In September 2019, returning from a visit to Africa, Pope Francis reflected on the flight home to Rome on the tensions that were tearing at the unity of the church. “I pray that there will be no schism,” the pope told the Vatican press corps, “but I am not afraid.”
Since then, the threat of a formal split of dissident Catholics from the church or the creation of a separate sect has grown to be a major theme of Francis’ pontificate. Conservative and progressive Catholics alike have publicly challenged the authority of the pope and the Vatican, openly or implicitly hinting at an irreparable fracture in the church.
Recently the pope has moved against his critics on the right, excommunicating former U.S. papal nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò for the crime of schism, forcing Cardinal Raymond Burke, the informal dean of the dissident right, from his Vatican post and removing Bishop Joseph Strickland from his seat in Tyler, Texas, for his anti-Francis agitation, mostly on social media.
For these and other conservatives, the pope has done too much to reconcile the church with modern social trends: opening its doors to women who want leadership roles and the LGBTQ+ faithful, restricting the saying of the Old Latin Mass and accommodating Beijing’s influence on the church in China.
Liberal Catholics, meanwhile, claim Francis has done too little to promote inclusivity and accountability in the church, calling on him to allow women to become deacons and blessings for same-sex couples and to do more to solve the issue of clergy sexual abuse. These issues have motivated the German church’s Synodal Path, a yearslong movement to answer popular drift away from the church with progressive, and largely unsanctioned, reforms.
Schism is nothing new in the church, starting with the Great Schism of 1054, which created the divide between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism before the Protestant Reformation fragmented the Western church in the 16th century. The most recent faction to fall into schism was the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, founded in 1970 by the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who rejected the changes of the Second Vatican Council and consecrated his own bishops, for which he was excommunicated.
FILE – In this Nov. 16, 2015 file photo, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S., at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ annual fall meeting in Baltimore.
Viganò is thought to come the closest to provoking a similar split. In 2019, as Francis addressed the disastrous aftermath of the clerical abuse crisis in Ireland, Viganò published a fiery document accusing the pope of covering up the abuse of minors by ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and calling for him to resign. Since then, he has called Francis “a heretic” and a “tyrant” and condemned the reforms of the Second Vatican Council while drawing closer to conspiratorial and radical wings of the church.
Setting himself up at the hermitage of St. Antonio alla Palanzana, about an hour from Rome, Viganò drew a crowd of discontented Catholics: evicted nuns, wealthy Italian aristocrats and reactionary priests. He created an organization, Exsurge Domine, with the goal of offering help and financial support to clergy who claim to have been persecuted for their traditionalist views.
But experts say Francis has skillfully dealt with critics on both sides by waiting for the right moment to act and by issuing documents clarifying his most controversial pronouncements. Massimo Borghesi, a philosopher and author of the 2022 book “Neoconservatism vs. the Field Hospital Church of Pope Francis,” Viganò can no longer be considered a representative voice of the conservative opposition to the pope.
“I don’t think that Viganò’s excommunication implies a schism,” Borghesi told Religion News Service on Monday (July 15). “It might still concern an absolute minority of traditionalists who believe that the church in Rome has betrayed the tradition of the church following the Second Vatican Council,” he said, but he has reached the apex of his following in the United States, where he had seen the most support.
“I don’t think this interests the majority of the American church,” said Borghese.
According to an April 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, a three-quarter majority of Catholics in the U.S. view the pope favorably. Even though the country’s political polarization is a factor in their opinion — almost 9 in 10 Catholic Democrats support Francis, compared to 63% of Republican faithful — conservative Catholics recognize that the pope’s election was legitimate, even if they dislike his policies, Borghesi said.
“The conditions for the schism are not there. They are simply awaiting the next pope,” he said.
If Francis had gone after the archbishop in 2019 or 2020, Borghesi believes, he might have created a deeper split. Instead, he allowed time for tensions to pass and for many of his reforms to be assimilated into church life. In the meantime, Viganó’s increasingly radical positions have served to alienate his staunchest American supporters, who have stayed mostly quiet since the Vatican’s sentence in early July.
“These processes have cooled spirits and allowed more clarity within the church,” he said.
Similarly, Vatican chroniclers say, Francis has come through the direst threat from the left, as the German church’s Synodal Path has retreated from its most radical positions.
Dr. Katharina Westerhorstmann, German theologan and Professor of Theology and Medical Ethics at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.
In 2022, German theologian Katharina Westerhorstmann announced she was resigning from the synodal commission that was studying relationships and sexuality because the Synodal Path’s rejection of official Catholic doctrine had drifted dangerously toward schism.
“For me there were some discussions that crossed the line, especially the notion where they seemed to have already decided where this was going and that those opinions that didn’t fit into that direction, shouldn’t really count,” Westerhorstmann said.
