Bishop Stefan Oster sharply criticized a homosexual German politician who professes to be Catholic after acquiring a child via surrogacy.
Jens Spahn of the German Christian Democrats (CDU) announced last week that he and his homosexual “husband” Daniel Funke “became fathers” by acquiring a child from a surrogate mother in the United States. Spahn is a former Minister of Health, and from 2025 until this month he served as the leader of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the German Bundestag.
The news caused a massive backlash online against Spahn, especially because surrogacy is banned in Germany and Spahn himself has officially opposed legalizing the practice in the past. The CDU still officially holds this position. Spahn and Funke circumvented German law by traveling to the U.S. to buy a child from a surrogate.
In a video message that garnered significant attention online, Bishop Oster of the Diocese of Passau broke down why surrogacy is morally wrong and damaging to the child.
Oster explained that “there are good reasons why surrogacy is prohibited in our country.”
“In my view, the most fundamental reason is that it violates human dignity,” he stated. “As a general rule, parents regard the birth of a child they have together as a gift – a gift that is not for sale and therefore cannot and must not be purchased. As Christians, we believe that children are a gift from God and that their dignity as persons comes from God.”
“But people also see it as a gift because children generally arise from the loving relationship between their parents, and because the experience of love itself is a gift that I cannot buy. It is undeserved when someone loves me, but I have a responsibility insofar as I open myself to that love.”
”So-called ‘love for sale’ is therefore the exact opposite of love – namely, a business transaction,” he continued. “Every person is unique and develops through unique relationships. A child’s development begins in the womb. The unique relationship between mother and child has a profound impact on the child and also lays the foundation for the life ahead.”
“While still in the womb, the child senses the mother’s emotions. It hears her voice, experiences her loving care even before birth, and develops a bond with the world through its mother, who at first is the child’s entire world.”
”Our tradition teaches that the union of a man and a woman – the young parents – is a uterus spiritualis, a kind of spiritual womb, in which and through which the child naturally comes to know Mom and Dad,” Oster said in defense of the traditional family. “It is the unique child of this very mother and this very father. By nature, it has a unique, irreplaceable, and irretrievable role in the new family structure.”
“This child of Jens Spahn and Daniel Funke is named Georg, and he is already a public figure – and, as such, is essentially a commodity,” Oster stated. “What a burden this will one day be for him to bear, even though he has no idea of it yet. I am completely convinced, my dear friends, that above all other rights, every child has a right to its natural parents – and this right far outweighs any right potential parents might have to acquire a child, have one created, or even buy one.”
The bishop acknowledged that “a child’s natural circumstances can be so terrible that any other solution for their upbringing might be better than the ones they were originally given” but argued that “few educators or psychologists would dispute that, under normal circumstances, the circumstances originally provided by nature are, by their very nature, the best possible.”
“So when a prominent CDU politician, to fulfill his own desires, uses surrogacy, deliberately violates the laws of his own country and the fundamental principles of his own party on this issue – which is so crucial to our view of humanity – and, on top of that, actively advocates for surrogacy, I consider that a genuine scandal,” Oster concluded.
“This is especially true given that this politician has publicly professed his affiliation with the Catholic Church,” he added. “In my view, he has thereby taken a step that we, as a faith community, will never be able to follow, even in the future.”
Spahn has since resigned from his position as the leader of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group after the scandal elicited calls for his resignation, including from his own party. However, he remains a member of the German Bundestag and of the CDU.
Spahn was not the only homosexual CDU politician to announce he had acquired a child via surrogacy this year.
In April, it became known that another politician from the Christian Democrats, Hendrik Streeck, also had a child via surrogacy together with his “husband.” However, government spokesperson Stefan Kornelius said that Streeck would not face consequences because he has not spoken out against surrogacy in the past and therefore “there is no evidence of a double standard on Streeck’s part.”