Hilarios Karl-Heinz Ungerer is a German Bishop based in Munich, where he currently heads the Free Catholic Church,[1] though his routes trace back through other independent European churches. Bishop Ungerer has received mention in the international press for being the co-consecrator, in 1998, with Bishop Roberto Garrido Padin, of Bishop Rómulo Antonio Braschi, who carried out the controversial ordinations of Catholic women on the Danube River in 2002. This group of women, among them theologians and religious, became known as the Danube Seven.
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Hilarios Karl-Heinz Ungerer was ordained priest twice in 1967 in the Free Catholic Church Movement in Germany, and was consecrated Bishop several years later. Having established a "shop church" on one of the main thoroughfares of downtown Munich, in 1976 he became part of the German branch of the Mariavite Church, a Polish Marian Catholic movement that broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in 1909 and entered into communion with the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands. On 6 October 1976 Ungerer was consecrated bishop (sub-conditione) by the Mariavite Bishop Norbert Maas, but on 8 August 1978 he achieved demission.
Since then Bishop Ungerer has led the Free Catholic Church in Germany, considered to be a German expression of the independent Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church which broke away from Rome in 1945.