German Catholic leaders faced renewed conflict with the Vatican over proposed structural reforms to the church, casting a shadow over the start of the German Bishops’ Conference spring meeting on Monday. A long-standing reform process in Germany’s Catholic Church has proposed giving the laity, or regular Catholics who are not members of the clergy, equal power as bishops in some institutions. The idea has drawn criticism from the Vatican, and a new letter to the German bishops on Monday from three senior cardinals from the Roman Curia in the Vatican demanded that the German Bishops’ Conference…