Canon 401 §1 of the Code of Canon Law for the Latin Church essentially requires diocesan bishops to submit a letter of resignation to the pope upon turning 75 years old.
The pope does not have to accept the resignation, and the bishop can continue to serve longer, should circumstances warrant and the pope allow it.
In §2 of the same canon, a bishop can or even ought to present a letter of resignation if, “because of ill health or some other grave cause,” he “has become less able to fulfill his office.”
Shortly before Easter, at the age of 70, Bishop Gregor Maria Hanke, OSB, the bishop of Eichstätt in Germany, submitted his request to resign to Pope Francis.
Of course, Pope Francis passed away soon thereafter, before making a decision on the matter.
However, on June 8, 2025, the Vatican announced that Pope Leo XIV accepted Bishop Hanke’s resignation.
More important than the resignation itself are the reasons Bishop Hanke cited for making the request. The Pillar quotes Hanke’s own words on the matter: “I do not want to hide the fact that after the many challenges, scandals, and unresolved conflicts, which were not lacking during my time as bishop, I feel an inner fatigue.”
In addition to financial and abuse scandals with which he had to deal, Hanke also expressed concern over “the spiritual fruitfulness of the Church in our country [Germany].”
Bishop Hanke has been one of a handful of bishops in Germany opposing the German Synodal Way. I have written about the problematic character of the German Synodal Way elsewhere and noted Pope Francis’s own criticisms thereof. While encouraged by Pope Francis’s 2019 Letter to Catholics in Germany, it appears well-founded that Bishop Hanke was disheartened by most of his fellow German bishops.
As Luke Coppen reports, “Hanke was one of four German diocesan bishops to criticize the country’s controversial synodal way, which called for sweeping changes to Catholic teaching and practice, and to reject plans to establish a national synodal body with extensive powers over the Church in Germany.”
Alongside Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki (Cologne), Bishop Stefan Oster (Passau), and Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer (Regensburg), Hanke declined “to participate in a future national synodal body,” continues Coppen.
Coppen wrote elsewhere that, in January 2023, the Vatican had already told the German bishops that they had no authority to establish this national synodal body and its manner of operation.
These four bishops, then, were being faithful to the Holy See in refusing to participate.
But other bishops in Germany seem primed to continue with the project anyway.
Additionally, as Madalaine Elhabbal reports, after the death of Pope Francis but before the election of Pope Leo XIV, the German Bishops’ Conference issued a controversial document: “Blessings for Couples Who Love Each Other.”
Its provisions go well beyond the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s document Fiducia Supplicans.
How long can theologians and (especially) bishops be allowed to publicly dissent without curial intervention?
Furthermore, according to a Catholic World News report, on May 4, 2025, the president of the German Bishops’ Conference, Georg Bätzing (Limburg), promised to work for the ordination of women within the Catholic Church as a “matter of justice.” I checked the link to the German-language source for the reporting, which indicates that Bätzing was referring to the ordination of women to the priesthood.
Unfortunately, I could not find a full text of the speech itself and only select quotes from Bätzing are offered. Nevertheless, the report reads (in my translation): “The President of the German Bishops’ Conference wants to campaign for this: that in the Catholic Church women can also receive priestly ordination. ‘I wish for this, and I will do everything for that purpose,’ said the Limburger Bishop Georg Bätzing. . . . ‘It is an imperative [Gebot] of justice.’”
If the report is accurate, then Bätzing would be openly contradicting the infallible teaching of the Church. Pope St. John Paul II expressed the basic doctrine in his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, in which he wrote: “I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”
The language of “definitively held” refers to the requirement of assent to secondary objects of infallibility. While theologians argue whether the apostolic letter itself was an act of teaching infallibly, it is—at minimum—presenting the teaching as infallible by virtue of the ordinary and universal magisterium.
Cases such as these raise important questions.
I recently wrote an article on the duty of theologians to remain silent (at least publicly) when—after careful and prayerful study—they find themselves unable to intellectually assent to a non-definitive teaching of the magisterium.
Even with non-definitive teachings, theologians are not permitted to publicly dissent, let alone advocate for others to do so. When it comes to infallible teachings, withholding assent even interiorly is not permitted.
Are not bishops held to the same standard?
According to canon law they are.
In Canon 833, it lists “all those promoted to the episcopate as well as those who are equivalent to a diocesan bishop” among those obliged to make the profession of faith.
The profession of faith begins with the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, but it does not end there. It continues:
With firm faith, I also believe everything contained in the word of God, whether written or handed down in Tradition, which the Church, either by a solemn judgment or by the ordinary and universal Magisterium, sets forth to be believed as divinely revealed.
I also firmly accept and hold each and everything definitively proposed by the Church regarding teaching on faith and morals.
Moreover, I adhere with religious submission of will and intellect to the teachings which either the Roman Pontiff or the College of Bishops enunciate when they exercise their authentic Magisterium, even if they do not intend to proclaim these teachings by a definitive act.
Among others, teachers of theology and philosophy in seminaries are also required to take this oath.
It is bad enough when theologians do not adhere to this oath, choosing instead to publicly dissent. It is arguably far worse when bishops themselves openly dissent from magisterial teaching. For decades, the prosecution of such dissent has waned.
Yet, many of the faithful find themselves scandalized by the public dissent—real or perceived—of Catholic clerics and theologians. It remains one of the chief points of contention within the Church today.
While Bishop Hanke named several reasons for his resignation, and the Synodal Way is only one of them, it seems he has grown weary of fighting a large portion of his home country’s episcopate, which seems to care little for Catholic orthodoxy.
Despite Pope Francis’s many rebukes, the German Synodal Way does not appear to be reforming accordingly. The question is: How long can theologians and (especially) bishops be allowed to publicly dissent without curial intervention?
As one who has opposed radical traditionalism, in my experience, it is precisely the laxity shown toward dissenters from settled Catholic doctrine that fuels the flames of their own resistance.
Seeing bishops, other clergy, and professors get away with dissent without ramification leaves such people tempted to ignore the hierarchy also, seeing themselves as sheep without shepherds. In other words, part of confirming the faithful in the faith is the rebuke of public dissent.
If, in the past, the Church over-prosecuted people deemed “suspicious,” perhaps today, the Church has tended toward the opposite extreme and become overly permissive. Is it time for this to change?