The removal of the vote on the Synodal Council from the German bishops’ agenda marks perhaps the first time that pressure from the Vatican has caused the DBK to resist moving forward with a Synodal Path priority, since the supposed effort to reform in 2019.
Of all the priorities of the Synodal Path, the Vatican has been particularly critical of the Synodal Council. In January 2023, three important Vatican officials — Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State; Cardinal Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, then prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith; and Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops— they wrote to the German bishopscriticizing the proposed council as being incompatible with Catholic ecclesiology, emphasizing that neither the bishops nor the Synodal Way had any authority to establish it.
More recently, Pope Francis wrote a private letter to four German Catholic laywomen describing the preparatory committee, and not just the Synodal Council, as one of “numerous steps being taken by significant segments” of the Church in Germany “that threaten to lead it “more and more distant from the common path of the universal Church.”