Is it only the relatively small number of followers that leaves the Old Catholics on the fringes of ecumenical interest, in the shadow of public perception at all - in contrast to the Protestant Church?

Since the Speyer Vicar General Andreas Sturm announced his conversion to the Old Catholic Church last month, attention for this reform movement, which emerged in the context of the First Vatican Council, has increased slightly again.

The ordination of women, the downgrading of papal authority and other controversial demands of the reform agenda in Catholicism, some of which is five decades old, have already been implemented there.

The German Old Catholic diocese currently has around 15,000 members in sixty parishes, which extend over larger areas such as diaspora communities.

Christian Geyer Hindemith

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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In 2017, the answer of the old Catholic bishop Matthias Ring to a question from “katholisch.de”, the official “news portal” of the Catholic Church, was significant: “Isn’t the main obstacle to ecumenism being the different understanding of the Eucharist?” The bishop replied: "I do not think so.

We Old Catholics believe in the enduring real presence, that is, in the fact that Jesus is really present in the Eucharist.

We reject the so-called doctrine of transubstantiation as a binding, special explanatory model for this, but personally I lean towards it.

Otherwise, our understanding of ministry and the Eucharist – with the exception of the ordination of women – is identical to that of the Roman Catholics.” Identical?

Does this not only apply to the understanding of the Eucharist but also to the understanding of ministry?

After all, it doesn't look that simple behind the nomenclature.

The church order of the Utrecht Union of the Old Catholic Churches, known as the episcopal-synodal church order, as the name reads in a historically correct derivation, sparked anti-hierarchical dynamics that brought it into new contrasts to the Roman Catholic Church.

Under the heading "Synodality in the Old Catholic Church" (in: Material service of the Bensheim Confessional Institute, Volume 73, Issue 2, 2022 / De Gruyter), Andreas Krebs, Professor of Old Catholic and Ecumenical Theology at the University of Bonn, explores the weight of episcopal authority in his church.

In doing so, he would also like to contribute to sharpening the concept of synodality, which is currently the subject of controversial debate among Roman Catholics.

There is no jurisdictional power of the bishop

Krebs first summarizes important Old Catholic doctrinal developments in the context of the episcopal-synodal church constitution, which in the event of a conflict "ultimately shows a clear predominance in favor of synodal structures".

In other words: Old Catholics do not have jurisdiction over the episcopate in the Roman Catholic sense.

“Although one can read in a current church report that the Old Catholic Church has a hierarchical church structure, this is very far removed from reality.

The prominent position of the person in the episcopate has above all a theological and moral dimension, but hardly a juridical one.

The "voluntary self-restraint" of the episcopal office, which was recently brought into play in the German synodal path, also seems to aim in this direction (juridical deprivation of the ordained office), through which the canon law anchored jurisdictional power of the ordained office would be slowed down by the office holder himself.

A sly fiction against which the Viennese archbishop Christoph Cardinal Schönborn raised an objection with a theological foundation of synodality.

Which Old Catholic developments would Krebs like to emphasize that would not have existed without the dominance of “the synodal” over “the episcopal”?

The first thing to note is that after isolated Episcopal declarations of allegiance to National Socialism, the Old Catholic Church in the post-war period “again developed into a cosmopolitan, dialogical, despite its small size versatile church”.

This includes bringing ecumenism to life with the Anglican communion and achieving a comprehensive doctrinal consensus with Orthodoxy.

Church fellowship with the Lutheran Church of Sweden has existed since 2017.