‘Into the future’ - German synodal path organizer calls for ‘aggiornamento’

“It’s about asking the Holy Spirit: ‘How should we go?’”

As head of the faith and education office at the German bishops’ conference, Dr. Frank Ronge has a broad-ranging portfolio of responsibilities for the Catholic Church across in Germany. 

But in recent years, Ronge’s job has put him in the center of one of the most closely-watched — and controversial — happenings in the Church today. Ronge has been responsible for coordinating the Synodaler Weg, or synodal path, undertaken by the Church in Germany — a broad-ranging series of discussions launched in 2019, in response to Germany’s clerical sexual abuse crisis.

Dr. Frank Ronge. Credit: Pillar Media.

The Synodaler Weg has seen a great deal of attention from the Vatican, especially as participants have called for significant changes to ecclesiastical leadership structures, and to reevaluation of Catholic moral and social doctrines.

At the Church’s International Eucharistic Congress in Quito, Ronge talked with The Pillar about his own work on the project.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

Dr. Ronge, you are, so far as I can tell, the sole German at the International Eucharistic Congress, is that right?

I think so, yes. Maybe there are some others, but I haven’t met them.

And you work for the German bishops’ conference?

Yes, I am responsible for questions of faith and education, and for the last four years, I have been head of the office which organizes the German synodal path.

That must be extremely stressful.

It has been a very interesting job, and I think it's a very necessary job, to bring the Church into the future.

In the United States, we often perceive the synodal path as a tug of war between the Vatican, especially, and lay people and some bishops who would like to see changes to the Catholic Church’s doctrine.

Do you think that’s an accurate assessment of what’s happened in the synodal path? How would you summarize it?

I think there is a misunderstanding — you have to see especially our point of departure of the synodal project. 

We had in 2010 a crisis of sexual abuse and in the following years. And in 2018 an independent report was published which indicated that about 1,700 priests had been accused of sexual abuse in prior decades, and as many as 3,700 children were alleged victims. 

In Germany, a lot of people were talking about this, and people were leaving the Church — saying, “this is a system in which we can no longer participate.”

This is a real problem, because in the Church we have the duty to promote the evangelium — the faith — and it was impossible in those circumstances. 

And this report on sexual abuse said that there were conditions we had to change with regard to handling abuse cases, but also with regard to systemic problems in the Church. We had to deal with those. Those problems are the question of power in the Church, the question of how the priesthood is lived, the question of the role of women within the Church, and the problem of the Church’s sexual teaching, because it’s so narrow, and you have to deal with that.

And so the Catholic bishops of Germany unanimously said: “Okay, we have to deal with that, and we will take up a ‘synodal path’ and not alone, but together with lay people.”

We started that way, and just two years later, the pope started a synodal path for the whole Church. So both paths connected to each other, and we’ve tried to do this with the pope and the Vatican, but we have some special issues to solve in Germany, those issues which I have mentioned to you.

I don’t imagine you would work at the bishops’ conference unless you care about the Church. And so when you talk about “bringing the Church into the future” by “modernizing” or changing the doctrinal path of the Church, that must be something which impacts your own relationship with the Church.

How do you understand the role of the synodal path, and even your own role, in the life of the Church?

The Second Vatican Council was a council of aggiornamento. And that aggiornamento is based firmly in the tradition, and, of course, first based on Sacred Scripture. But that aggiornamento also has to deal with a changing world, and the challenging questions we have today.  And so we have to ask how we can in the best way bring Sacred Scripture, and the tradition, and the teaching of the Church into the world of today. That's our question.

On the synodal path we are trying to do this to address the things which prevent the possibility of evangelization. The alternative is not changing, staying firmly affixed, and then there’s no chance — because people will not then follow the evangelium anymore.

So what has it meant for you, spiritually, to be a part of this undertaking?

I’d like to show you something. This is our sign, and this is very, very important to us.

The cross of the synodal path is a cross made of a lot of little crosses. That was the cross displayed at the front of each of our meetings.

Synodal Cross. Credit: © Synodal Way / Maximilian von Lachner

And during those meetings, it’s not about competing sides. It’s about asking the Holy Spirit: “How should we go?”

This cross that I carry is one of the little crosses which made up that big cross.

And you can take this and put it in your hand — you can just hold onto it, and thus hold onto Christ, and hold onto the Holy Spirit. 

That is the main thing.

And all of us, when we are discussing issues, and there's a big debate, with not all of us thinking the same — still, we all have the cross in our hand, and we’re all thinking: “Holy Spirit, please guide us.”

It’s not easy to find answers this way. But that’s the spiritual moment of all this. Nobody knows at the beginning how this will go, but we try to hear, as the pope says, and we’re really trying spiritually to find the right path.

But of course, sometimes the Holy Spirit might speak through the pope saying: ‘No, this is not what the Church is going to do.’ And that’s already happened to some extent.

One must be at that cross as well, I imagine.

The pope sent us a letter — In that letter, he gave us some tasks, and I think we were really looking at how to respond to those tasks he identified.

One is, of course, to stay together with the Church in total — Sometimes people say there will be a schism. But that's absolutely nonsense. Every Catholic bishop in Germany will stay with the pope, in the Catholic church, and the lay leaders as well. There's no question.

Then the pope said to proceed in a spiritual way. And we have tried to move forward in a spiritual way — maybe in a uniquely German spiritual way. We have had a lot of Masses, for example, and a lot of periods of silence during the course of our deliberations.

But the pope also said that we have to deal with the tasks in front of us, and the challenges in front of us in real steps. He said: “you have to take these challenges and proceed together.”

And that was before he started the global synodal process. And if you see all the tables in Rome, at which people are sitting and hearing each other, I think we try to take our path — and of course we have to correct the way where it's not so good.

At the end of the 5^th General Assembly of the Synodal Path in Germany, we had our texts, produced in these meetings, which identified things we can change directly in Germany. And there are some other questions we ask the pope and the whole world to discern. Questions related to sexual morality, and the question of women deacons, for example…

And also the ordination of women as priests, rights?

We have asked the pope not to close that question. We have not asked him whether women could be priests, but rather, that it be able to be discussed, because people discuss it, and we have to see that it’s discussed. And so we have asked that question not be closed. The idea is that we will go on a path with people, where there can be truly proclaimed the evangelium.  That’s it.