Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, criticized the German bishops’ Synodal Way in an interview with Die Tagespost.
“Listening to some reflections made in the context of the German Synodal Way, it sometimes seems that a part of the world feels particularly ‘enlightened’ to understand what the other poor wretches are unable to grasp because they are closed or medieval, and then this ‘enlightened’ part naively believes that thanks to it, the whole universal Church is reformed and freed from the old schemes,” he said.
“To believe that in one part of the world the crisis caused by sexual abuse can be solved by decisions that are contrary to the teaching of the universal Church is, in my opinion, not even reasonably justified,” he added.
Distinguishing the Vatican’s approval of non-liturgical blessings of same-sex couples from some German bishops’ advocacy for liturgical blessings of same-sex unions, Cardinal Fernández said that “a pastoral pope” is able to preserve “communion among Germans, Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, Russians, and so on,” because he allows Church teaching “to enter into dialogue with the concrete, often so wounded lives of the faithful.”