Bremen-Nord’s “New Church Image”: Women Lead, Priests Supply the Sacraments
Hildesheim’s official documents say that two laywomen will assume the leadership previously exercised by the parish priest, while priests are given greater freedom for sacramental work and a retired moderator accompanies the arrangement from a distance. Canon 517 permits lay participation during a genuine priestly shortage. It does not permit a diocese to convert that emergency into a new theology of the parish.
On 21 July, the Diocese of Hildesheim announced that the three Catholic parishes of Bremen-Nord would be led from 1 September by Agnes Dobrzynski and Dr Ute Zeilmann. Its headline referred to a new joint leadership of the deanery; its opening sentence was blunter still. For the first time, the parishes would be led by “two women and not a priest”.¹
That wording requires some canonical precision. Dobrzynski and Zeilmann are not being appointed jointly to the canonical office of dean or vicar forane, which the law reserves to a priest. They will serve as Pfarrbeauftragte — lay parish delegates — across the three parishes of Heilige Familie in Bremen-Grohn, Heilige Familie in Osterholz-Scharmbeck, and St Marien in Bremen-Blumenthal with St Ansgar in Schwanewede.
The practical division is clear. Zeilmann, a theologian already employed in the deanery, will direct pastoral work and the salaried pastoral team. Dobrzynski will lead the administration. Both are presented as successors to the retiring parish priest, Dr Holger Baumgard.
Fr Johannes Pawellek will be assigned as the priest moderator required by canon law. He is currently a parish priest elsewhere in the Diocese of Hildesheim, will retire in November, and is expected thereafter to accompany the Bremen-Nord leadership team “from a distance”. Fr Pawel Nowak remains in the pastoral team, while Fr Pradyut Bahla, an Indian priest completing doctoral studies in Frankfurt, will be assigned to Bremen-Nord for five years.
The July announcement alone would have raised questions about whether the diocesan publicity accurately described the canonical arrangement. Earlier documents published by the deanery remove much of that uncertainty. The language was chosen deliberately.
A letter from the Hildesheim General Vicariate, dated 1 June, informed the three parishes that they would no longer have their own parish priest. With the approval of the then Bishop of Hildesheim, Heiner Wilmer, Zeilmann would assume the pastoral leadership of the inter-parochial team and Dobrzynski would retain administrative leadership. A moderating priest would be attached to the parishes, but would not live locally because he had another responsible assignment elsewhere in the diocese.²
The parish circulars published on 12 June went further. Every leadership responsibility previously exercised by Dr Baumgard would be divided between the two women. Priests would thereby receive greater freedom for sacramental pastoral care. The arrangement would establish synodal leadership, strengthen the baptised through participation in the bishop’s pastoral care, and make visible new forms of ecclesiastical office held for a fixed term.
The circular supplied its own theological description: this was a “new, but entirely viable image of the Church”.³
That sentence distinguishes Bremen-Nord from a merely improvised response to clerical scarcity. The diocese is not simply attempting to maintain Catholic life until a parish priest can be appointed. It is using the shortage to divide the priest’s sacramental ministry from the leadership of the parish and to present the resulting structure as ecclesial development.
What Canon 517 permits
The ordinary constitution of a parish is set out without ambiguity in the Code of Canon Law. A parish is a stable community whose pastoral care is entrusted to a parish priest as its proper pastor. He exercises the functions of teaching, sanctifying and governing under the authority of the diocesan bishop, assisted by other priests, deacons and lay Catholics. Only a priest can validly be appointed to that office.
Canon 517 §2 provides an exceptional remedy where a genuine shortage of priests makes it impossible to appoint either a parish priest or a parochial administrator. In those circumstances, a bishop may entrust a deacon, layperson or group of persons with participation in the exercise of pastoral care. He must also appoint a priest, furnished with the powers and faculties of a parish priest, to direct that care.⁴
The distinction between participation and direction is essential. It does not arise from a judgement that priests are invariably wiser administrators, more competent organisers or holier Christians than laypeople. It belongs to the sacramental and hierarchical constitution of the Church.