She and a group of theologians believed that while reforms were necessary to ensure safeguarding for children and vulnerable adults in the church, certain doctrinal aspects should remain unchanged. Westerhorstmann told RNS that while a schism was a definite possibility between 2020 and 2021, that is no longer the case today, despite a flare-up last year, when priests in Germany began blessing same-sex couples in violation of Rome’s ban on the practice.
“Right now, it seems that the negotiations with the Vatican are going well; there is more openness maybe on both sides,” she said. “In fact, I would say that there is no risk of a schism in the German church anymore at all.”
Both extremes now await the next conclave and the future pope, where the future of the Catholic Church will once again be decided.
Some observers say the greatest threat to the church today is not passionate dissent but disinterest.
“Some Catholic circles, not just conservatives, are drawing away from the church” said Porfiri. “I would describe this as a schism of indifference, where some Catholics are leaving the church, not because they object to one particular aspect or issue, but because they are no longer engaged.”
A prominent and prolific theologian in the Church of the Nazarene will face a church trial later this month for advocating for LGBTQ affirmation at a time when the denomination is doubling down on its opposition to same-sex relations.
The Rev. Thomas Jay Oord, an ordained elder and a lifelong member of the denomination, is accused of teaching doctrines contrary to the Church of the Nazarene. He is also being charged with conduct unbecoming of a minister for his efforts to move the denomination to affirm LGBTQ people. The church holds that “the practice of same-sex sexual intimacy is contrary to God’s will.”
If found guilty, Oord could lose his preaching credentials or possibly even his church membership. His trial will take place in Boise, Idaho, on July 25.
The trial follows last year’s guilty verdict against a San Diego Nazarene minister who published an essay in a book co-edited by Oord, titled “Why the Church of the Nazarene Should Be Fully LGBTQ+ Affirming” arguing that the church should have more dialogue on LGBTQ issues.
That minister, the Rev. Selden Kelley, who pastored San Diego’s First Church of the Nazarene, was stripped of his credentials and can no longer pastor a church or hold any position of leadership within the Church of the Nazarene.
Oord, who in 2015 was pushed out of his job at Northwest Nazarene University for his progressive views more generally, said the church tried to gag him into keeping silent about his upcoming trial. He has decided to speak publicly about it anyway. Two weeks ago he published a book called “My Defense: Responding to Charges that I Fully Affirm LGBTQ+ People.”
Church of the Nazarene headquarters in Lenexa, Kan.
“I’m convinced that I won’t get fair treatment going through the trial process,” Oord said. “And I want most of all to make a defense based on theology, not based on the legal nuances of the denomination’s manual.”
Oord has written widely that love is the center of what it means to follow Jesus and that love lies at the heart of holiness. Holiness is a critical doctrine of the Church of the Nazarene, which was formed out of the 19th-century Wesleyan-Holiness movement.
The 2.5 million-member global denomination is theologically conservative and has seen more growth overseas. It is declining in the U.S., where it has about 500,000 members in 4,600 churches.
The Rev. Scott Shaw, the district superintendent of the Intermountain District Church of the Nazarene who brought the charges against Oord, declined to comment on trial.
The church, which is governed by six elected general superintendents, last year put out a statement that the church’s positions on human sexuality, along with other positions on Christian character and conduct found in its manual or rulebook, were essentially doctrine.
This tightening of a church’s social policies and elevating them to the status of doctrine has also characterized recent moves in the Christian Reformed Church. The United Methodist Church, to which the Church of the Nazarene is more theologically akin (both trace their origin to John Wesley), underwent a major split over LGBTQ inclusion, losing 25% of its U.S. churches and more recently all its churches in the Ivory Coast of Africa. At its most recent conference, the church voted to repeal the denomination’s condemnation of homosexuality from its rulebook and allow LGBTQ people to be ordained and ministers in the denomination to marry same-sex couples.
An entrance to Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho.
Oord said he became “queer affirming” in the early 1990s and spent the next few decades helping queer students at Eastern Nazarene College and later at Northwest Nazarene University feel embraced and loved. He now directs doctor of ministry students at Northwind Theological Seminary, an online-only school. His daughter, Alexa, with whom he co-edited “Why the Church of the Nazarene Should be Fully LGBTQ+ Affirming,” is bisexual.
Oord said he believes the majority of scholars in the Nazarene affiliated universities and seminaries are LGBTQ affirming but won’t say so publicly because they fear for their jobs. One of them, K. Steve McCormick, a professor emeritus at Nazarene Theological Seminary, is expected to testify on Oord’s behalf at the trial.
Last year, a dean at Point Loma Nazarene University, Mark Maddix, was fired for siding with a colleague who lost her job, also for siding with LGBTQ rights.
