For Hamburg, a first homegrown bishop

As expected, the Archdiocese of Hamburg as given a single auxiliary bishop on Thursday, and as equally expected, he is one of the three area deans appointed by Archbishop Stefan Heße last year as part of the organisational overhaul of the archdiocese. And although the new auxiliary bishop has been the area dean for Mecklenburg in the east of the archdiocese, as an auxiliary bishop he will reside in Hamburg. In the past Hamburg had two auxiliaries, one in Schwerin, the other in Hamburg. But as part of the reorganisation that number has been reduced to one, residing in the metropolitan heart of the area.

Bishop-elect Horst Eberlein was born in 1950 in Walsleben (Altmark) and ordained to the priesthood in 1977. He was a priest in parishes in what was then the Apostolic Administration of Schwerin, which in 1994 became a part of the newly erected Archdiocese of Hamburg. He is then the first bishop to be appointed from among the clergy of Hamburg itself. His predecessors as auxiliary bishops came from Schwerin (Norbert Werbs) and Osnabrück (Hans-Jochen Jaschke), and the archbishops were also called from other circumscriptions. Archbishop Heße, for example, came from Cologne.

Since 2015, Bishop-elect Eberlein has been a non-resident member of the cathedral chapter, and in 2016 he was appointed as one of three area deans, representing the archbishop in Mecklenburg, the most eastern part of the archdiocese. As auxiliary bishop, Msgr. Eberlein will support the archbishop in running the archdiocese. The consecration of the new bishop is set for 25 March, in St. Mary’s cathedral in Hamburg. It will be only the second time that that church has been the setting for an episcopal consecration, after that of Archbishop Heße in March of 2015.

As auxiliary bishop, Msgr. Eberlein has been given the titular see of Tisedi, in modern Algeria. In the past, from 1999 to 2005, another German bishop, Gerhard Feige, held that title when he was auxiliary bishop of Magdeburg.

Photo credit: Klaus Bodig / HA

Advertisement

A Cold War arrangement ends as Germany is set to lose a bishop

The place of the German dioceses in the world Church is unique in several ways. Their relations with Rome are dictated by concordats which also influence the appointment of bishops (rather than the Pope choosing a new bishop from a list of three candidates, it is the other way around for most dioceses in Germany; it is the Pope providing a list of three candidates to the cathedral chapter of a given diocese, who then make their choice for the Pope to appoint). And there is also an unofficial tradition when it comes to auxiliary bishops: in at least the major (arch)dioceses, there will always be the same number of auxiliary bishops. For example, Cologne has three, one for each of its pastoral areas, and Hamburg has two.

Or had, at least.

In the Archdiocese of Hamburg the tradition is about to change. Hamburg is perhaps a little too young to have very old traditions, but this goes a bit further back than the archdiocese. Established in 1994, the archdiocese was given two auxiliary bishops, one residing in Hamburg, the other in Schwerin. And in Schwerin, the tradition of having a resident auxiliary bishop goes back another 40 years, to 1973, when the area, then still part of the Diocese of Osnabrück, was made a nominally separate Apostolic Administration. This because of the political situation at the time: the new Administration was that part of Osnabrück which lay in the communist German Democratic Republic, divided from the rest of the diocese by the iron curtain. As this border between west and east prevented easy travel by the bishop from Osnabrück to the faithful in Mecklenburg and Vorpommern, the Holy See appointed an auxiliary bishop to reside in Schwerin, who could be a bishop for the faithful there when the ordinary could not. After the German reunification, major parts of Osnabrück, including Schwerin, were split off to become the new Archdiocese of Hamburg, but the auxiliary bishop in Schwerin remained, now as an auxiliary bishop of Hamburg. Since 1981, that has been Bishop Norbert Werbs, who retired in May of 2015. No successor has been appointed since then, and none will, it now seems.

A spokesman of the archdiocese said that, in the future, the sole auxiliary bishop would reside in Hamburg, like the archbishop. That single auxiliary is currently Hans-Jochen Jaschke (at left) who is set to retire upon his 75th birthday on 29 September of this year. Not only is this the end of a cold war arrangement, one of those which so marked the recent history of the German dioceses – of which Hamburg is the only one incorporating parts of both former East and West Germany – but also a move that decreases the number of German bishops by one. Before now any retiring bishop, be he an ordinary or auxiliary, could expect a successor to be appointed within reasonable time (auxiliaries quicker than ordinaries).

The decision to no longer appoint two auxiliary bishops for Hamburg was made by Pope Francis and Archbishop Stefan Heße together, it is said. In preparation for the selection of the single new auxiliary, to be appointed when Bishop Jaschke retires, the archbishop has asked for suggestions from some 100 people in the archdiocese.

With its third archbishop, Hamburg gets around to consecrating for the first time

The consecration of the new archbishop of Hamburg, Msgr. Stefan Heße, on 14 March, turns out to have a few unique features, as the plans for the event emerge.

While he is the third archbishop of the north German diocese, Archbishop-elect Heße will be the first to be consecrated there. His two predecessors, Archbishops Werner Thissen and Ludwig Averkamp were both consecrated as auxiliary bishop of Münster. Of the two current auxiliaries of Hamburg, Bishop Hans-Jochen Jaschke was an auxiliary of Osnabrück until he was transferred to Hamburg when it was created as a diocese in 1994. Bishop Norbert Werbs began as auxiliary bishop of the Apostolic Administration of Schwerin, which became part of Hamburg, also in 1994.

With the first consecration of a Hamburg archbishop in his own new territory, the choice of consecrators is not dictated by tradition. Archbishop-elect Heße will, somewhat surprisingly, not be consecrated by his predecessor, Archbishop Thissen. Instead, Osnabrück’s Bishop Franz-Josef Bode will be the first consecrator. This choice is fitting as Hamburg and Osnabrück are closely related: the latter is a suffragan diocese of Hamburg and a great deal of its former territory is now part of the archdiocese.

Co-consecrators will be the aforementioned Bishop Norbert Werbs, auxiliary bishop of Hamburg, and Rainer Cardinal Woelki, the archbishop of Cologne, where Archbishop-elect Heße was born and where he most recently was vicar general.

Photo credit: Klaus Bodig / HA