Leo XIV accepts the resignation of the bishop of Speyer, broken by the abuse crisis

On Wednesday 19 August 2026, at midday, the Vatican announced that Pope Leo XIV had accepted the renunciation of Bishop Karl-Heinz Wiesemann of the pastoral governance of the diocese of Speyer, in Germany. Sixty-six years old since 1 August, the bishop had led this see since March 2008. The diocese cites reasons of health; in a letter to the faithful, the bishop speaks of a “recurrent depressive disorder” diagnosed by his physicians.

He states that the immediate trigger, about five years ago, of a stay in a psychosomatic clinic was “the concrete situation of the handling of sexual abuse in our diocese.” In psychotherapeutic treatment since 2019, he says he has not recovered his former capacity for work, and no longer has the strength to carry through the coming structural reforms nor to bear the preparation of the millennium of the laying of the cathedral’s foundation stone, to be celebrated in 2030. “I have been a Christian with you and a bishop for you with all my heart and with great inner joy,” he writes, before adding that “the burden of so vast a responsibility has left grave traces in me, physical and above all spiritual.”

Wiesemann had supported the German Synodal Path and its decisions, notably on the role of women, the image of the priest, and the doctrine on sexuality, while professing his attachment to unity with the universal Church. After the publication of the MHG study in 2018, he had conducted interviews with victims; the first part of the independent study on abuse commissioned for his diocese appeared in 2025.

What the Church Has Always Taught

The bishop’s charge is not an administrative burden: it is the guard of souls, for which he will answer. “Attendite vobis et universo gregi, in quo vos Spiritus Sanctus posuit episcopos regere Ecclesiam Dei”: “Take heed to yourselves and to the whole flock, wherein the Holy Ghost hath placed you bishops, to rule the Church of God” (Acts XX, 28). The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that Order is a true sacrament instituted by Christ, which imprints on the priest an indelible character and sets him apart for the service of the altar; its very dignity measures the gravity of its corruption.

On doctrine, the Church is not reformed by changing what Christ has fixed. The Council of Trent declares that the priesthood is, by divine institution, reserved to men alone, and that God’s law on chastity and marriage is subject to no vote of men. What Christ has bound, no assembly unbinds.

The Measure

We judge neither the man nor his illness. That a bishop should be broken, in his body and in his soul, by the weight of the crimes committed under his jurisdiction, this says something true about the gravity of those crimes: the sin of clerics against the sixth commandment, aggravated upon the innocent, is of those of which Our Lord says that it were better for its author to be drowned in the depth of the sea with a millstone about his neck (cf. Matt. XVIII, 6). Tradition has never minimized this evil; it named it and it punished it.

But the remedy this bishop supported is not the Church’s. To ordain women, to remake “the image of the priest,” to revise the doctrine on sexuality: these are not structural reforms, they are to touch what Christ instituted and what Trent defined. One does not heal the corruption of the priesthood by undoing the priesthood. The perpetual remedy for unworthy priests has never been to change the law, but to make holy priests: penance, chastity, and that fear of God by which a shepherd answers for his flock. This is what a faithful soul must hold, when the man charged with teaching it to him collapses.

Sources. Acts of the Apostles XX, 28, and Saint Matthew XVIII, 6, according to the Vulgate. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the sacrament of Order and the sixth commandment. Council of Trent, session XXIII, on the sacrament of Order, and session XXIV, on marriage.