German Catholics chafe against Vatican’s same-sex marriage ruling

Two days after he married his partner of many years, Anselm Bilgri, a former monk and prior at one of Germany’s most famous monasteries, learned that the Vatican would not bless relationships like his.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Catholic Church’s doctrinal watchdog, ruled in March that priests could not bless same-sex unions. This has not been well received by the German Church, one of the world’s richest national churches.

It dismayed many who had hoped Pope Francis would soften the hard line taken on sexual morality by John Paul II and his successor, Germany’s Benedict XVI.

The 68-year-old Bilgri said this position was “out of date.”

“I think the Vatican has again done itself no favours as it is completely out of date. People in our Western societies are in favour of equal rights, also for minorities. And in society it is now possible for same-sex couples to marry. And the church is like a parallel society that doesn’t allow this. So it actually excludes itself from developments in modern society,” said Bilgri, who ran the brewery at a Munich monastery and was then prior, or deputy head, of the 900-year-old Andechs Abbey on Bavaria’s “Holy Mountain.”

Ordained in 1980 by Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict, he recalls ranting to his brother monks at the Church’s refusal to modernise.

He is not alone: hundreds of clerics signed a petition saying they would still bless same-sex unions, in defiance of the Vatican.

Bilgri left the church in 2020 and joined the Old Catholic Church, which emerged in the Netherlands in the 19th century and lets priests marry and allows same-sex relationships.

Already losing members after years of abuse scandals, the German church has seen departures pick up since the Vatican ruling, according to officials who record church membership.

“We Germans always try to follow it (Church rulings) 100%, but when it doesn’t work because our realities are different, then we resist and do something like what Martin Luther did back then, a Reformation,” said Bilgri who added that southern Europeans had a different solution. “I always hear it from southern Europeans who say they don’t know why we always make such big problems with the Pope, they say for them, he is like the grandpa in the family. You listen to him, you are nice to him but you don’t necessarily do what he says.”

In the 16th century it was Martin Luther, a German, broke from Rome and started the Protestant Reformation that weakened for ever the authority of the Pope. That example looms large for many German Catholics, Bilgri says.

In Cologne, Germany’s largest archdiocese, the numbers registering to leave the church for tax purposes picked up noticeably after the ruling.

While the numbers are modest compared to the country’s 23 million Catholics, the departure of 400 000 in 2020 has consequences because the Church taxes members pay have made Germany’s churches some of the world’s wealthiest.

When the Cologne archdiocese first published its accounts in 2015, its 3.35 billion euros in assets made it richer than the Vatican – although churches in Germany spend much of their income on institutions such as schools, kindergartens and care homes.