Features

German Cardinal Walter Kasper has called for the role of women in the Church to be upgraded and for greater respect to be shown towards homosexuals.

On Monday afternoon, the Vatican Communications Office announced that the adoption of a “Message to the People of God”, originally planned for Monday midday, would probably be postponed until Wednesday.

The bishop of Essen, Franz-Josef Overbeck, has said the ongoing Synod on Synodality in Rome was addressing many questions being asked by Catholics in Germany.

“Laity possess a vision of reality and a spiritual experience that must be recognised and welcomed so that the work of evangelisation and the life of the Church can be fulfilled,” writes Professor Serena Noceti.

Only one in five people in Germany believe that Pope Francis can modernise the Catholic Church. Nine years ago, it was one in two.

Several German Catholic bishops voiced their expectations of the World Synod at the autumn plenary assembly of the German Bishops’ Conference in Wiesbaden on Wednesday.

Polish Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki, has intensified his criticism of the Catholic Church in Germany, saying it is going through its greatest crisis since the Reformation while Catholic women’s associations, reform groups and victims’ initiatives called on the German bishops to take immediate action.

The president of the German Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Georg Baetzing, has said he disagrees with the Vatican’s ban on the ordination of homosexual men to the priesthood.

Several hundred people gathered near Cologne Cathedral on Wednesday evening to hold a blessing service that catered especially for LGBTQI and remarried people.

Luxembourg Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich and Bishop Bertram Meier of Augsburg have warned against expecting too much progress on reform from the World Synod starting in Rome in October.