Church trials are a recent phenomenon in the denomination, said Ron Benefiel, an academic and a minister in the denomination. He said he anticipated that if Oord is found guilty there will be an appeal.
Oord said he is speaking out, against the guidance of the church, because he wants to encourage queer people and their allies and because he wants to make a theological case for LGBTQ inclusion.
“I really want to see the denomination live up to the calling of love that it claims that we’re trying to pursue,” Oord said. “It’s my belief that love requires people who are trying to be followers of Jesus to be fully affirming of queer people.”
Pope Francis holds rosary beads as he presides over the closing Mass at the end of the Synod of Bishops in Saint Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, October 29, 2023.
The global Catholic Church is split on whether to allow women to serve as deacons, a Vatican document showed on Tuesday, just weeks after Pope Francis ruled out any opening on the issue.
Giving women a greater role in the male-dominated Church is one of the issues up for the debate at a summit of bishops known as the synod.
An initial, inconclusive session was held last year. On Tuesday, the Vatican released a working document due to inform discussions at a second and final session in October.
“While some local Churches call for women to be admitted to the diaconal ministry, others reiterate their opposition,” it said.
Noting that women deacons will not be on the synod’s agenda, it said “theological reflection (on the issue) should continue, on an appropriate timescale and in the appropriate ways”.
Priestly celibacy – another contentious area for potential reform – was not mentioned, while the document said African bishops are studying “the theological and pastoral implications of polygamy for the Church in Africa.”
The Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM) will report on these issues at the October meeting, Cardinal Mario Grech, Secretary General of the Synod of Bishops, told a press conference.
‘FULLER RECOGNITION’ FOR WOMEN
Deacons, like priests, are ordained ministers and, as in the priesthood, must be men in today’s Church. Women deacons existed in early Christianity, but it is unclear what role they had.
Contemporary deacons may not celebrate Mass, but they may preach, teach in the name of the Church, baptise and conduct wedding, wake and funeral services and even run a parish.
The Vatican document stressed the need to “give fuller recognition” to women in the Church, saying that “by virtue of Baptism, they enjoy full equality”.
In an interview with the “60 Minutes” programme of U.S. broadcaster CBS recorded in April and aired in May, Francis responded with a flat “no” when asked if he was open to women deacons.
But he added that women were often playing deacon-like roles, without formally having that title. “Women are of great service as women, not as ministers,” he said.
Asked about the pope’s remarks, Cardinal Grech said: “As of now, it is a ‘no’ (to women deacons), but at the same time the Holy Father has said that the theological reflection and study must continue. For me this is not a contradiction.”
INCLUSIVITY
Known as “Instrumentum laboris”, the document was presented after consultations with national bishops’ conferences, theologians, Catholic institutions and associations from around the world.
Turning to another hot-button issue, the text did not include any specific references to LGBT people, but called for more inclusivity.
“A need emerges in all continents concerning people who, for different reasons, are or feel excluded or on the margins of the ecclesiastical community or who struggle to find full recognition of their dignity and gifts within it,” it said.
It also acknowledged calls for greater transparency and accountability of Church leaders, and greater involvement of lay Catholics in Church affairs, including in response to sex abuse and financial scandals, and on pastoral matters.
— In a rare trial, the Vatican acted against Carlo Maria Viganò, a former ambassador to the U.S. and one of Pope Francis’s most vociferous internal critics.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, then the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States, blesses the altar at the start of mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on March 24, 2016, in Washington.
The Vatican on Friday excommunicated Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, exacting a severe punishment on the most vociferous internal critic of Pope Francis for refusing to recognize the authority of the pope and liberal reforms made by the Roman Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
Such drastic steps are exceedingly rare in the church and illustrated the extent to which Viganò — the Vatican’s former ambassador to the United States — is perceived to have crossed a line. He has called on the pope to resign and excoriated him in harsh terms, including calling him “a servant of Satan.”
Viganò’s punishment suggests that Francis, who has faced conservative criticism since early in his papacy, may be losing patience with his sharpest critics in the church hierarchy who have challenged his papal authority in sometimes shocking and irreverent terms. It is also an indication of how Viganò has morphed over the years from a being a critic of the pope and the church’s shortcomings on dealing with clerical abuse into a fringe conservative firebrand who has embraced conspiracy theories and recently retweeted a post from Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), claiming that “the covid vaccines are killing people.”
The Vatican’s decision came after its disciplinary body, the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, had issued a formal decree June 20, assigning the senior cleric to a penal canon trial for the “crime of schism” and “denial of the legitimacy of Pope Francis.”
“His public statements manifesting his refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff, his rejection of communion with the members of the Church subject to him, and of the legitimacy and magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council are well known,” the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith said in statement. “At the conclusion of the penal process, the Most Reverend Carlo Maria Viganò was found guilty of the reserved delict of schism.”
