The Catholic Church is struggling to find a more modern way of dealing with queer believers. “Rainbow pastoral” is also an answer in the Archdiocese of Munich. But an ex-monk doesn’t want to wait.
The former Benedictine monk Anselm Bilgri has long since lost patience with his former church. At the end of 2020 he left the Roman Catholic Church and found a new spiritual home among the Old Catholics.
That’s why he can do something this Saturday that was long unthinkable for him, who has been committed to Roman Catholic celibacy for decades: He marries – his husband. In a Catholic church in the middle of Munich.
“I wanted to be in a church where I could be married to my husband,” said the 68-year-old, who was ordained a priest by the later Pope Joseph Ratzinger, one of the reasons given for his conversion. Because among the Old Catholics, even same-sex marriage is no longer a problem. The Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, has been struggling for years to find a modern way of dealing with queer believers, does not even officially allow blessing celebrations for homosexual couples – and thus repeatedly frustrates liberal believers.
The Old Catholic Church is becoming a real alternative for some: the second prominent example alongside Bilgri is the former vicar general of the Speyer diocese, Andreas Sturm, who wrote about his conversion to the Old Catholics in the summer in a book “I have to get out of this church”. .
Church Joinings
In fact, twice as many people joined the Old Catholic Church last year as in 2020 – even if the whole thing is still at a very low level. 386 people joined in 2021, and as of December 31, the total number of members was 14,923. “We are growing,” says the old Catholic diocese. What a sentence for a Catholic Church in these times. For comparison: Last year, 359,338 believers turned their backs on the Roman Catholic Church. That was almost 86,600 more than in the previous record year 2019.
And even if the German Bishops’ Conference (DBK) – driven by the “Out in Church” initiative – is now working on new employment law for queer employees and the headline-grabbing blessing celebrations for homosexuals as part of the “Love wins” campaign apparently without sanctions for the priests involved remained: Nothing has changed in the official line of the church. In March 2021, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith clarified that it was “not lawful” to bless homosexual partnerships, since such unions “could not be recognized as being objectively directed toward God’s revealed plans.”
It was not until September that a basic text on church sexual morality failed in the vote as part of the German reform process “Synodal Way” due to the necessary two-thirds majority of the bishops. The text, which aimed to liberalize church sexual morality, met with 82 percent approval in the general vote. But only 33 bishops voted in favor of the text, with 21 against and two abstentions. A slap in the face to all those who hoped for a strong signal for reform.
Unlike the Old Catholics
According to the Bonn-based diocese in Germany, the first two women were ordained priests as early as 1996. Divorced and remarried are – unlike in the Roman Catholic Church – not excluded from communion, there is no celibacy, but flat hierarchies and a democratic structure. That is basically all that the Roman Catholic Church is currently struggling to achieve in the synodal path reform process, always aware of the threatening, final no from Rome to everything.
“It’s good that the Old Catholic Church as well as the Protestant Churches are ahead of the Roman Catholic Church on this path,” says Christian Weisner of the reform movement “We Are Church”. “For individuals, switching to the Old Catholic Church may be a solution.” But it is important to him and his initiative to “change wrong theologies and traditions as well as the system of injustice within the Catholic world church.” He emphasizes: “It’s difficult.”
However, a small trend in the Roman Catholic dioceses in Germany, which is called “rainbow pastoral” and specializes in pastoral care for queer believers, shows that something can change despite the rigid and seemingly unchangeable structures on site in the individual communities. In about half of the 27 dioceses there is now, estimates “We are Church” – and the Archdiocese of Munich now has such a project.
“Practice must also change, and practice has an incredible number of fields of action,” says project leader Michael Brinkschröder, a member of the Ecumenical Working Group on Homosexuals and Churches (HuK), who has high hopes for this two-year project. The official starting signal is to be given on Sunday evening with a church service in Munich. Then ex-monk Bilgri and his husband have already been married for a day.
Source: Stern
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