The German Bishops Conference (DBK) has voted to update its labour rules. Now, it will no longer be concerned about certain aspects of its workers’ private lives.
Until now, employees of Catholic institutions in Germany could lose their jobs if they were openly in a same-sex partnership or remarried after a divorce.
The change means no one need fear dismissal for those reasons.
Before the change can come into force, however, each of Germany’s 27 dioceses must write the measure into their labour laws. That may take take a few months.
The country’s various Catholic institutions employ 800,000 employees.
“Explicitly, as never before, diversity in church institutions is recognised as an enrichment,” the DBK says.
“All employees can, independently of their concrete duties, their origin, their religion, their age, their disability, their sex, their sexual identity and their way of life,” be representatives of a church that “serves people”.
“So long as they bring a positive attitude and openness toward the message of the Gospel [and] respect the Christian character of the institution,” it said when announcing the change in labour law.
A two-thirds majority of the DBK supported the amendment. The change agreed last Tuesday, came almost a year after 125 Church employees in Germany came out as queer together, in a protest to end discrimination.
The Central Committee of German Catholics said the move was “overdue,” while the German Catholic Women’s Community described the reform as a “milestone”.
Christian Weisner from the advocacy group “We Are Church” welcomed the move but noted that it was “probably also due to the staff shortage”.
No way!
Not everyone’s happy with the labour rule changes.
Thomas Schüller, an expert on canon law, says the decision was “driven by the state labour courts”, which have for a long time taken precedence in questions of Church labour law with regard to personal lifestyle.
Father Nelson Medina, a Dominican priest who holds a doctorate in fundamental theology, has harshly criticised DBK president Bishop Georg Bätzing, who supports the gay agenda.
Medina says Bätzing’s pro-gay stance “is yet another belch of modernist heresy, which, like all great heresies, never really dies out completely”.
(Synodal Way champion Bätzing says he will not prevent the blessing of homosexual couples, something that occurred en masse in May of this year despite the explicit prohibition of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.)
Father Juan Manuel Góngora, a Spanish priest who has more than 56,000 followers on Twitter, also disapproves of the change.
“Sin cannot be blessed,” he says.
“The bishop should go back to the seminary to study or go over to the Protestant Deformation and stop annoying people.”
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