German synodal committee unanimously approves statutes for new “synodal conference” of bishops and laity, navigating Vatican concerns over episcopal authority.
Newsroom (25/11/2025 Gaudium Press ) In a hushed conference room overlooking the baroque cathedral city of Fulda, members of Germany’s interim synodal committee on Saturday, November 22, put the finishing touches on what may become one of the most consequential structural experiments in the post-Vatican II Catholic Church. By unanimous vote, they adopted the statutes for a permanent national body – the “synodal conference” – designed to give lay Catholics and bishops equal decision-making power on matters that transcend individual dioceses.
The 12-article text, hammered out over two days, represents the first concrete fruit of a tortuous negotiation between German Catholic leaders and the Holy See that has stretched across three papacies and multiple Roman interventions. If the statutes survive the gauntlet of approval still ahead – endorsement by the German bishops’ plenary and the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), followed by Vatican recognitio ad experimentum – the synodal conference will hold its inaugural meeting in Stuttgart on November 6-7, 2026, eight months later than originally envisioned.
At its core, the new body will consist of 81 voting members: all 27 diocesan bishops, 27 representatives appointed by the ZdK, and 27 more to be elected at a final synodal way assembly in late January 2026. Every member, clerical or lay, will have an equal vote. The statutes insist that the conference “respects the constitutional order of the Church” and “preserves the rights of diocesan bishops and the German bishops’ conference.” Yet the very language of bishops and laity deliberating and deciding together on “important issues of Church life of supra-diocesan significance” marks a departure from traditional governance models in most national episcopal conferences.
The careful wording is no accident. It reflects months of back-and-forth with Rome, including direct input – highlighted in a different color in the working draft – from Archbishop Filippo Iannone, until recently prefect of the Dicastery for Legislative Texts. One key phrase, “synodal decision-making processes,” was lifted almost verbatim from the final document of Pope Francis’s global synod on synodality, a deliberate signal that Germany is attempting to remain within the wider synodal framework rather than striking out alone.
The road to Fulda has been anything but smooth. When the German “synodal way” concluded in March 2023, participants voted to establish a permanent mixed council with real decision-making power. Rome responded swiftly: in January 2023 the Vatican declared that neither the bishops nor the synodal assembly possessed competence to create such an organ, warning it would place itself “above” the bishops’ conference and undermine the sacramental authority of bishops as defined by Vatican II.
Undeterred, German leaders set up the interim synodal committee anyway, tasking it with preparing the permanent body “by March 2026 at the latest.” Four conservative bishops – including Stefan Oster of Passau and Gregor Maria Hanke of Eichstätt – refused to participate, arguing the committee itself contradicted Rome’s directives.
A fragile détente emerged only after intensive talks. German bishops traveled to Rome for their delayed ad limina visit in 2022, returned for further discussions in March 2024, and reached a joint communiqué in June 2024 that allowed work to continue under strict conditions: the new body must sit neither above nor alongside the existing bishops’ conference.
Saturday’s unanimous vote – including participation from bishops who had previously kept their distance from the committee – was greeted with visible relief. Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg, chairman of the German bishops’ conference, called it “a great moment, and also a historic one.” The unanimous approval, he said, “shows how much we have come together” and lifted “a great weight” from his shoulders. Bätzing made a direct appeal to the four boycotting bishops to join the permanent conference, insisting that painful lessons from the synodal way about listening to minorities had been learned.
ZdK president Irme Stetter-Karp was equally emphatic that the result would not be a “paper tiger.” “Bishops and lay people unanimously adopted the statutes,” she said, “with the formula that has always been important to us as lay people: that we deliberate and decide together.”
Yet beneath the conciliatory rhetoric, fault lines remain. During the Fulda meeting, debate flared over financial governance. An initial proposal that the synodal conference’s finance committee might assume responsibilities currently held by the Association of the Dioceses of Germany (VDD) – the powerful legal entity that coordinates the German Church’s vast church-tax revenues – was firmly rebuffed by several bishops, including Franz Jung of Würzburg and Archbishop Udo Markus Bentz of Paderborn. In the end, the committee settled for a non-binding declaration urging future reform of VDD structures in a “synodal spirit.”
Critics wasted no time sounding alarms. Writing in Die Tagespost, Regina Einig warned that diocesan church-tax councils, staffed by lay experts deeply familiar with local conditions, would resent national interference from a body of 81 whose members may know far less about grassroots realities. In a separate analysis for the German edition of Communio, canonist Benjamin Leven described the statutes as “clearly designed as an intermediate step,” deliberately leaving multiple crucial details – including voting thresholds and exact competencies – to future rules of procedure that Rome may never see before implementation begins.
Whether the Vatican will grant even provisional recognitio remains the central unanswered question. Pope Leo XIV has maintained intense private contact with the German episcopate: audiences with several bishops in recent months, and, on the very day the statutes were adopted, a meeting with Katharina Westerhorstmann, the theologian who resigned from the synodal way in protest at what she called its predetermined progressive direction.
For now, the German Church has threaded a narrow needle: creating a body with real lay co-responsibility while embedding enough safeguards – and Roman-sourced language – to make approval at least conceivable. The next moves belong to the plenary assemblies of the bishops and the ZdK, and ultimately to Rome. When the synodal conference finally convenes in Stuttgart a year from now, it will do so either as a pioneering experiment in synodality or as the latest chapter in a decades-long saga of German exceptionalism testing the limits of Catholic unity.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from The Pillar
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