The president of the German bishops’ conference Bishop Georg Bätzing sat down with Cardinal Kurt Koch on October 4 to clear the air with the ‘Christian Unity’ president.
Bätzing had demanded an apology from the Vatican’s Koch (pictured) over comments that brought up Germany’s Nazi past.
He lamented what he called Koch’s “untenable statements” about the German “synodal way”.
Koch, charged with promoting Christian unity, is reported to have compared the German bishops’ Synodal Path process with a mistaken Christian ideology that underpinned the rise of Nazism.
In an interview with the Catholic weekly “Die Tagespost,” Koch said that he was shocked that the German Synodal Way was talking about new sources of revelation.
“This phenomenon already existed during the National Socialist dictatorship, when the so-called ‘German Christians’ saw God’s new revelation in blood and soil and in the rise of Hitler,” Koch said.
At the end of the German bishops’ plenary assembly on September 29, Bätzing said that, with his remarks, Koch had “disqualified himself from the theological debate” about the Synodal Path.
“If a public apology does not happen immediately, I will file an official complaint with the Holy Father,” Bätzing said.
That evening, Koch published a statement rejecting the accusations. He said he had in no way compared the Synodal Path reform project with Nazi ideology, “and I will never do so”.
Koch said he has been misunderstood: “I simply assumed that we can still learn from history today, even from a very difficult period. As the vehement reaction of Bishop Bätzing and others show, I have to realise in retrospect that I failed in this attempt. And I also have to realise that memories of phenomena in the National Socialist period are obviously taboo in Germany.”
The following day, Bishop Bätzing intensified his criticism. He said he could not accept the cardinal’s response “since Cardinal Koch, in essence, does not apologise for the indefensible statements, but — on the contrary — aggravates them”.
Bätzing added he still expects a “clear dissociation from these statements.”
Bätzing said the cardinal must have “consciously chosen” the comparison to the Nazi era, thus placing the participants of the Synodal Path “in the horizon of the regime that brought unimaginable suffering, especially to the Jewish people”.
Following demands for an apology and a threat he might “file an official complaint with the Holy Father,” the German Bishops’ Conference president met with a Vatican cardinal in Rome this week.