“Heiliger Vater,” “Querido Hermano.” The Pen-Tip Duel Between Rome and the Church of Germany

Even Walter, Cardinal Kasper, a/k/a Kasper the Friendly Ghost, a leading 'progressive theologian' opposes the schismatic 'Synodal Way'!

From Settimo Cielo

By Sandro Magister

The days go by, but where the exchange of letters between Cardinal Reinhard Marx and the Pope will end up continues to be an enigma.

A chronicle of the affair can help in understanding it, but the first thing to be be kept in mind is the context, that “Synodal path” which the Church of Germany started on three years ago and whose goals are already written down, demanded by an overwhelming majority of bishops and laity: elective offices, end of priestly celibacy, sacred orders for women, revolutionized sexual morality. A nightmare even for Pope Francis, who in vain, with a letter dated June 29 2019 “to the people of God who are on their way in Germany,” tried to stop the drift. And now he may be trying again, precisely with his answer to the letter from Marx.

The first act of this correspondence is in fact the letter that Cardinal Marx wrote to the pope on May 21.

In the letter, Marx exaggerates the influence of sexual abuse on the Church’s fate. He states that it has come to “an institutional and systemic failure,” for which all are “co-responsible.” But “the turning point to get out of this crisis” exists - he writes - “and it is only the ‘Synodal path’.” And to this end he offers his resignation as archbishop of Munich and Freising, as a “personal signal for a new restart of the Church and not only in Germany.”

At first no one knows anything about this letter, but on June 4 Marx makes it public, declaring that he was authorized to do so that same day by the pope.

The next day, June 5, German episcopal conference president Georg Bätzing, bishop of Limburg, interviewed by the television channel Ardmediathek, fully supports the thesis expressed by Marx:

“Such a systemic failure has been perceived in the Church that there can only be systemic responses, and these responses must be fundamental. This is the message that Cardinal Marx expresses clearly and strengthens us in carrying out the ‘Synodal path’ .”

But then, on June 8, something unusual appears on the front page of “L’Osservatore Romano”: a letter to the editor of the Vatican newspaper signed by an esteemed elderly cardinal, Julian Herranz, a great canonist and in this capacity co-author of the juridical reforms of the last two pontificates in the matter of sexual abuse.

Herranz does not make the slightest explicit mention of Cardinal Marx’s letter, but disputes its main thesis, that of the “systemic” character of the crisis. Responsibility for the misdeeds does not belong to all, it does not belong to the whole Church, but is personal to those who commit them. The Church may be sullied by the sins of its members and discredited by the “strong powers” of this world, but it still remains holy and saving, and for this reason must be defended even more.

“One does not abandon the Mother when she is wounded,” Herranz concludes, quoting Francis. It is hard to imagine that he published this letter, featured so prominently in “L’Osservatore Romano,” without the pope's agreement.

On June 8 another cardinal takes the field, Walter Kasper, 88, German, considered a talented theologian and always classified as a progressive, identified repeatedly by Pope Francis, from the beginning of his pontificate, as his first theologian of reference, yet he too very critical of the “Synodal path” underway in Germany.

Not even Kasper makes explicit reference to Marx's letter, but demolishes the thesis that the “Synodal path” - as it has been set up and conducted - can regenerate the German Church. Which should instead pay the greatest attention to the warnings of Pope Francis in his letter of June 2019.

Kasper expresses these positions in an interview with “Passsauer Bistumsblatt,” the weekly of the diocese of Passau. And curiously, the bishop of this diocese of Bavaria, Stefano Oster, one of the very few opponents of the “Synodal path,” was received at the Vatican by Pope Francis on June 4, the same day as the publication of Cardinal Marx's letter.

On June 10 the pope's response to Marx finally comes, made public the same day.

Francis rejects the offer of resignation, he too dwells at length on the “catastrophe” of sexual abuse, and he too recognizes that “we are being asked for a reform.” But he makes no mention of the German “Synodal path.” True reform, he writes, “begins with oneself.” “We will not be saved by surveys nor by the power of institutions; we will not be saved by the power of money nor by the opinion of the media.”

That brings us to today. Marx, tiptop boss of the German “Synodal path,” was the one who said: “We are not a branch of Rome.” But now, with his resignation rejected, he remains archbishop of Munich under closer supervision by Francis. Who with this may be aiming to keep a bit of a brake on the “Synodal path,” in fact not mentioned again by Marx in the statement with which he took note of the pope's reply.

In addition, perhaps, Francis intends to water down the German synod in the “mare magnum” of the world synod on synodality he has convened for 2023, the dense global agenda of which is already braced for the starting gun.

But that this containment operation can be successful remains to be seen. Because in the meantime the blatant rebellion, primarily German-speaking, against the “Responsum” of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith that prohibits the blessings of homosexual couples - one of the battle flags of the synod of Germany - shows that now the convoy is underway stopping is no longer an option. In this specific case due in part to the enigmatic flip-flopping of Pope Francis, who one day shows that he approves of the “Responsum” and another day no.

Getting back to the two letters of Cardinal Marx and the pope, here is a more detailed analysis of them, signed by Professor Pietro De Marco.

*

BETWEEN MARX AND BERGOGLIO

by Pietro De Marco

1. I do not intend to take anything away from the sincerity of the distress that pervades the letter in which Cardinal Reinhard Marx offers to resign. In my personal style of judgment, the truth of the individual always deserves respect; but this never exhausts the meaning, the scope, of the events of which it is a part and the comprehension of which it often alters.

