Archbishop Hubertus van Megen formally took up the role of
apostolic nuncio in Germany Thursday, when he presented his credentials
to President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Berlin.Among the Dutch archbishop’s most important responsibilities will be advising Pope Leo XIV on the selection of new German bishops when vacancies arise.
Diocesan bishops who will reach the standard retirement age of 75 in the coming years include Bishop Gerhard Feige of Magdeburg (74), Bishop Heinrich Timmerevers of Dresden-Meissen (73), Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising (72), Bishop Wolfgang Ipolt of Görlitz (72), and Archbishop Heiner Koch of Berlin (72).
But van Megen will be well aware that the pope faces a distinct set of constraints when it comes to appointing their successors.
What
rules govern the nomination of the country’s bishops? And how free does
this leave the pope to select his favored candidates?
What rules govern appointments?
When the vast majority of the world’s dioceses fall vacant, the pope is free to appoint his chosen candidate directly.
This is expressed in Canon 377 §1 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, which says that “the Supreme Pontiff freely appoints bishops or confirms those legitimately elected.”
But
the appointment process is not always so straightforward. In China, for
example, the pope has less room for maneuver, if he wants to balance
his appointment prerogative with an effort to normalize the state of the
Church in the country.
Announcing a new episcopal appointment in the country this week, the Vatican noted
that the pope had appointed the bishop after approving his candidature
within the framework of the 2018 provisional agreement between the Holy
See and the Chinese government. The agreement’s exact terms have never
been published, making it difficult to know precisely how candidates are
nominated.
This atypical arrangement, in which a
state plays a notable role in the choice of bishops, has historical
precedents. For example, the Concordat of 1801 gave Napoleon the right
to nominate French bishops, while the pope canonically appointed them.
Exceptional
arrangements also emerged in Germany for historical reasons connected
with the country’s relatively late emergence as a unified nation-state.
Before
the country’s unification in 1871, individual German states signed
concordats, or formal agreements, with the Holy See that governed
bishops’ appointments. Some of these arrangements survived unification
and were later modified by new concordats, leaving Germany with a
patchwork of nomination procedures.
The three main
concordat arrangements governing diocesan episcopal appointments today
are the Bavarian Concordat (1924), the Prussian Concordat (1929), and
the Baden Concordat (1932). It’s worth noting that these apply to the
nomination of diocesan ordinaries, rather than auxiliary bishops, who
are appointed through the standard process.
The
Bavarian Concordat covers eight dioceses. These are Bamberg, Würzburg,
Eichstätt, Passau, Regensburg, Augsburg, and Munich and Freising — all
situated in the southern state of Bavaria — and Speyer, which is located
in the Rhineland-Palatinate state, but for historical reasons is associated with Bavaria.
Under
the Bavarian Concordat, diocesan bishops and cathedral chapters are
required to submit lists of potential new bishops to the Holy See every
three years, regardless of whether there is a vacancy. When a bishop
resigns, the cathedral chapter submits its recommendations to the Holy
See, which selects a candidate according to the concordat’s procedures.
If
he observes the terms of the concordat, the pope therefore does not
have the same freedom of appointment in Bavaria that he has in most
dioceses worldwide. Instead, the text delineates that he must choose
from among candidates presented through the concordat process.
Once
the pope has made his choice, the Bavarian state government is informed
of the decision and has a right to object to an appointment on
political grounds before the appointment is formally announced.
The
Prussian Concordat applies in 15 dioceses — Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne,
Paderborn, Aachen, Erfurt, Essen, Fulda, Görlitz, Hildesheim, Limburg,
Magdeburg, Münster, Trier, and Osnabrück — making it the most widespread
arrangement in Germany.
When a diocese falls vacant,
the cathedral chapter presents a list of candidates to the Holy See.
Rome reviews the list and sends a list of three names to the chapter,
which chooses one. The chapter communicates the election result to the
state government, which has the right to raise political objections to
the chosen candidate. The pope then confirms the election. Minor
variations can occur in the process within some dioceses.
The Baden Concordat applies to just four dioceses: Freiburg, Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Mainz, and Dresden-Meissen.
It
closely resembles the procedure of the Prussian Concordat, in which the
cathedral chapter elects a candidate from a list of three sent by Rome,
but with some procedural differences.
In recent years, there has been a concerted push to increase the laity’s role in German episcopal appointments, linked to the country’s controversial synodal way.
Church law already allows lay people to participate in a limited way. Canon 377 §3
says that apostolic nuncios — the pope’s ambassadors — can seek the
opinions of “laity outstanding in wisdom” on potential candidates.
A 2022 synodal way resolution
called on cathedral chapters to work with an elected body representing
“the entire people of God in the diocese” to determine a list of
suitable candidates that the chapter sends to the Vatican.
But
dioceses have found it difficult to enact the resolution because
appointment processes are strictly governed by concordats and cannot be
changed unilaterally.
Overall,
the pope has a slightly freer hand in the appointment of bishops to
eight out of Germany’s 27 dioceses (the Bavarian ones), but faces a
significantly restricted choice in the remaining 19 dioceses (the
Prussian and Baden ones).
This is important to take
into account in any discussion of whether Pope Leo XIV could overhaul
the German hierarchy, if he so wished.
If that were
his intention — and he has given no obvious indication that it is — he
would likely face considerable local resistance. This point is
speculative, but there are precedents from the pontificates of John Paul
II and Benedict XVI that are worth considering.
The Polish pope, for example, appointed the conservative-minded Wolfgang Haas
as the coadjutor bishop of Chur in 1988, effectively bypassing the
Swiss diocese’s normal episcopal election procedure in which the
cathedral chapter plays a pivotal role. But Hass encountered so much
opposition that in 1997 he was put in charge of the newly created
Archdiocese of Vaduz in Liechtenstein.
In 2009, Benedict XVI appointed Fr. Gerhard Maria Wagner,
another temperamentally conservative figure, as an auxiliary bishop of
Linz, Austria. Although no cathedral election procedure applied to the
appointment, it raised local hackles because Wagner was not among the
candidates proposed by the Linz diocese. Following protests by priests
and lay people, Wagner asked the German pope to withdraw the
appointment, and he accepted the request.
These two
cases arguably highlight the difficulties of going against the grain of
local ecclesial culture in the German-speaking world.
If
Pope Leo wished to alter the course of German Catholicism, episcopal
nominations alone would probably not be sufficient. After all,
appointments are downstream from the ecclesial culture that produces
future bishops. Any lasting change would likely depend on reshaping the
culture itself, perhaps by supporting grassroots movements that offer an
alternative to the now-dominant synodal way.
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