With a clear vote for the opening of the ordained ministry in the Catholic Church for women, the fifth and last plenary assembly of the reform project "Synodal Way" came to an end on Saturday. More than ninety percent of the more than 200 members, including well over two-thirds of the bishops, agreed in the late morning to a text in which the request to Pope Francis is addressed to clarify the status of the statement of his predecessor to the women's priesthood. John Paul II had stated that the Church did not have the authority to ordain women as priests in addition to men.

Daniel Deckers

in the political editorial department responsible for "Die Gegenwart".

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On the one hand, this demand clearly falls short of the demand of many delegates that the "synodal way" must also adopt the concern that men and women should be allowed to administer the sacraments of the Church on an equal footing. Such a demand, however, would have failed the necessary consent of two-thirds of the bishops.

Pleas for "eye level at the altar"

Thus, at the end of a very emotional debate, the compromise line outlined by the bishops themselves met with broad approval, taking into account all relevant theological and human-scientific arguments, to examine to what extent the justifications of the Church's Magisterium for the exclusion of women from priestly ordination are still viable today.

In the debate on the plot text "Women in sacramental ministries and ministries of the Church", it was not only women, especially religious sisters, who spoke out for "eye level at the altar" and for an end to the "gendering of human dignity". The Archbishop of Munich, Reinhard Cardinal Marx, spoke for many when he confessed that the arguments for the exclusion of women from the ordained ministry would seem weaker and more artificial to him.

Of course, no bishops' conference worldwide has yet decided not to declare the admission of women as subject to justification, but their exclusion. Thus, not only the reaction of other bishops' conferences to the positioning of the Church in Germany remains to be seen, but also the behavior of the Pope and the Roman Curia towards the latest demands and requests from the land of the Reformation.

However, these are likely to play a greater role at the World Synod of Bishops, which begins in autumn, than the advocates of the status quo would like: Before the all-important vote, the Erfurt Bishop Ulrich Neymeyr had encouraged his brothers in office by pointing out that the Catholics in Germany were not alone with the concern of the women's priesthood in the world.

On the other hand, it was also recalled in the debate that the demand for the opening of the diaconate to women had already been decided in 1976 by the Joint Synod of the Dioceses in the Federal Republic of Germany as a vote to the Pope and had remained unanswered to this day.