Munich (dpa / lby) - The autumn general assembly of the Freising Bishops' Conference starts in Munich on Tuesday. The archbishop of Bamberg, Ludwig Schick, who has just resigned, will take the opportunity to say goodbye to his fellow bishops at a joint dinner, said his spokesman. The diocesan administrator, Auxiliary Bishop Herwig Gössl, will then take part in the consultations and will take over the duties of the Archbishop of Bamberg until a successor is appointed.
At the meeting in Munich, the Catholic bishops in Bavaria want to deal with topics such as ecumenism and youth work. It should also go to schools, religious education and Catholic universities in the Free State.
The background is above all the financial situation of the Bavarian dioceses, which all have to save significantly in times of falling church tax revenues. There are different plans for this in the individual dioceses. The Archdiocese of Munich has announced that it will primarily look at the real estate with the question of whether it can also be used differently than before.
Even if they are not on the agenda, the topics that are currently affecting the Catholic Church in Germany as a whole should also play a role at the assembly: the synodal path reform process and the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
The chairman of the Freising Bishops' Conference, the Munich Archbishop Cardinal Reinhard Marx, wants to inform about the results at the end of the conference on Thursday. The provisional head of the Bavarian Catholic Office, Bettina Nickel, will also be there. She had taken over the task from Prelate Lorenz Wolf after he had declared his resignation in the spring as a consequence of his role in dealing with cases of abuse in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising. The office is considered the interface between politics and the Catholic Church in the Free State.
