Rome has gone six months without responding to the parents from Hamburg. The program comes into force tomorrow. The first serious test of this pontificate is not doctrinal: it is one of governance.
Tomorrow, August 20, the sexual education framework titled Männlich, weiblich, divers, thirty-three pages put into effect by the vicar general Sascha-Philipp Geißler under Archbishop Stefan Heße, comes into force in the fifteen Catholic centers of the Archdiocese of Hamburg. It will come into force with the canonical complaint against Heße lying dormant in the Dicastery for Bishops since June. It will come into force six months after a group of parents delivered a letter addressed personally to the Pope to the nuncio in Berlin asking him to stop it. It will come into force without León XIV having said a word. That is what must be judged here: not what Rome thinks, which we already know, but what Rome does, which is nothing.
It is worth measuring the irony carefully, because it is the kind that is not constructed: it is discovered. The dicastery before which those parents filed their complaint against their archbishop is precisely the one Robert Prevost led from 2023 until the conclave that elected him. No one in the world knows its timelines better than he does, the way a file is studied, referred, awaited, archived. Its current prefect, Filippo Iannone, is his own appointment, the first major one of his pontificate. So when it is said that “Rome has not responded,” something more uncomfortable is being said: that the apparatus the Pope himself governed and whose head he himself chose has let the calendar run until the calendar decided for him. Tomorrow there will be nothing left to suspend. There will be classes.
And there is a second irony, worse, because this one is documented in writing. In Chiclayo, when the Peruvian State wanted to introduce gender content into schools, Bishop Prevost declared to the Diario Correo that promoting gender ideology is confusing “because it seeks to create genders that do not exist,” and added that talking about identity and sexual orientation to a child who has not reached sufficient developmental age generates much confusion. That was a state plan, in a country that was not his own, about schools that did not belong to him, and the bishop spoke. This is a diocesan document, signed by an archbishop whom he can remove, applied in schools that call themselves Catholic because an ecclesiastical authority consented to them being called that, and the Pope remains silent. Canon 803 is not an ornament of the Codex: it requires that the formation imparted be based on the principles of Catholic doctrine and reserves the name of Catholic school to the consent of the competent authority. If that name means anything, someone will have to explain what remains of it in Hamburg starting tomorrow.
It will be said, with the usual elegance, that Rome cannot micromanage every diocese, that subsidiarity exists, that the diocesan bishop has his own competence. It would be a respectable argument if it were consistent. It is not. In May, the Holy See made public a letter from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith to the German episcopate rejecting the ritualization of blessings for same-sex couples, and Cardinal Parolin came out to say that it was premature to speak of certain things. The instrument exists. The hand exists. What is selective is the will. Rome corrects the Germans when the disobedience is liturgical and visible in Rome; it lets them proceed when the disobedience occurs in a primary school classroom in Eimsbüttel and is only suffered by two hundred families without a megaphone.
Add the detail that no Vatican note will want to recall. Heße offered his resignation in March 2021 after acknowledging personal procedural errors in the handling of abuse cases during his time as vicar general in Cologne; Francis rejected it in September of that year and kept him in Hamburg. The prelate who was forgiven for not having protected children well is today the prelate who imposes, against two hundred organized parents, doctors, teachers, and jurists, a framework whose intellectual genealogy passes through Uwe Sielert, disciple of Helmut Kentler. The archdiocese agreed in February to remove those sources from the text. It removed the names. No one has explained what it did with the premises. And all of this is labeled, without anyone choking on it, under the word prevention.
That is why this is not just another German controversy or an episode of the Synodal Way. It is the entire question of the pontificate posed in a small and verifiable case: when Catholic parents exhaust all channels, speak with their diocese, write to their archbishop, go to the nuncio, address the episcopal conference, appeal to the Pope, and file a canonical complaint before the competent dicastery, does anything happen? If the answer is that nothing happens, then the appeal to the Successor of Peter is a decorative formality and the Church that listens is a congress slogan. León XIV has explained that he does not intend to change the doctrine on sexuality and marriage and that he does not want to fuel polarizations. We believe him on the first point. The second is the problem: there are conflicts that are not defused by remaining silent, but are adjudicated by remaining silent, and always on the same side.
What this newspaper demands is concrete and fits in three lines. That the Dicastery for Bishops respond in writing to the complaint filed in June. That the framework be suspended while it is examined. That it be stated, with signature and date, whether a text built on premises contrary to Christian anthropology can govern centers that bear the name of Catholic. We are not asking for a gesture. We are asking for an act of governance, which is the only thing a Pope cannot delegate.
Classes start tomorrow. We shall see who teaches.