Several German bishops publicly distanced themselves from the document on diversity of sexual orientations published by the schools commission of the German Bishops’ Conference (DBK) at the end of October.
“Despite it saying on the cover … ‘the German bishops’, the text does not speak in my name,” said the Bishop of Passau Stefan Oster. A statement headed on his website titled “Do we still believe what we believe?” said he “formally distances himself” from the document’s “substantive assumptions and its theological, philosophical, educational, and developmental-psychological content”.
The DBK document Created, Redeemed and Beloved “in its current version is on the best way to a de-sacralised understanding of humans”, he said, insisting that the Catholic understanding of humanity must not be abandoned.
“For a different teaching about humans leads to a different teaching about revelation, the sacraments, redemption – and thus necessarily to a different teaching about the Church and its existence – ultimately even to a different understanding of the triune God,” he said.
Oster argued that “almost every line suggests ‘Yes, not too much sexual morality, and certainly not the claim to truth’”, and said the document suffered from an “overdose of an emotionally-charged super-dogma: ‘God loves everyone exactly as they are.’ That’s why no one should be critically questioned in their diversity, that would already be discrimination.”
The Bishop of Regensburg Rudolf Voderholzer and the Archbishop of Cologne Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki joined Oster in his protest, referring to his statement on their diocesan websites.
Voderholzer said that critics had asked the permanent council of the DBK to modify the text, but “it was published in our name almost unchanged”.
He continued: “There is an agenda being pushed here. I don’t want to hear in 30 years that this was another case where the Catholic Church just went along with it.”