One subject about which Pope Benedict felt strongly was the condition of the Church in his native Germany, and not in a good way. He quite openly questioned the nature of a Church which was so thoroughly bureaucratised. In an interview with his biographer Peter Seewald, he declared that, “In Germany we have this established and well-paid Catholicism, often with employed Catholics, who then oppose the Church with a trade-union mentality. For them the Church is only an employer towards whom they are critical. They don’t approach matters from a dynamic of faith… This I believe is the great danger threatening the Church in Germany: that she has so many paid employees and therefore a surplus of non-spiritual bureaucracy.”
This situation is squarely the result of the German Church’s funding through state taxation, whereby it is supported by donations from those who may not actually ever attend. The corollary of that system is that those who withdraw their financial support (which entails a renunciation of their Catholicism) are thereby denied the sacraments – and so are their children. “The automatic excommunication of those who don’t pay is, in my opinion, indefensible,” said Benedict. This rottenness in the German Church is, as Benedict said, what happens when there is “an excess of money”. And there is little that Christ would have had less sympathy with than an institution that is bloated, wealthy, self-serving and which excludes people from the channels of grace – the sacraments – on the basis of their willingness to pay. It takes little imagination to surmise what He would have said about it.
Yet the energies of much of the Church in Germany are taken up by the so-called Synodal Path (as distinct from the global Synodal process), which is obsessed by questions of clericalism, gender and sexuality. It has voted to reassess homosexuality and asked the Pope to reconsider the issue of women’s ordination. Inevitably there are profound differences between the bishops and lay members.
If the Synodal Path wants to be radical, it should instead ask whether the German Church’s model of funding is counter-Christian. But that would require painful self-sacrifice and willingness to change.
The German Church has moved a long way from the Bavarian Catholicism in which Pope Benedict grew up. More is the pity.
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