The summary judgment by the Vatican can only be undone by a ruling of the pope or the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith acting in his name. The excommunication means that Viganò cannot officially accept Catholic sacraments including Communion, ordain priests or officiate Mass.
He does not immediately lose his clerical title, though such a step — known as defrocking — could follow if he is deemed to be unrepentant, experts say. In 2006, for instance, the Vatican under Pope Benedict XVI excommunicated Emmanuel Milingo, a Zambian archbishop, who married a South Korean woman in a ceremony inside the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, conducted unauthorized exorcisms and established a movement for married priests. Three years later, he was defrocked.<
That step was probably not taken now “in the hopes that [Viganò] may repent,” said Davide Cito, a canon lawyer and deputy rector at Rome’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross.
For Viganò, repentance, at least for now, seems unlikely. The 83-year old Italian prelate did not even appear at his own trial, arguing that he did not recognize the authority of Francis or the Vatican officials under him to hold him accountable. On Friday, he posted on X that, as he does every month, he would say Mass for supporters in defiance of the Vatican’s ruling. He also called for “donations” to his Exsurge Domine foundation, which is offering “traditional training” to six seminarians, he said.
The crime of schism is defined as a rupture with the church’s “unity” under the pope. The Vatican cited Viganò’s public statements that have “resulted in a denial of the elements necessary to maintain communion with the Catholic Church,” as well as his rejection of Francis’s “legitimacy” and the reforms laid out by the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.
Though church codes require clerical fealty, Francis has largely tolerated dissent for years. That, however, has begun to change, especially since the pope’s appointment last year of Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández — a fellow Argentine and a longtime ally of Francis — as the new head of the Vatican’s disciplinary arm.
Since Fernandez’s appointment last summer, the Holy See has acted more swiftly to defend the pope. A major Francis critic, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Tex., was stripped of his diocese, while another longtime critic, American Cardinal Raymond Burke, lost his pension and Rome apartment.
Among the pope’s critics, though, Viganò was in a league of his own.
He was recalled as U.S. ambassador, or apostolic nuncio, in 2016 amid allegations that he’d gotten caught up in the political fight against same-sex marriage. Two years later, he made headlines with a bombshell letter that latched on to a vulnerability of the church — its record of dealing with sexual abuse cases — to accuse Francis of misconduct. Francis, he asserted, had ignored early warnings about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., who had just resigned from the College of Cardinals.
Three weeks before the Vatican announced Viganò’s trial, he published fresh allegations on X claiming that Francis had committed the “same abuses” as McCarrick when serving in a senior church position in Argentina. He again offered no evidence.
Viganò appeared to escalate his missives after a December ruling, authorized by Francis, allowing Catholic priests to conduct short blessings of people in same-sex relationships. He referenced the ruling in his lengthy response to the trial, writing, “Bergoglio authorizes the blessing of same-sex couples and imposes on the faithful the acceptance of homosexualism, while covering up the scandals of his protégés and promoting them to the highest positions of responsibility.”
— Trouble is brewing in the very regions that cradled the 16th-century Protestant Reformation.
Screenshot
By BEN MUNSTER
The events that sent the Catholic Church to the brink of a full-blown schism really got going just after lunch.
On a freezing afternoon last November in central Berlin, a few hundred German Catholic politicians, theologians and captains of industry piled into the grand chandeliered assembly hall of the Hotel Titanic Chaussee to put the final touches on an ambitious reform that would allow them to effectively overrule their own bishops — and by extension the Holy See.
During a rowdy assembly lasting several hours, with the wind whipping outside, the delegates complained that Pope Francis had let the German Church down on key issues such as clerical sex abuse, gay marriage and trans rights, on which the German faithful desperately sought progress.
“They found out, using human science, that there are more than two genders — and yet the pope rejects this!” the theologian Andreas Lob-Hüdepohl fumed from beneath a mushroom cloud of fuzzy red hair. “Nobody knows where he goes, he’s always changing his mind. There’s no throughline in his doings, no logic.’”
Since the beginning of his papacy, Francis has faced attacks from conservatives worried he’s gone too far on issues like homosexuality, abortion and capitalism. But those gathered in Berlin were complaining of precisely the opposite: that he isn’t liberal enough.
“Francis was elected to renew the Catholic Church,” said Thomas Söding, the vice president of the Central Committee for German Catholics, the group that descended on the German capital in November. But the pope’s failure to bring about any meaningful change has left the Church archaic and unfixed, he said, forcing the Germans to try and beat their own path.