Rome has already addressed the tendency to use Canon 517 §2 for something broader than the canon allows. In 1997, eight dicasteries stated that the provision could be employed only because of a shortage of priests, not for convenience or an ambiguous promotion of the laity. The participation entrusted to lay Catholics was not to become the direction, coordination, moderation or government of the parish. Those competencies remained with the priest.
That instruction also required bishops to consider other remedies first, including assigning several parishes to one priest, using a group of priests in solidum, or employing retired priests still capable of pastoral service. An emergency arrangement could not replace the office of parish priest or become the preferred model of parish life.⁵
The Congregation for the Clergy repeated the same limits in 2020. Canon 517 §2 was described as an extraordinary and temporary pastoral solution. The only canonical reason for employing it was a priestly shortage severe enough to prevent the appointment of a parish priest or administrator. The appointed priest alone possessed the powers and faculties proper to a parish priest, and the coordination of pastoral activity fell to him.
Rome also warned dioceses against terminology implying that lay collaborators governed or presided over the parish. Expressions such as parish manager, moderator or co-pastor could obscure the essential difference between the common priesthood of the baptised and the ministerial priesthood conferred by Holy Orders.⁶
Hildesheim’s public description sits uneasily beside those instructions. Rome says that laypeople participate while the priest directs. Hildesheim says that two women rather than a priest will lead, and that every leadership task formerly exercised by the parish priest will pass to them. Rome presents the arrangement as temporary and extraordinary. Bremen-Nord describes it as the visible embodiment of a new and viable image of the Church.
The decrees of appointment have not been published. The available evidence therefore does not establish that the arrangement will be canonically invalid or that Fr Pawellek will lack the faculties required by law. Those conclusions cannot responsibly be manufactured from press releases.
The discrepancy nevertheless requires an answer. If the priest moderator will genuinely direct the pastoral care of the three parishes, the diocesan publicity has misrepresented both his office and that of the two women. If the documents accurately describe where leadership and practical government will rest, the moderator risks becoming the canonical signature attached to an essentially lay-led structure.
Accompaniment from a distance is not necessarily fictitious. A priest can exercise authority without residing in every parish under his care, particularly when several communities have been grouped together. Yet the canonical direction required by Canon 517 cannot be reduced to occasional advice, sacramental availability or juridical approval when a priestly signature is needed. It must be real, habitual and recognisable.
The priesthood cannot be divided into departments
The June circulars reveal a functional conception of the priesthood. Leadership is transferred to lay employees so that priests may have more freedom for sacramental pastoral care.
The parish priest, however, is not a sacramental technician working within an organisation directed by others. His ministry of the word, his celebration of the sacred mysteries, his spiritual fatherhood and his government of the faithful belong to one pastoral office. He teaches and governs the people for whom he offers the Holy Sacrifice. He sanctifies the flock whose souls have been committed to his care.
The priest does not represent Christ the Head and Shepherd only when he stands at the altar. Nor does the power of order exhaust the character of his pastoral mission.
St John Paul II warned in 1993 that bishops should not adopt plans treating a parish without a priest-pastor as normal or desirable. A fall in priestly numbers could not be interpreted as a providential indication that laypeople should replace priests. The ordained were not merely celebrants of the Eucharist, he said, but spiritual fathers, guides and teachers of the faithful entrusted to them.⁷
Bremen-Nord approaches the model against which he warned. Two priests will remain available to perform priestly acts, while the comprehensive leadership formerly exercised by the parish priest is transferred elsewhere. The structure preserves sacramental provision but weakens the visible relationship between the priest and the community as its father and shepherd.
This judgement does not depend upon the appointees being women. The same objection would arise if two laymen were assigned the same functions. Dobrzynski and Zeilmann may be competent, conscientious and personally devout. Nothing in the published material justifies a judgement upon their motives or personal qualities.
Their sex is nevertheless central to the way Hildesheim has advertised the change. The diocese itself emphasises that two women, rather than a priest, will lead. What could have been presented soberly as an emergency response to scarcity has become a symbolic advance in female ecclesiastical leadership.
