Tensions are rising in the Catholic Church in Germany ahead of this week’s final assembly of the controversial “synodal way.”
Speaking days before the March 9-11 gathering in Frankfurt, the initiative’s co-president Irme Stetter-Karp expressed surprise at the German bishops’ plan to submit changes to documents that may struggle to gain a two-thirds majority of episcopal votes.
“All delegates, bishops and laity alike, had several weeks to make amendments, and now the deadline has passed,” she said in a March 5 report published by Germany’s Welt newspaper.
Stetter-Karp, the president of the powerful lay Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), suggested that participants in this week’s assembly should decide whether further alterations are permitted before texts are put to the vote.