It would be wrong to say Francis has done nothing to earn his reputation as a liberal revolutionary. Since the start of his papacy, the pontiff has roiled the religious hierarchy with interventions in popular debates, not only on sexuality but also on the economy, immigration and climate change. He has introduced some genuine reforms, including opening high-level offices in the Holy See to women, and has famously embraced a tolerant, each-to-his-own philosophy, even declaring that heaven is open to atheists. Asked about gay priests during an exchange with reporters on the papal plane returning from his first foreign trip, the pontiff answered: “Who am I to judge?”
This has all been accompanied by a conspicuous effort to project holiness and humility. Francis decided early to settle into the Vatican’s cramped Santa Marta guesthouse instead of the opulent abode of previous popes, and he ditched the bulletproof popemobile for a navy Ford Focus. Just days after the conclusion of the conclave that elected him, the then-Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires was reported to have expected so little of his chances that he’d already booked a return ticket to Argentina.
But even as conservatives in the United States, Africa and the Vatican itself have fumed over Francis’s self-consciously populist approach, repeated right-wing attacks on his authority have fizzled. Instead, the more serious challenge has come from those who complain the pope’s liberal reforms have been half-hearted, stopping short of theological change while being overshadowed by scandal.
Last year, for example, a landmark declaration allowing clerical blessings for same-sex couples was diluted after a fiasco involving religious musings on the nature of orgasms. In late May, moreover, Francis’s own liberal bona fides were questioned after multiple reports that he had used a homophobic slur behind closed doors.
Driven to desperation, progressive Catholics in Germany and elsewhere have seized on an effort by Francis to inject a modicum of consultative democracy into the Church — an arcane initiative he has dubbed “synodality.” Since then they have used the process to seize powers normally reserved for the ordained and to steer their local branches in a direction more to their liking. Many, indeed, want to harness the synodal process to actually change Church law.
“Ninety percent of people who leave the Church say they are angry with sexual abuse, clerical corruption, that they are angry with the leadership,” Söding said. “There is this idea of holy men who are elected by God himself and have the position to lead the Church — even if the big majority of the faithful are not convinced that this is the right way.”
Since the beginning of his papacy, Francis has faced attacks from conservatives worried he’s gone too far on issues like homosexuality, abortion and capitalism.
For much of the past year, the German challenge has rippled through the Catholic Church, prompting dire warnings of a schism and calls for a conservative crackdown. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that the threat to clerical authority has erupted in the very regions that cradled the 16th-century Lutheran upheavals. Last year, one prominent archbishop described the events in the German Church as “the greatest crisis since the Reformation.” And though the uprising has recently been subdued, it shows no signs of ending.
* * *
Some revolutions are full of fire, rage and righteous oratory. The progressive revolt against Francis, however, has a more German hue, one of careful and piecemeal administrative reform.
The Teutonic rumblings began in 2018 with a landmark inquiry into Germany’s clerical abuse crisis. Commissioned by the country’s clergy to stem the exodus of jaded churchgoers, the resulting report recommended that priestly celibacy be questioned, that greater tolerance be shown toward LGBTQ+ people, and that lay Catholics have a greater say over the appointment of bishops.
In many places such suggestions could have been ignored, but in Germany that was less plausible. Unique among its counterparts, the German Church is funded by the taxes of its 20 million-odd members, making it sensitive to public opinion in a way most ecclesial bodies aren’t. In 2018 that sensitivity led to pressure on German bishops to enact the reforms concerning clerical abuse — even if many of them contravened Church law.
Ironically enough, the tool German Catholics have used to challenge the Vatican was one provided by Francis himself. Over the course of his papacy, the pope has rolled out several major, church-wide consultative forums known as synods, while expanding their scope to include laypeople and encouraging others to take cues.
While Francis’s allies say these synods are really only about “listening,” many in the German clergy, perhaps wishfully, viewed them as an endorsement of outright democratic reform. They soon found a willing partner in the Central Committee for German Catholics, the powerful lay pressure group that descended on Berlin last year. Representing the cream of the German Catholic elite — its ranks include Brussels politician Manfred Weber — the Central Committee naturally bends toward the political mainstream, and it seized the opportunity to drag the bishops into modernity.
And so Germany’s “Synodal Path” was born. Through a series of joint assemblies, the institutions worked briskly to put the recommendations of the 2018 report into practice, even if it made some of the bishops queasy. Where Church doctrine was immovable their proposals were rhetorical, but at times they explicitly defied Vatican guidance — approving, for instance, blessings for gay couples in 2023.
Last year, controversy erupted when the Central Committee pushed through a motion to weaken the voting power of the bishops, allowing them to be overruled by a simple majority. Ignoring the outcry from Rome, the Committee then pushed to make that arrangement permanent, with a “Synodal Council” that would forever bind the two parties together.
That was the goal of last November’s gathering in the Hotel Titanic Chaussee: to vote in that final reform and institutionalize the Germans’ pioneering Church democracy. The bishops, for their part, were expected to rubber-stamp the vote the following February.
