The German press is awash with stories about the controversy and divisions over matters such as state compensation for the Church, the exclusion of certain groups from Communion and the suffering of the abused.
The Church must free itself from its “material and political yoke” in order to devote itself more fully to the world as a whole.
This was the Pope’s appeal during his recent trip to Germany.
“In a sense, history has come to the Church’s rescue during the various phases of secularisation which have vitally contributed to the Church’s purification and domestic reform,” Benedict XVI explained.
For now, however, German bishops do not seem intent on adhering to his message. This is according to Der Spiegel magazine’s latest issue. The discussions held in some Länders, in order to reduce the degree of compensation made every year by the German regions to the dioceses for the expropriations which took place in the 19th century, have led to any results, the weekly news magazine writes.
In Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s northernmost state which borders with Denmark, the governing Free Democratic Party (FDP), were aiming for example at cutting payments by 10-15%. Between last December and today, a number of regional administration emissaries met representatives of the Catholic Church five times, but to no avail.
Last year, Germany paid 193 million Euros to the Catholic Church and 266 million to the Protestant Church. These sums were used to cover maintenance fees incurred by the churches or to pay bishop’s salaries.
Der Spiegel magazine quotes some calculations made by Carsten Frerk, a finance expert in the German Church, which show that since 1949, Germany had paid 22, 9 billion Euros to both Churches, of which the Protestants Church received 12 billion Euros and the Catholic Church 10, 9 billion Euros.
This is a consequence of the so called Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803, the last significant law passed in the Holy Roman Empire, with which the Holy Roman Empire of the Germanic Nation tried to pay Churches compensation for the territories that had been taken from them. Der Spiegel comments that according to the Pope, these expropriations led to the Church’s “purification and domestic reform.”
In turn, the President of the German Episcopal Conference, Robert Zollitsch pointed out that the Pope’s words “have nothing to do with the abrogation of concrete financial rights.”
Meanwhile, the radical leftist party Die Linke is preparing a bill aimed at stopping these compensation payments, by paying a lump sum equal to ten times the annual contributions paid today by the Churches. This would make a total of 4, 6 million Euros. The proposal is supposed to be presented before the Bundestag by early 2012 at the latest.
Other German media have focused on the Pope’s visit to Germany at the end of September. In the weekly magazine Focus, Monsignor Wilhelm Imkamp, a consultor for the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments, harshly criticised the German President Christian Wulff for the welcoming speech he addressed to the Pope in Berlin.
“Wulff crossed the line when, as Catholic Christian, he used his political role with all the possibilities this opens up, to discuss some of his personal problems with and in the Church,” Imkamp said.
Wulff, who is a remarried divorcee and therefore excluded from communion, had addressed this issue in his speech.
Imkamp regretted that there were “too many whiny theologians who as a whole, do not spread enough joy for the faith” present in the Church. He warned that if the German Church does not remain faithful to the Vatican, it will risk turning into “a pathogenic agent with a strong potential for infecting the Church as a whole.”
Munich’s daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung met with one of the five victims of paedophile abuse committed by priests and church employees, who were received by the Pope in Erfurt on 23 September. When the Pope entered the room, "I just saw him as a tired man who seemed older that I had imagined him to be,“ the man explained. He was born out of wedlock in 1948 and sent to an Catholic orphanage, where he was abused by a nun. The Pope listened to the man’s story in silence for ten minutes and at the ened he said: "I am shaken."
"I believed him," the man said to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, whose identity remains anonymous. Benedict XVI then listened carefully to the stories of four more victims and in one case, he said he actually knew the person who had committed the crimes described.
He promised he would do all that he could to prevent such occurences from ever taking place again and hoped that wounds could be healed.
He seemed "sincere", the man said. Meeting him, he concluded "did me good."