That symbolism reflects a persistent confusion within the German synodal programme. The sacramental constitution of the Church is treated as though it were an inherited distribution of institutional power. Once Holy Orders is interpreted primarily through the categories of status, access and representation, the male priesthood appears less as a gift received from Christ than as a position from which women have been excluded.
The Church does not correct that misunderstanding by turning laywomen into functional parish priests. She thereby clericalises the laity while narrowing the priesthood to those sacramental acts which cannot yet be reassigned.
Synodality against the solitary priest
Dobrzynski and Zeilmann have explained that they wish to receive the universal Church’s impulses towards synodality: leading together, listening to the power of the Holy Ghost, practising spiritual discernment and ending solitary leadership decisions. They intend to develop transparent decision-making through the parish and deanery councils.⁸
A prudent parish priest should already listen, consult and recognise the gifts of his people. Canon law provides pastoral and finance councils precisely because ecclesiastical government need not be arbitrary. No serious defence of the priesthood requires a pastor to make every judgement alone.
The rhetoric employed in Bremen-Nord nevertheless creates a convenient contrast. The departing priest represents solitary decision-making; the lay team represents transparency, cooperation and spiritual discernment. The moral advantage is assigned before the new arrangement has begun.
There is little evidence that Dr Baumgard actually governed his parishes as an isolated autocrat. Zeilmann and Dobrzynski already worked alongside him at deanery level, and a network of pastoral staff and councils was already in place. The image of the lonely decision-making priest serves the case for restructuring better than it describes the ordinary government of a contemporary German parish.
Synodality cannot mean that authority remains legitimate only until consultation has ended. Nor can spiritual discernment leave the Church indefinitely uncertain about the office of the parish priest. The Holy Ghost does not contradict the sacramental order He has given to the Church.
A real shortage, and the wrong diagnosis
The practical crisis is severe. The parish circulars reported that fewer Masses could be offered during the summer because no substitute priest was available while Fr Nowak was absent. Hildesheim recorded no diocesan priestly ordination in 2025. Across Germany, only twenty-five priests were ordained that year; reports for 2026 indicate thirty diocesan ordinations, with none in Hildesheim.⁹
Emergency measures are therefore unavoidable. Lay Catholics will undertake more administration, catechesis, charitable work and pastoral assistance. Priests will serve several churches and cover increasingly large territories. Some parishes may remain without a resident pastor for considerable periods.
Necessity does not explain why the absence of a priest should be welcomed as a new image of the Church.
Germany’s shortage did not fall from the sky. It followed decades in which much of the institutional Church weakened Catholic catechesis, tolerated liturgical banality, neglected confession, questioned traditional moral teaching and treated priestly identity with embarrassment. Young men have repeatedly been told that the future belongs to flattened structures and shared professional ministry. Few will sacrifice their lives to become the sacramental functionaries of somebody else’s pastoral organisation.
Hildesheim’s response manages the consequences without confronting their causes. An Indian priest is being brought to Bremen-Nord for five years, while the local structure proclaims that pastoral leadership no longer needs to be priestly. The universal Church supplies the ordained minister; the German bureaucracy determines the restricted space within which his priesthood will be exercised.
There is no ingratitude in receiving priests from other countries. Catholicism is universal, and missionary clergy have always crossed national boundaries. The incongruity lies in depending upon the vocations of other churches while portraying the diminished authority of the priest as a local theological achievement.
A serious recovery would begin elsewhere: with reverent worship, unambiguous doctrine, disciplined seminaries, the restoration of confession and Eucharistic devotion, and a renewed understanding of the priest as one who offers sacrifice and spends his life for a particular people. Vocations grow where the priesthood is recognisably supernatural and necessary. They do not flourish where its eventual disappearance has already been built into the pastoral plan.
The Wilmer legacy
The Bremen-Nord model was approved before Heiner Wilmer left Hildesheim. The General Vicariate’s letter expressly records his consent. The scheme must therefore be understood as part of the ecclesiastical direction established during his eight years as diocesan bishop.
