German bishops elect Chairman with no form
The Catholic Church has not decided on a generational change. The new head Bishop Robert Zöllitsch is no more than a temporary solution. The internal struggle for posts and positions is also still far from finished.
So it is not to be Marx. Not yet, one probably has to say. Maybe it was him, or the Episcopal voters in Wuerzburg, or both together decided that too little time had passed since the inauguration of Reinhard Marx, as the new Archbishop of Munich on 2 February. Instead, it falls to Freiburg Archbishop Robert Zollitsch to replace Cardinal Karl Lehmann of Mainz who resigned the position due to ill-health.
As the 71-year-old Lehmann is almost the same age as Zollitsch who was born in 1938, at very least this does not indicate a generational change in the club of the German head pastors. Zollitsch can already because of his age, be no more than a temporary solution. At the end of their 75th year, canon law demands that Bishops offer their resignations to the Pope. For a term of six years, Zollitsch has now been elected. At latest at this time, the Episcopal Conference will return to the question of who represents them to the outside world and who will unite them internally.
No outsider knows him
This could have been decisive. The decision today has shown that there are factions, fault lines and clashes. Three ballots were needed before there was the result. In the first two votes, none of the bishops achieved the required absolute majority. Even so Zollitsch is a weak president. This is the one who practically nobody on the outside knows. Only five years ago, he was - still under John Paul II – made Archbishop of Freiburg. Previously, he was responsible for training priests there, and before that for twenty years head of diocesan personnel.
Both are "softer" offices, but that also require strength, human knowledge and empathy. But they are limited to internal matters, and do not require a visible confrontation with the world in which the church like any other socially relevant group has to find her profile and take positions.
Not a hopeful signal
The German bishops principally looked inwards and missed a chance to present themselves as "the church in the world". On this basis, Robert Zollitsch, however is a logical choice. Conservatives and open minded progressives can now wrestle with each other behind church and monastery walls and argue for positions that outside nobody anyway understands - or even particularly cares about. This was clearly not understood, as the 69 bishops gathered at Himmelsforten wrote the name of their preferred candidates on the ballot paper.
What signal does this give from the General Assembly? Not a hopeful one anyway. None was found that could present the host of German Bishops as a powerful, courageous community, which takes as their responsibility the search for values – and which as still uncomfortable - society could be made aware of and then act on. The opportunity to work with this group as dialogue of equals, as always occurs when it comes to an honest and open confrontation of views, is being missed.
Zollitsch has nothing to be guilty about. The most one could accuse him of that he has no previous record, and thus could act as a brake . Questions should focus mainly on why a real fresh start after the Lehmann-years was prevented. Perhaps because of the rapid ascent by Archbishop Reinhard Marx, he was suspect,envied because his grasp of the media or perhaps he himself calculated his chances that he would be elected in a few years. Ambition and jealousy is not removed on consecration from clerical souls. Before anything today the name Zollitsch on this day stands for playing for time.
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