The mood at the hotel resembled a party political conference. There was much grandstanding about Israel, while grievances with the pontiff ranged from clerical abuse to the minutiae of daily politics. Among those who gave impassioned speeches was Hildegard Mueller, president of the German Association of the Automotive Industry — not the most obvious authority on theology.
Inevitably, such scenes alarmed the Holy See. Francis and his allies concluded that the Synodal Path was an attempt to change Church law outright. The previous year, the pope’s top diplomat had warned the Germans that their initiative posed a “threat to the unity of the church.” Francis himself intervened in November, urging the German Catholics to stop “looking for ‘salvation’ in ever new committees,” and instead to “open up and go out to meet our brothers and sisters, especially those who are … on the thresholds of our church doors, on the streets, in the prisons, in the hospitals, in the squares and in the cities.”
The Germans largely shrugged off the criticism, outwardly playing down their aims while privately talking of genuine democratic transformation. The power-sharing reform sailed through the Committee with a decisive yes — with practically no dissent.
For much of the past year, the German challenge has rippled through the Catholic Church, prompting dire warnings of a schism and calls for a conservative crackdown.
* * *
The uprising against clerical authority hasn’t been confined to liberal circles in Berlin. Earlier this year, bishops in Belgium unveiled a “Synodal Manifesto” that called for many of the same reforms as the Germans. To be sure, the Belgians were more careful, agreeing to go ahead only with Vatican approval. But the development showed the extent to which public outrage was spreading at a regional and even sub-regional level.
To take a more extreme example, not long after the Germans voted to defy the Holy See, Bishop Felix Gmür welcomed POLITICO to his beleaguered alpine redoubt in the town of Solothurn in northern Switzerland, the seat of the diocese of Basel. Under a pale January sky, with snow falling on the gray fir trees surrounding his palatial headquarters, the bespectacled bishop described the fiasco engulfing his own small, cold corner of the Church.
The revolution had come to Gmür’s doorstep in November, when churchgoers from one of the cantons under his watch presented him with four demands pertaining to the handling of child abuse by the Swiss Church. Switzerland, too, had been roiled by a series of horrifying revelations, and the Lucerne “Synod” — a parliament of laypeople tasked with collecting and disbursing tax revenues for the diocese — wanted Gmür to set up an external body to investigate abuse, as well as an archive to prevent the destruction of documents.
As in the German case, the events illustrated the deteriorating relations between the clergy and the faithful; the difference here, however, was how far the parishioners were willing to go. They were not advocating a new, benign power-sharing arrangement — they were threatening to withhold some half a million francs from Gmür should he not meet their demands.
To some, that was a terrifying precedent: “If you have the money, you now have the power against the bishop,” said Urs Corradini, a Swiss deacon who works for Gmür’s diocese and has publicly defended the bishop. “This is really dangerous. The power has to be with the pope, the bishops, the priests.” Otherwise, he said, matters of faith risk becoming subject to democratic decision-making — “and then the group decides if you want to believe in Christ or not.”
While the dispute may still be resolved amicably, Gmür was scandalized that it arose in the first place. “I said, you’re not my superiors. That’s not the way it works!” he said.
“It’s a war,” he added, only partly joking.
St. Ursus Cathedral in Solothurn, Switzerland. The city is the seat of the diocese of Basel and home to the beleaguered bishop Felix Gmür.
To be sure, committee meetings and checkbooks aren’t pitchforks and torches, but the events roiling Central Europe have alarmed the more conservative Church leaders, who worry that efforts like those in Berlin, Brussels and Basel could impose political, secular directives on weakened bishops.
As the Germans gathered in Berlin, Stanislaw Gadecki, the powerful former Polish archbishop of Poznan, gave an interview to the Catholic World Report in which he likened the debate in Germany to the Protestant Reformation that tore the church apart in the 16th century. “The documents [the Germans were voting on] draw profusely from Protestant theology and the language of modern politics,” he said.
Others have suggested that the Germans are playing with fire in their mistaken view that the 2,000-year-old Church, with its fundamentally authoritarian hierarchy, can ever function like a modern democracy.
“They have misread the pope, the pope is not liberal,” Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, a close ally of Francis, told POLITICO. He said the German Church was the victim of “aggressive lobbying” and U.S- style culture war polarization. Such politicking, he added darkly, “destroys the unity of the Church.”
* * *
While the pontiff has poured cold water on the German effort, he has refrained from a definitive crackdown. Indeed, as pope, he’s all too aware how precarious a position the European Church is in, with worshippers leaving in droves. “Faith in Europe and in much of the West is no longer an obvious presumption but is often denied, derided, marginalized and ridiculed,” the pontiff said in a speech to prelates in 2019.
