New Letter from Vatican tells Germany’s Bishops Women’s Ordination and Homosexuality Off the Table at Upcoming Meetings

CV NEWS FEED // In a new letter, the Vatican told Germany’s bishops that discussions about women’s ordination and changes to the Church’s teachings on homosexuality are off the table at next year’s meetings in Rome between German Synodal Way delegates and Vatican officials. 

The letter, released Friday, was written by Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin and dated October 23, during the Synod on Synodality, and addressed to Beate Gilles, the secretary general of the German Bishops’ Conference.

According to CNA, Parolin reminded Germany’s bishops that the Church will not “confer priestly ordination on women,” and warned of disciplinary consequences, including excommunication, for those who defy Church teaching.

The letter also reminded the German bishops that the Church’s teaching on the disordered nature of homosexual acts will not change.

“For even if one recognized that from a subjective point of view there may be various factors that call on us not to judge people, this in no way changes the evaluation of the objective morality of these acts,” Parolin stated in the letter.

This letter follows a November 10 letter from Pope Francis to four German Catholic women who left Germany’s Synodal Way. In it, he shared his concern that “there are indeed numerous steps being taken by significant segments of this local Church that threaten to steer it increasingly away from the universal Church’s common path.” 

The pope referred to a “consultative and decision-making body” proposed by the German Synodal Way that will have a structure that is “not in alignment with the sacramental structure of the Catholic Church” and that was in fact forbidden in his January letter.

In January, Pope Francis also warned that the German Synodal Way is “elitist, unhelpful, and running the risk of bringing ideological harm to Church processes,” according to CNA. 

During the recent Synod on Synodality in Rome, German Bishop Franz Josef Overbeck said that if the Catholic Church is going to continue to exist in Germany, it may have to allow priests to marry and to consider women’s ordination.

Overbeck said there are currently zero seminarians in his diocese of Essen, and he has only ordained 15 seminarians in the last 13 years. He has buried 300 priests in the same time period.

He said “it’s very clear the German Church is in a new stage in the third millennium.”

Participants in the German Synodal Way have approved the blessing of same-sex unions and have asked for revisions to the catechism to allow for the use of birth control and the normalization of homosexual acts. In March, the German bishops asked Rome to open the way for the ordination of women.This week’s letter reminded the German bishops of St. John Paul II’s Ordinatio Sacredotalis, which says the Church has “no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women.”