The emphatic and showy “mea culpa” on the part of the ecclesiastical reform party the cardinal represents is, on on the scandal of pedophilia in the Catholic clergy, taking on forms and profiles insidious and uncontrollable for the very ones who avail themselves of them. The “mea culpa” in fact acts as an intraecclesial weapon, since properly speaking the reform party does not intend to purify what exists (the sacred order of the Church) but to liquidate it.

The error of pastors in not taking into account - or not until it was too late - the possible “personal injury” and potential for civil prosecution of the abuses, and of sanctioning only the crime of "sollicitatio" against the guilty priest, too often today gets a response of indiscriminate self-recrimination of which Marx's statements are an exemplary case. This may appease public opinion and the aggressiveness of the media - as well as impede many anti-Christian policies - but it amplifies the size and significance of the phenomenon, immersing the whole reality of the Church in it.

This reckless abjection (in any case dictated by atheological criteria) of the Church on the sin of its individual members, an effect of forgetting the human-divine reality of the Church and of the baptized, has been taking place for some time in two directions, which is worth recalling.

One consists in the reinforcement, on the part of the Church, of that objective conferral upon public opinion (not the “world,” as is commonly said, which is another concept) of authority over the Church itself. An ancient strategy of all the anti-institutional forces that Rome has always opposed; finally legitimized in a confused and acritical form - with recourse to the “laity” now become a hostile “laicité” - in the conciliar age, under the pretext of the secularism of the Christian and of listening to modern man.

The other, well known and diagnosed for some time, accentuates in compensation for the sense of guilt the self-representation of the Church in terms of auxiliary function or presence, as unified institution and moral community, fit to live in the postmodern fable of an “other possible world” of the good and just.

In this self-representation and practice it acts - after the abuse scandals - like the gravely incriminated parent who ceases to exercise responsibility and authority. And it is easy to understand that no worse could have been done worse. In fact, if the second tendency has now pervaded the current life and spirituality of Christian communities, Catholic and non-Catholic, infantilizing them, the first is of the utmost gravity, since it subjects the very institution, authority, and dignity of the Church to the judgment of the insubstantial cultures of openness and deconstruction, to their utopianism, to their entirely political moralism.

The Churches, or in concrete terms the secular hierarchies and elites that practice at every step the strategy of “asking for forgiveness” thus in fact support the most crude anti-clerical theses, renouncing the true work of government and internal and public self-correction. I say “true,” because the German stance of the “Synodal path” constitutes a false version of this, since the acts of government and self-correction that it provides consist in the construction of “acceptable” substitutes for the Catholic institution and form.

The origins of this drift are also distant. A profound observation by the great Lutheran biblical scholar, who later came to Catholicism, Heinrich Schlier, already grasped way back in the fifties the correlation between a loss of certainty in the Church’s supernatural foundation (real and subsistent in Christ) and a substitutive hypertrophy of organizations and structures, more or less reformist or from below.

“Revolutions” are known for producing bureaucracies. In the “Brief account” of his own itinerary to the Catholic Church - “where even men kneel” - the great exegete wrote that by that time (1953) in the evangelical Church “dogmatic decisions are made, terms of discipline, by an ecclesial bureaucracy.” And he warned that this, which I would call reformist extrinsicism, also tempted the beloved Catholic Church. And such, in fact, not only would be the foreseeable arrival point of Germany’s “Synodal path,” but is already its practice.

Cardinal Marx’s move, whatever his degree of awareness of it, takes place in this gamble of the German Church and supports it.

2. I wrote this before the papal letter of reply to Marx of last June 10. Three things can be observed on it straight off: (a) the pope, taking the Munich cardinal’s arguments literally, amplifies the theme of ecclesial catastrophe (“the sad story of sexual abuse”) and saturates his own text with it; (b) he also seems to say to his confrere: since you are not the only one in the Church to suffer from it, you should have like the others the courage to endure, to cope; and moreover tells him (c) to go forth, as a pastor, into the desert of desolation and of the cross, because “we will not be saved by surveys " (the onerous “Untersuchungen” on pedophilia commissioned by the German Church from outside experts) nor by “the power of institutions.”

The pope's reply, turning down the resignation, is therefore aimed at a path of change that is not institutional but personal. Francis responds tp Marx’s imbroglio with the invitation to “put skin in the game,” not to be “reform ideologists.”

Shrewd words, seeing that Rome is unable to find other resources for dealing with the German bishops and their disturbing “Synodal path.” But we must disagree when even the pope, like Cardinal Marx, insists on the idea that “the Church cannot take a step forward without accepting this crisis.” Not only because it is firmly founded in Christ but because no end of souls live in the Communion of saints on earth without finding an obstacle to charity in the sin of some priests.

The “confession of nakedness” - “I have sinned!” - as the papal letter expresses itself with a fitting image, belongs to every soul with its burden of cross. But it is sterile and without truth to soil the entire body of the holy Church in a theatrical “mea culpa,” to parry the blows of a global ideology that has no dignity as a judge but has the power of a Slanderer. See the recent case of the complaints brought against the Canadian Catholic school of more than a century ago (the case of the Indian Residential Schools), imprudently taken as reliable.

The Holy Father must protect himself from the naivety of those in the Church who confuse this aggressive anti-Catholic culture with “the vast regions of human experience and knowledge” from which the faith and the Church should learn.