Francis has tried to push the envelope on what flies in the Church, but he keeps colliding with the rigidity of its culture and of scripture — or tripping over his own scattered approach to theological policymaking. There’s a familiar rhythm to the pope’s scandals: He casually floats a progressive idea, draws vicious pushback from the right and then retreats, angering the left. Days, months or years later he reintroduces a diluted version of his mothballed proposal, only to generate greater pushback and deeper confusion.
What often results from this chaotic process is a precarious “two-speed Church” in which Francis tries to appease both sides by leaving the application of his diktats to the discretion of local priests — an idea as revolutionary as it is indicative of increasing desperation in the Vatican. While there has always been a degree of to-each-his-own permissiveness regarding major regional differences, rarely has it come so explicitly from the top.
Illustrating this approach was the surprise publication in December of Fiducia supplicans, a papal declaration affirming the right of priests to give simple blessings to same-sex couples. At first it looked as if the pope was changing his mind following years of equivocation, in which he had embraced gay Catholics on a personal level while cracking down on independent efforts to move ahead with blessings — most notably in Germany in 2021.
But the initial excitement of liberals soured to disappointment when Francis downplayed the significance of the declaration following fevered backlash from conservative Catholics, most prominently in Africa. A rare top-down clarification explained that Fiducia supplicans referred only to rote, cookie-cutter blessings, of the sort a priest could offer an unscrupulous businessman if he wanted — as Francis himself later put it.
Rites for gay couples ought to last no longer than 10-15 seconds, the Holy See said, adding the practice could be ignored entirely in regions where it would be considered “imprudent.” What was certainly not on offer was a formal, doctrinal recognition of same-sex unions per se. Those, the clarification made painfully clear, were still sinful.
The pope’s allies would say this fudge was by design, and that Fiducia supplicans was rooted in the same philosophy that underlay Francis’s “Who am I to judge?” comments from 2013. Sure, it didn’t rewrite Church law, but it was a call for priests to fixate less on sin — especially sexual sin — and to refrain from subjecting churchgoers to “exhaustive moral analysis.” After all, priests sin as much as the next man — and sometimes more.
Still, nobody was satisfied. Conservatives complained that the declaration amounted to a kind of moral relativism imposed from above without warning. For liberals, meanwhile, it was a reminder that the pope was at heart a conservative, and that his support for LGBTQ+ causes had a hard limit (a sense that was reinforced by his reported use of the homophobic slur “frociaggine” last month when discussing the possibility of gay priests).
Worse yet, reports circulated that the document’s author, newly appointed Cardinal Victor Fernandez, had written graphic books as a young priest exploring kissing and orgasms. Fernandez was a longtime Argentine protégé of Francis who had that year been made head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the revered Vatican ministry tasked with defending Catholic dogma. Fernandez soon became the target of a conservative outcry, and while Fiducia supplicans wasn’t officially rolled back, for conservatives in particular it was as if it had never existed.
“Read the document,” said a Vatican official who was granted anonymity to speak openly about a pope he described as vindictive toward critics. “It says: well, obviously you cannot bless a homosexual relationship, because from a Catholic point of view, it’s sinful. However, we will invent a new form of blessing. It’s not a sacramental blessing, it’s a ‘fracramental flessing.’ It looks almost like a blessing, and if you run sideways, and do it in under ten seconds, and keep it totally spontaneous…”
The chief problem, the official added, is that the pontiff has an overriding need to do everything his way, often at the expense of ideological coherence. “Most of his energy goes into hiding what he thinks, hiding who he is, and hiding what he’s going to do, in an almost neurotic way,” the official complained. “He keeps what he wants to do even from himself as long as possible, in order to be totally unexpected in what he does.”
To illustrate, the official relayed an unfiltered comment Francis had made to a person who met him in the 2000s when he was still archbishop of Buenos Aires. The person was new to Argentina and wanted to get a sense of the locals.
Francis’s response was telling. “With the Argentinians, you have to be careful,” he said. “What they say, what they do and what they think are totally different things.”
He may well have been talking about himself.
Pope Francis, then Argentina’s cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio at St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City in 2005.
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It doesn’t help that, in all likelihood, the Pope is not long for this world. At 87 and with only one intact lung, he struggles to breathe, suffers bouts of pneumonia, and is perennially in and out of hospital. Every public cough generates macabre headlines. Meanwhile, he has largely failed to appoint enough allies to the College of Cardinals to guarantee a like-minded successor, and liberals wonder whether he will leave any progressive legacy at all.
Caught between a liberal Europe and a predominantly conservative global south, Francis is in a bind. He is largely preoccupied with reining in — or appeasing — breakaways and rebels on all sides; for his right flank that means withholding reform, while for his left it means dangling promises he’s unlikely to keep.
