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Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (l) and Georg Bätzing, Chairman of the German Bishops' Conference
Photo: Marijan Murat / dpa
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke out in favor of church reforms at the start of the Catholic Day in Stuttgart.
Sexual abuse, cover-up and slow clarification would have damaged and destroyed a lot of trust, said Steinmeier on Wednesday evening at the start of the church festival.
»I would like all the more to encourage those who are actively committed to the renewal of the Catholic Church in Germany.
I can tell you that not only I, but many people are looking at the work of the Synodal Path with curiosity and expectation.«
The Synodal Path is a reform process in the Catholic Church in Germany that has been ongoing since 2019.
It covers four subject areas:
the Catholic sexual morality,
dealing with power
the position of women
and the priestly duty of celibacy.
Steinmeier said that the results of the synodal path will largely determine what role the church will play in society in the future.
The Federal President defended the church against the accusation that it had acted too cautiously in the pandemic.
This criticism mostly came from those who had little to do with the church anyway "and who cannot or do not want to see how much good and comforting things have actually happened in silence".
»I am perplexed and surprised«
The opening of the Catholic Day was overshadowed by allegations against the chairman of the German Bishops' Conference, Georg Bätzing.
"I'm perplexed and surprised," said the bishop of the host diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Gebhard Fürst.
"I don't know the exact scope right now, but I would never do something like that in my diocese."
more on the subject
Catholic Church: Bishop Bätzing promoted priests despite allegations of harassment
The "Zeit" supplement "Christ & Welt" made it known on Tuesday that Bätzing had promoted a pastor in his Limburg diocese despite allegations of sexual harassment.
The priest is said to have verbally and physically sexually harassed a Protestant pastor in training in 2000, and later also a prospective community officer.
A diocese spokesman said that Bätzing had issued a warning against the priest.
Because the priest showed remorse and apologized, Bätzing appointed him district dean.
“Any form of harassment, assault, both verbal and physical, is a no-go.
And I don't accept that in any way," he told the dpa news agency on the sidelines of Catholic Day.
The President of the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), Irme Stetter-Karp, pointed out on Wednesday that, to the best of her knowledge, the incidents were not criminally relevant.
"But the question of why Bishop Bätzing then appointed the priest in question as regional dean in this situation is of course a question that I'm probably not the only one to ask myself, and in this respect I assume that he may have made a mistake here must also take a stand on the past.«
The Catholic Day, which runs until Sunday, includes 1,500 events and is taking place again in person for the first time in four years, albeit with far fewer participants than last time, around 25,000.
Among them are 7000 contributors alone.
90,000 people came to the 2018 Catholic Day in Münster.
In view of this decline, those responsible had to ask themselves why the much smaller Catholic Day in Stuttgart, at ten million euros, cost the same as the popular one in Münster and whether it was still justified to spend so much public money on it.
The canon lawyer Thomas Schüller criticized the Catholic Days as "expensive flash in the pan without sustainability".
Stetter-Karp admitted that the number of registrations not only had to do with Corona, but also with the fact that the Catholic Church was going through a "crisis situation".
»It is certainly no coincidence that we have more than 30 events on the urgent reform issues in the Catholic Church in our program.«