… Some German Catholics have voiced concern that the abuse crisis is being exploited in order to introduce the Synodal Way’s revolutionary goals.
The sex-abuse scandal “is only being used for the radical restructuring of the Church,” said Meuser, himself an abuse survivor. “Because of abuse, we need abuse prosecution, not ‘Church reform,’” he added.
Commenting on the Synodal Way’s Facebook group, German Catholic layman Thomas Roik decried how abuse has been “instrumentalized to enforce political Church demands,” adding that it is making “a mockery of the victims.”
The Synodal Way’s claim that it is dealing with the real causes of the abuse crisis is also hotly disputed.
Writing in the Neue Zurcher Zeitung on Feb. 10, German Catholic writer and philosopher Martin Mosebach said he believed the underpinning philosophy of the “Synodal Way” is the very one that aggravated the abuse, and which mostly took place in the post-conciliar era — a time, he said, marked by the collapse of “structures of obedience.” He asserted that the abuse took place not because priests “broke under the yoke” of discipline, doctrine and tradition, but, rather, because they had been “freed for decades from clear spiritual supervision.”
—January 25: Pope Francis decries German Synodal Way as ‘Neither helpful or serious’
What for Germany and the whole Church now, ten years later?
No more traditional priesthood a goal for some?
Pope Benedict XVI
“The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.
She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social privileges. . . .
It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek . . . The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain . . .
But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.
And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death. — from Faith and the Future (2009)
Pope Benedict XVI Lamented Blurring of Genders
Calls for “an ecology of the human being”.
2008: Pope Benedict has called for “an ecology of the human being”
Pope Benedict XVI has suggested that the need to save mankind from a destructive blurring of gender roles is as important as saving the rainforests.
He explained that defending God’s creation was not limited to saving the environment, but also about protecting man from self-destruction.
The Pope was delivering his end-of-year address to senior Vatican staff.
His words, later released to the media, emphasised his rejection of gender theory.
Speaking on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI warned that gender theory blurred the distinction between male and female and thus could lead to the “self-destruction” of the human race. More…
Still, there can, never be a new “Church” alongside the only true visible and hierarchical Church Our Lord bequeathed to mankind. As St. Augustine said,
“…no man ought to sever himself from the unity of the Church before the time of the final separation of the just and unjust, merely because of the admixture of evil men in the Church” —Saint Augustine, On Baptism, Against the Donatists, Bk. IV, The Complete Works of Saint Augustine. Ch.12.19, (1407), emphasis supplied
Updated
Catholic Critique 