BIshop George Bätzing of Limburg, the president of the German episcopal conference, has again responded to Denver’s Archbishop Samuel Aquila, who has charged that the German Synodal Path “challenges, and in some instances repudiates, the deposit of faith.”

Bishop Bätzing repeated the German bishops’ claim that changes in the Church are necessary as a response to the sex-abuse scandal. He said that Archbishop Aquila’s argument—that the scandal does not call for theological innovations—is “frighteningly one-line,” and that the American prelate does not understand the “multi-dimensional systemic factors in the Catholic Church which favor abuse.”