The chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference told fellow European bishops that “we want to walk this [synodal] path as the Catholic Church, in full communion with the Holy Father and in fidelity to the Church’s Magisterium.”
“We do not want to set out on our own or isolated path,” Bishop Heiner Wilmer of Münster said at a recent meeting of the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences. “We do not want a specifically German path that distances us from the universal Church.”
In 2023, Pope Francis said that the German Synodal Path threatens Church unity. Prefects of Vatican dicasteries objected to the creation of a German Synodal Conference to govern the Church there, leading to the conference’s indefinite postponement.