In the Catholic Church in Germany there could soon be official blessing ceremonies for homosexual couples.
The plenary assembly of the Synodal Path reform project on Saturday in Frankfurt approved a corresponding paper with a clear majority in the first reading.
The German Catholics are thus disregarding the Vatican's no to such blessing celebrations, which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had confirmed in March of last year.
In addition, the General Assembly also passed a text in the first reading in which Pope Francis is called upon to “clarify and reassess homosexuality from a teaching point of view”.
Thomas Jansen
Editor in Politics.
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The refusal to bless two people who want to live their partnership in love, commitment and responsibility to one another and to God is "merciless or even discriminatory" in a society that has achieved human dignity and free self-determination as a maxim of moral standardization, it says in the text on blessing celebrations.
Such a refusal cannot be convincingly justified theologically.
According to the will of the synodal path, homosexual acts should no longer be condemned as a serious sin in the catechism.
Homosexual orientation is part of human identity “as created by God” and is therefore “ethically not to be judged differently from any other sexual orientation”.
Resolutions only become valid after the approval of the bishops
Pastors who bless homosexual couples should no longer have to face disciplinary consequences.
The German dioceses are requested to draw up a form of blessing that defines the course of such celebrations.
Similarities with a church marriage should be avoided.
However, the resolutions of the General Assembly of the Synodal Path only become binding if, after the second reading, they are not only approved by a two-thirds majority of the General Assembly, but also by a two-thirds majority of the bishops.
All of the more than 60 German bishops are represented in the plenary assembly, which has a total of 230 members;
the members were nominated equally by the Bishops' Conference and the Central Committee of German Catholics.
Whether the demands for blessing ceremonies and a reassessment of homosexuality will also get a two-thirds majority among the bishops remained open on Saturday.
The votes of the bishops are not yet shown separately after the first vote.
In the debate about a reassessment of homosexuality, however, profound differences of opinion within the bishops' conference became apparent.
"The catechism is not the Koran," said Munich Archbishop Reinhard Cardinal Marx.
A change of the catechism is therefore not a "sacrilege".
He pointed out that Pope Francis had also changed his statements on the death penalty;
formerly the catechism allowed the death penalty as a last resort in certain cases;
Francis deleted this passage in 2018 in favor of an exception-less ban.
Warning against "breaking with tradition"
Bishop Gregor Maria Hanke of Eichstätt warned against a "break with tradition" and called for a more detailed debate.
The Bishop of Görlitz, Wolfgang Ipolt, doubted that the reassessment of homosexuality would get the necessary two-thirds majority among the bishops.
The Bishop of Regensburg, Rudolf Voderholzer, objected that the differences between blessing celebrations and church marriages could not be made sufficiently clear.
The Vatican's rejection of blessing ceremonies for homosexuals in March had also provoked strong opposition among bishops in Germany.
The chairman of the German Bishops' Conference, Georg Bätzing, said the document "so blatantly closes itself off to advances in knowledge of a theological and scientific nature" and will mean that pastoral practice will ignore it.
Most recently, the church's handling of homosexuality came to the fore two weeks ago, when 125 queer employees of the Catholic Church came out and demanded an end to their discrimination.
As a result, several dioceses assured that queer employees would no longer face any legal consequences if they revealed their sexual orientation.