“German Catholicism Is Not in Schism, But Apostasy”

The article also claims that October 2023 will be a turning point in the history of the Church and will deeply mark the legacy of Pope Francis, because “what is happening in Germany will collide with the first session of the Synod of Synodality for a Synodal Church.”

The author proceeds to present an inventory of what can be discovered in the preparatory texts, and in the texts already voted on definitively during the last Synodal Assembly. Thus it amounts to “a weaponization of the crime and sin of sexual abuse in order to reinvent Catholicism,” an observation that had already been widely made, in particular by certain German bishops.

There will also come “the rejection of settled Catholic understandings of human love and its expression,” and “an unconditional surrender to gender ideology and its deconstruction of the biblical concept of the human person.” 

According to Weigel, the Synodal Path is “a revolution in ecclesiology that, in the name of lay empowerment, empties the offices of bishop and priest of their full sacramental character.” This stripping has already been voted in the last Assembly through the will to set up a system of government shared between the bishops and the laity.

Weigel continues: “The [Synodal Path leads to] gradual reduction of the Church to wealthy NGO [non-governmental organization], doing good works defined by the politically correct consensus of the moment.” This is the high point, or rather the conclusion of all of what precedes.

More an Apostasy Than Schism

The author concludes: “German Catholicism is often said to be in a de facto schism. That is an inadequate description of the German crisis. The German Catholicism manifest in the documents of the Synodal Path is in apostasy. The German Synodal Path does not accept the ‘faith which was once for all delivered to the saints’ (Jude 1:3).”

“Rather, one of its ‘foundational’ texts affirmed earlier this year that, ‘in the Church, too, legitimate views and ways of life can compete with one another, even in terms of core beliefs,” which indeed appears as a contradiction to the truth of the faith.

This American writer’s observation tallies with previous analyses, but it encompasses at a glance the terrible cancer that is developing in the Church in Germany. It is a cancer because the tumor, as George Weigel fears, will invade the Church through the Synod on Synodality.