One third under 30!?

adminonNovember 25, 2021January 5, 2022Leave a Comment

With a "synodal path," the Catholic Church in Germany sets out for the future. The BDKJ calls for greater participation of young people in the process. It is about setting the course also for their generation.

"Young people are not only the future of the church, but a big part of its present," the BDKJ federal board makes clear in a resolution published this Wednesday.

That is why representatives of Catholic youth are calling for opportunities for the faithful under 30 to participate in the synodal path proclaimed by the German Bishops' Conference (DBK) and the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK).

Taking young people's concerns seriously

"Around a third of Catholics in Germany are under 30 years old," argues BDKJ chairman Thomas Andonie. "That is why the necessary renewal process of our church can only succeed if the concerns of young people are heard and taken seriously," Andonie said.

With this and four other demands, the BDKJ wants to help shape the synodal path: Further topics are a common leadership by lains, laity and clergy, a blessing of same-sex couples, the advocacy of gender equality on the level of the world church and the establishment of a priestly education that is close to life through modern forms of housing that take the place of seminaries.

Confident outlook on synodal path

The BDKJ federal board looks with confidence to the exchange in the synodal way, which must be followed by common binding decisions.

Church side plaintiff for the first time

Violence against children © Nicolas Armer

In a child sexual abuse trial, for the first time in Italy, an archdiocese has appeared as a civil joint plaintiff. A court in Prato, central Italy, sentenced a priest to four years and four months in prison.

Besides, he must have 50.000 euros in compensation for the victim, as reported by the media. The man had been discovered by a passerby in his car last July while he was molesting a ten-year-old girl.

With the sentence, the judge remained slightly below the sentence of five years demanded by the prosecutor. The court refused to make its own compensation payment to the girl's parents. According to the lawyer for the Archdiocese of Florence, this was the first time a diocese had acted as a joint plaintiff against one of its priests. The attorney general saw this as "an important sign of a new awareness in the Church following the initiatives of Pope Francis".

Entlang threatened from cleric's office

According to media reports, the court ruling also provides for a series of additional penalties for the priest to prevent possible contact with minors. In addition, the man must undergo a criminal trial under canon law, where he is threatened with removal from the clerical rank.

They have lost their relatives and are almost unprotected against sexual violence: Blume, the anti-Semitism commissioner for Baden-Wurttemberg, calls on the German government to take in more Yazidi women from northern Iraq.

Following the adoption of a resolution in the UN Security Council on the protection of women in conflict regions, he hopes that the German government will once again be willing to take in women and children who have suffered sexual violence, Michael Blume told the Evangelical Press Service (epd).

Emergencies that cannot be helped locally

Many hundreds of women were living in Iraqi refugee camps, all of whom had lost their relatives under the most difficult circumstances, added Blume, who is also head of the Northern Iraq department at the Ministry of State in Stuttgart.

They are absolute emergencies who cannot be helped on the ground.

Until mid-2016, Blume had headed a project group that was responsible for around 1.has brought 100 women and children in particular need of protection from northern Iraq to Germany. The majority of them were accommodated in Baden-Wurttemberg.

UN resolution against sexual violence in conflicts

Among them was Nadia Murad, who herself had been enslaved and raped by fighters of the terrorist militia "Islamic State" (IS) and is now a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Murad was a speaker at the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday, when the resolution against sexualized violence in conflicts was adopted there on Germany's initiative.

The goal of the resolution is to create structures to better prosecute perpetrators and better protect victims.

A change of location often helps

The religious scholar Blume emphasized: "If one federal state alone has managed to take in a thousand people, then the whole of Germany should be able to save another thousand."Baden-Wurttemberg offers to make its experience, expertise and contacts available to other authorities.

Many victims are already helped by a change of location. For example, they said, there have been many suicides in Iraq, but not a single one among the Yazidis taken in by Germany.

Many of the women have now obtained a driver's license and are working. They also testified before law enforcement agencies against IS perpetrators. "They are our allies against extremism and sexual violence," Blume said.

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