Emmanuel Thomas, with DPA reports I Sunday, April 09, 2023
BERLIN – The president of the German Bishops’ Conference, Georg Bätzing, called for the renewal of the Catholic Church in his Easter sermon.
“There is no alternative to conversion and renewal,” said Bätzing, who is bishop of the diocese of Limburg in western Germany, according to the text of his sermon distributed in advance.
He said that the Catholic Church had developed a firm core of faith convictions in laborious and often controversial processes. This could give the faithful support and orientation.
“However, this is possibly much less than thick dogmatic manuals seem to suggest,” Bätzing said.
For a long time, the Catholic Church has been marked by a dispute between traditionalists and reformers. Bätzing himself is considered one of the most resolute innovators. Bätzing said that not everything that has evolved in the course of time in terms of tradition is worth preserving.
“Faced with the past, we also notice the stale taste of the old leaven of malice and wickedness,” he criticized, quoting the words of the Apostle Paul from the First Epistle to the Corinthians in the New Testament of the Bible.
“Whenever the Church and individual believers have become too involved with power, when they thought they should rule over people for the sake of Christ, then they have not followed the ways of the Risen One, have deceived people … to the point of sacrilegiously destroying faith confidence.”
Bätzing’s conclusion: “Away with the old leaven, even if it is conflictual and painful!”
