Bamberg/Munich (dpa/lby) - The former longtime head of the Catholic office in Bavaria, Valentin Doering, is dead. As the Archdiocese of Bamberg and the Archdiocese of Munich-Freising announced, he died at the age of 81 last Wednesday. Doering was the first head of the office created in 1994, which serves the exchange of the Catholic bishops with politics and public life.
Doering was always intellectually up to date as a cautious and goal-oriented pointer, said the Bamberg diocesan administrator, Auxiliary Bishop Herwig Gössl, on Friday. The Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, said that Doering had succeeded in "bringing Christian-Catholic attitudes and values into politics and, conversely, also bringing social impulses into church work".
Doering was a committed and credible builder of bridges between church and society, said Marx, who is also head of the Freising Bishops' Conference.
Doering, priest of the Archdiocese of Bamberg since 1969, ended his work in the Catholic office in 2006 for health reasons. Most recently he lived in the Upper Palatinate.
