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Posted on 01/17/2026 2:27:14 PM PST by ebb tide
As Pope Leo XIV meets with his Apostolic Nuncio for Germany, Monsignor Nikola Eterovic, on Saturday, the very real possibility of schism with the Catholic Church in Germany looms.
“It’s alleged the German Church wants to put the German laity on the same level as the bishops and also let them control the cash,” according to a report in the Italian language publication Il Giornale by Nico Spuntoni.
Spuntoni explains:
This is a project, already approved by the powerful Central Committee of German Catholics, that will create a permanent body in which laypeople will be on an equal footing with bishops. This Synodal Conference will have decision-making power and be able to introduce changes to doctrine by majority vote, forcing those who disagree to provide a public justification. In addition, the Conference will take control of the financial resources of the extremely wealthy German Church.
The Holy See’s concern over what many interpret as a trajectory toward schism extends far beyond Germany’s national boundaries.
Spuntoni suggests that the German Church would like to trigger a contagion that would spread through the rest of the Roman Catholic Church.
An unpublished document shows that in 2021, Benedict XVI contacted Cardinal Reinhard Marx, then-head of the German Bishops’ Conference and chief proponent of Germany’s “Synodal Way,” to express his “great concern” about the synodal process in Germany.
“Vatican sources confirm that in recent years Ratzinger was very skeptical about the direction taken by the German Church and was convinced that ‘this path will do harm and end badly if it is not stopped,’” wrote Spuntoni. “Marx ignored the appeal of the Pope Emeritus.”
“Now it is Leo XIV’s turn,” said the Il Giornale author, who noted that the Pope may turn to Cardinal Mario Grech’s report to the consistory, which stated that “it is always up to the bishop of Rome to suspend the synodal process if necessary.”
“Prevost shares Benedict XVI’s concerns,” said Spuntoni, who warned that if Pope Leo “lacks the strength to say no to the Synodal Conference project, there is a risk that the German avalanche could become a schism for the universal Church.”
READ: Italian bishops’ newspaper appears to defend gender ‘transitions’ for minors
The Synodal Way is a heterodox reform project launched by the German Bishops’ Conference and the Central Committee of German Catholics in December 2019.
By 2023, an overwhelming majority of the members of the Synodal Way, including more than two-thirds of the German bishops, voted in favor of heretical documents calling for women deacons, “blessings” of same-sex unions and even “transgender” priests in a text replete with gender ideology.
Cardinal Gerhard Müller, former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), blasted the heretical German Synodal Way at the time, saying it was worse than schism and calling it a variant of “materialistic and nihilistic woke culture” that has abandoned “the very essence of Christianity.”
Müller explained in an interview with the conservative German magazine Tichys Einblicke that while the schismatic Orthodox Church kept its focus on Christ, the Synodal Way in Germany has abandoned “the very essence of Christianity … in favor of its transformation into a variant of the materialistic and nihilistic woke culture of man’s self-redemption and self-creation.”
“Instead of the word of God in Holy Scripture and Church Tradition, one refers to the ‘authorities’ like Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Helmut Kentler, or Yuval Harari,” Müller continued.
The German cardinal furthermore said that “woke culture,” which is also represented in the Synodal Way, leads humanity further down the path of self-destruction. At the root of this problem Müller identifies a “wrong anthropology which makes the marriage of man and woman an arbitrary variant of self-centered libido.”
Proponents of the German “Synodal Way” are “propagandists of a secularized church that has distanced itself from Christ, who want to cast out the violations of the natural and revealed anthropology and sexual morality by destroying it,” wrote Cardinal Müller in a LifeSiteNews essay in 2022.
“The main goal of the whole campaign is the preservation of Christianity as the civil religion of the secular state and of the largely religiously agnostic and indifferent society as a whole,” said Müller. “Therefore, one offers itself to the ‘modern world’ – whatever that is supposed to be – as a socio-psychologically useful religious and social service organization."
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By 2023, an overwhelming majority of the members of the Synodal Way, including more than two-thirds of the German bishops, voted in favor of heretical documents calling for women deacons, “blessings” of same-sex unions and even “transgender” priests in a text replete with gender ideology.
All over the world the oddity is the lack of a schism.
Politics, religion....
Prevost will have to pick a side soon... he either puts the hammer down on the Krauts or confirms them in their errors. There’s no middle way on this.
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