German bishops discuss ‘synodal conference’ at Vatican
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German bishops discussed plans to establish a new national body known as the “synodal conference” with Vatican officials on Wednesday.
A joint statement issued after the Nov. 12 talks described the meeting as “sincere, open, and constructive.”
“Various points of the future statute of a synodal body of the Church in Germany (entitled the ‘Synodal Conference’) were examined, such as its nature, composition, and competences,” the statement said.
The meeting was the latest in a series of encounters between German Church officials and the heads of Vatican departments since the German bishops’ ad limina visit to Rome in November 2022.
Attendance at the meetings is typically limited to representatives of the German bishops’ conference and the Roman curia. But the Nov. 12 statement said that Bishop Stefan Oster of Passau attended the gathering “as a guest.”
Oster’s presence was notable because he is one of four German diocesan bishops who refused to join a committee drawing up a blueprint for a new synodal body. He also made headlines earlier this week when he publicly distanced himself from a German bishops’ conference document on “the diversity of sexual identities” in schools.
The document was inspired by the country’s “synodal way,” a 2019-2023 initiative that brought together German bishops and select lay people to discuss far-reaching changes to Catholic teaching and practice.
The regular meetings in Rome were arranged to diffuse tensions between the Vatican and German Church leaders over the synodal way.
One of the most controversial synodal way resolutions, passed in September 2022, called for the establishment of a permanent “advisory and decision-making body” known as the synodal council, composed of bishops and lay people.
It said the new body would “take fundamental decisions of supradiocesan significance on pastoral planning, future perspectives of the Church, and financial and budgetary matters of the Church that are not decided at diocesan level.”
But in January 2023, the Vatican informed the German bishops that neither they nor synodal way participants had the authority to establish the body.
The Vatican argued that the synodal council would represent “a new governance structure of the Church in Germany which … would place itself above the authority of the German bishops’ conference and would in fact appear to replace it,” undermining episcopal authority as outlined in the documents of Vatican Council II.
But after the synodal way ended in March 2023, a new interim body known as the synodal committee was established with the principal task of setting up the synodal council by March 2026.
In February 2024, the Vatican asked the German episcopate to postpone a vote on the statutes of the transitional synodal committee, ahead of talks between German bishops and curial officials in Rome.
The signatories of the Vatican letter included Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, the then-prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and now Pope Leo XIV.
German bishops flew to Rome in March 2024 for discussions with senior Vatican officials, building on talks over the synodal way that began during the 2022 ad limina visit. Vatican representatives at the meeting included Prevost.
At a follow-up meeting in June 2024, also attended by Prevost, the German bishops and the Vatican issued a joint statement, saying that a commission created by the German synodal committee would “deal with questions of synodality and the structure of a synod body.”
The statement said the commission would work “in close contact with a corresponding commission composed of representatives from the relevant dicasteries” to draw up a draft.
The statement added that Vatican officials had requested that the name “synodal council” be dropped and other unspecified aspects of the proposed body be changed. It said the new body should be “neither above nor at the same level as the bishops’ conference.”
It is unclear whether the Nov. 12 Vatican gathering ended in consensus on the statute of the new “synodal conference,” or the discussion will continue at future meetings.
The synodal way’s 2022 resolution called for the new body to be established “by March 2026 at the latest.”
Members of the interim synodal committee will meet Nov. 21-22 in Fulda, where they are due to make a final decision on the statute of the new synodal body.
Participants in the synodal way will gather for an assembly in Stuttgart on Jan. 29-31, 2026, nearly three years after the initiative formally ended. They are expected to discuss how the synodal way’s resolutions, which run to 150 pages, have been implemented in German dioceses.
Pope Leo XIV has held a series of private audiences with German bishops in recent months, including with Bishop Oster on Sept. 8, Bishop Bertram Meier of Augsburg on Nov. 12, and Bishop Heiner Wilmer of Hildesheim on Nov. 13.
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