"German relief agencies financing Amazon Synod, predict 'unmistakable' change in Church"

The chief executives of two German Church aid agencies, which have been funding the Amazon Synod preparations, have said the meeting will be “an unmistakable signal of departure” for the Church and a means of decentralizing Church governance away from Rome.

Much of the agency funding for the synod has passed through a Church network called REPAM set up specifically to prepare for the Synod, whose Brazilian director is Austrian Bishop Erwin Kräutler of the Territorial Prelature of Xingu in Brazil. Bishop Kräutler is advocating ordination of married men and women deacons at the synod, and has expressed support for women priests in the past.

According to a July 19 report by Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register, Father Michael Heinz and Pirmin Spiegel of Adveniat and Misereor said the upcoming meeting “will show that change is possible in politics, the economy, technology and, last but not least, in the Church.”

Adveniat and Misereor are respectively the German bishops’ relief agency for Latin America and the bishops’ overseas aid and development agency.

In a July 17 joint foreword to the German translation of the synod’s working document (instrumentum laboris), Spiegel and Heinz said the synod is “about responding to the challenges of the times by listening to the Spirit who demands the lives of men, peoples and creation as a whole be defended.”

They also said the working document calls for “a profound change in the Church” and that “what will be discussed in Rome will have significance for the Church worldwide.”

The two chief executives also said the document advocates decentralisation of Church governance “in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity” and consistent with Pope Francis’s 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium.

Adveniat’s president is Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck of Essen who said earlier this year that the synod will lead the Church to a “point of no return,” and, thereafter, “nothing will be the same as it was.”

The working document for the Oct. 6-27 synod, whose theme is “Amazonia: New Paths for the Church and for an Integral Ecology...

Particular areas of controversy in the synod working document include a proposal to ordain married men, a push to establish an “official ministry” for women, and a description of the Amazon as a “source of God’s revelation.”