Wilmer was elected chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference on 24 February 2026. Pope Leo XIV appointed him Bishop of Münster on 26 March, and he was installed on 21 June. With approximately 1.6 million Catholics, Münster is Germany’s largest diocese by Catholic population.¹⁰
His promotion matters because Wilmer has been a prominent supporter of the German Synodal Way. In 2022, he publicly regretted the failure of a text proposing reform of Catholic sexual teaching, stating that he had voted for it. He later welcomed the Roman permission for informal blessings of same-sex couples as a direction-setting development. Under his government, Hildesheim also established a formal programme of “queer-sensitive pastoral care”, including liturgical and sacramental accompaniment.¹¹
Pope Leo’s appointment does not prove that he approved the Bremen-Nord scheme or every position Wilmer has supported. The Holy See has issued no known judgement upon these particular appointments. Episcopal promotion is nevertheless an act of government, not a neutral entry in an ecclesiastical curriculum vitae. It gives authority, influence and a larger field of action to the man appointed.
Within three months of Wilmer’s transfer, one of the clearest practical expressions of his ecclesiology has become visible in the diocese he left behind. The parish priest is removed; his leadership is divided between two laywomen; priests are directed towards sacramental provision; and the result is praised as a new image of the Church founded upon baptism and synodality.
Bremen-Nord should therefore be judged by more than whether the diocesan lawyers have found a technically defensible use of Canon 517 §2. The deeper question concerns what the faithful are being taught to believe about the parish and its priest.
An emergency provision can sustain a community during a temporary deprivation. It becomes destructive when the deprivation itself is presented as progress. Canon law may permit a parish to endure for a time without its own priest-pastor. Catholic theology does not permit a diocese to teach that his disappearance reveals a more authentic Church.
The faithful of Bremen-Nord will still receive the sacraments, though apparently less frequently. They will still see priests. What they are being invited to accept is that priestly fatherhood no longer belongs at the centre of parish life.
Hildesheim calls this a new and viable image of the Church. It is more accurately the managed institutional form of decline: women lead, priests visit, and the shortage created by decades of failed ecclesiastical policy is consecrated with the language of synodality.
- Diocese of Hildesheim, “Doppelspitze leitet künftig das katholische Dekanat Bremen-Nord”, 21 July 2026; Deanery of Bremen-Nord, “Zwei Frauen leiten künftig das katholische Dekanat Bremen-Nord”, 21 July 2026.
- Hildesheim General Vicariate, letter to the employees, councils and parishioners of St Marien Bremen and the two parishes of Heilige Familie, 1 June 2026; Deanery of Bremen-Nord, information page for the new leadership model, 12 June 2026.
- Deanery of Bremen-Nord, circulars to Heilige Familie Grohn and Heilige Familie Osterholz-Scharmbeck concerning the new leadership model, June 2026.
- Code of Canon Law, canons 515 §1, 517 §2, 519, 521 §1 and 553 §1.
- Holy See, Interdicasterial Instruction, Ecclesiae de mysterio: On Certain Questions Regarding the Collaboration of the Non-Ordained Faithful in the Sacred Ministry of Priests, Article 4, 15 August 1997.
- Congregation for the Clergy, The Pastoral Conversion of the Parish Community in the Service of the Evangelising Mission of the Church, nn. 87–96, 20 July 2020.
- John Paul II, address to the bishops of the United States on their ad limina visit, 2 July 1993.
- Diocese of Hildesheim and Deanery of Bremen-Nord, announcement of the new parish leadership, 21 July 2026.
- German Bishops’ Conference, Kirchenstatistik 2025 and “Priesterweihen nach Diözesen 1962–2025”, published in 2026; KNA survey of priestly ordinations in the German dioceses for 2026, reported by Katholisch.de, 26 June 2026.
- German Bishops’ Conference, announcement of Wilmer’s election as chairman, 24 February 2026; Holy See Press Office, appointment of the Bishop of Münster, 26 March 2026; Diocese of Münster, report of Wilmer’s installation, 21 June 2026.
- Katholisch.de, reports on Wilmer’s support for reform of Catholic sexual teaching, 9 September 2022, and discussion of blessings for homosexual couples, 25 January 2022; DOMRADIO.DE, “Bischof Wilmer begrüßt Segenserlaubnis für queere Paare”, 21 December 2023; Diocese of Hildesheim, “Queersensible Seelsorge”.
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