A prime example of this tightrope act has been the most ambitious of the pope’s much-ballyhooed consultative “synods,” which followed two that took place in 2015 and 2018. The “Synod on Synodality” kicked off in 2021, culminating in a month-long forum in Rome last year in which around 450 delegates (including laypeople and women) debated major issues from different cultural perspectives. This grand international exercise in cultural bridge-building concludes in October; as with previous synods, the findings can make it into canon law, if the pope so chooses.
Gmür, the beleaguered bishop of Basel, was among those in attendance. He recalled a discussion in which African bishops sought allowances for polygamy — asking, in particular, whether a man would have to leave all his wives in order to convert — while some European participants sought canonical recognition of LGBTQ+ rights. “We did conclude that polygamy is not an idea of the bible,” Gmur said. “And certainly not [of] the New Testament.” On LGBTQ+ rights, “even the word was a problem,” he added. “That’s why in the document we call it, ‘With different personal sexual identity and orientation’.”
The current synod has invariably stoked the fears of conservatives who see it as a Trojan horse for an insidious woke agenda. As if in confirmation, the synod’s own leaders have cast it as the last great hope for introducing real structural reform: “If we miss this experience, we will not be effective in our mission,” Cardinal Mario Grech, the Synod on Synodality’s secretary general, told POLITICO in his Vatican office, a portrait of the pontiff smiling down from the wall behind him. “And then the future will be bleak.”
As usual, however, the prevailing view is that little will change. Grech’s comments notwithstanding, the pope has deferred many of the more touchy issues to Vatican-controlled “working groups,” such as the ordination of female priests and lay influence over the appointment of bishops. While that could mean Francis wants to repeat the same chaotic approach of Fiducia supplicans and roll out the big changes on his own terms at some unplanned date, it’s more likely that they’ve simply been put on ice. Tellingly, when the pope was asked by the 60 Minutes program in May whether little girls could ever dream of becoming deacons, a kind of priest, his answer was a decisive “no.”
Cardinal Hollerich, the Synod’s relator general, acknowledged that the goal of the synod is rather more aspirational — to seed a culture of inclusivity and dialogue that could, perhaps, lead to doctrinal reform, somewhere down the line. Holy See spokesperson Matteo Bruni said its core aim was to foster “greater involvement of the people of God” in pastoral and administrative Church matters, pointing to early successes in the Eastern Church. But he emphasized that it wouldn’t delve into the other big questions — the Synod on Synodality, as its name suggests, would be entirely self-referential.
This all bodes ill for the Germans, whose options are now seriously limited following some 11th-hour papal maneuvers. Last February, as the German bishops were gathering in the city of Augsburg to ratify the final decisions of the Synodal Path, they received a scathing letter from Francis’s deputies. When a smaller delegation later went to Rome to resolve the matter, they ultimately agreed, in a humiliating climb-down, to pursue their scheme only within the strict bounds of canon law, checking each new development with Rome — just as Belgium’s bishops had agreed to do.
As a result, the Synod on Synodality appeared to be the last channel through which the Germans could air their domestic grievances, though even that forum was already being closed off to them, according to one person familiar with the proceedings. Ecclesiastically outgunned, the Germans’ grand democratic experiment looked stone dead.
And yet, hope abides among Germany’s layfolk, many of whom remain defiant. Central Committee Vice President Söding told POLITICO he was confident the Synodal Path would go ahead, while a mid-June gathering of the Synodal Path participants proceeded just as planned — with zero papal intervention.
The German cause would seem to have gained an unstoppable momentum. Even if the Holy See does try to curb their efforts, Söding said, the Church is now too fragmented to forestall them indefinitely. “They would like to have control from the center — but they do not have this control,” he said.
More importantly, the Germans seem to have received a boost from figures behind the Leonine Walls. According to two people familiar with the Rome discussions, the bishops negotiating the future of the Synodal Path had an ally in the increasingly influential — and controversial — Cardinal Fernandez. As the author of the declaration on same-sex blessings, Fernandez is a prominent exponent of the “two-speed Church” compromise, an idea that is becoming, if partly by accident, de facto Vatican policy, as a way to bridge the Church’s yawning disparities.
As an idea it could literally tear the institution apart, introducing a new kind of Catholicism in which moral judgments are increasingly subject to regional interpretations, making the whole affair look rather Protestant. In practice it would be a way, as with Fiducia supplicans, for Francis to give the Germans what they want — albeit with delayed effect, and on his own obscure and disappointing terms.
It is whispered that Francis himself privately revels in this prospect, viewing it as a way to rid the Church of its sexual obsessions and return it to a grassroots approach that puts power in the hands of local priests. Certainly, in his efforts to please everyone, he has given up on trying to impose a cohesive, universal morality. At this point, if the Germans or others do opt to split irreversibly with Rome, who is Pope Francis, of all people, to judge?
