Germany’s proposed permanent Synodal Conference has stalled while Rome examines its statutes. In the space of a few days, German bishops, Vatican figures and theologians have exposed the question beneath the procedural dispute: is synodality a spiritual means of discerning how faithfully to transmit what the Church has received, or is it becoming a mechanism by which the constitution of the Church itself may be progressively renegotiated? Germany’s new Apostolic Nuncio has now asked the simplest and most devastating question of all: “Where do we see Jesus Christ?”
“My impression is that Germans often want too much, too quickly.” That is how Michael Haynes reported the assessment of Germany’s new Apostolic Nuncio, ✠Archbishop Hubertus van Megen, following the Nuncio’s unusually candid interview on the German Church, the Synodal Way and the proposed permanent Synodal Conference.¹
The published German interview contains an even more important question. Van Megen had been reflecting upon a Church which remains extraordinarily structured, comparatively wealthy and deeply embedded in German institutional life through schools, hospitals, associations and social agencies. Then he asked: “Where is the heart of the Church in Germany? Where do we see Jesus Christ?”²
That question should not disappear beneath another ecclesiastical argument about statutes, competencies and recognitio. It may in fact be the question which explains why those arguments matter.
Germany’s proposed Synodal Conference was supposed to begin meeting in November. It will not. The statutes were formally presented in Rome for recognition on 31 March, but the Holy See has not yet granted the required approval and the inaugural meeting has consequently been postponed. The proposed body would contain eighty-one members: the twenty-seven diocesan bishops, twenty-seven representatives of the Central Committee of German Catholics, the ZdK, and twenty-seven further Catholics. It is intended to continue the Synodal Way nationally as a permanent body in which bishops and laity deliberate and take decisions together.³
The question before Rome is therefore not whether bishops should listen to the faithful. Catholic government has never required episcopal isolation. Councils, diocesan synods, cathedral chapters, presbyteral councils and lay consultation all long predate the contemporary synodal vocabulary. The question is where consultation ends and ecclesiastical government begins; who possesses final responsibility for decisions; and whether a permanent national structure intended to institutionalise co-responsibility can do so without acquiring functions which belong by the sacramental and hierarchical constitution of the Church to bishops themselves.
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