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Last year, I devoted at least a couple of significant posts to what is, for me, a hateful 'initiative' (Pfarrer-Initiative) by some dissident Austrian parish priests led by a former auxiliary bishop of Vienna
I have lumped the priests in the banner above with Hans Kueng and We are Church as the epitome of the progressivist dissident movement in the Church. 'Aufruf zum Ungehorsam' is the priests' 'Call for Disobedience'. [BTW, since I used the dissident groups' own materials to put together the composite, isn't their choice of colors simply lurid?]...
Their manifesto (rather brief but incredibly in-your-face) can be found on this post, with other related material...
http://benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/newpost.aspx?a=edit&c=169318&f=169318&idc=657879&idd=8527207&idm=112222487&p=228
In a perverse way, the Austrian dissident priests are apparently celebrating the fact that Pope Benedict XVI has given them the spotlight today,trusting in the trite truism that any news is good news... .
Dissident priest leader
welcomes Pope's words
VATICAN CITY, April 5 (Translated from TMNews) - The Pope has broken his silence on the dissidence generted among some European Catholic priests and in his homily at the Chrismal Mass on the morning of Maundy Thursday, he spoke openly of the call for disobedience issued by some Austrian priests to the alarm of the Church hierarchy.
Benedict XVI's tone was discursive, as is usual for the theologian-Pope, but his conclusions are a doctrinal closure to the ecclesiastic reforms proposed by the rebels starting with women priests. [It must be recalled that this Pope has often said that such 'structural' reforms are meaningless - unless each of us, especially priests, start with personal reform in terms of genuine conversion and purification, and then everything else will fall into place. That is to say, a purified Catholic conscience would see the incompatibility and outright contradiction to the faith of proposing practices that the Church has avoided out of principle.]
But the priest who heads in the initiative, in a phone interview with TMNews, welcomed what he called Benedict XVI's 'openness' - that the Pope had acknowledged the good faith of his group, and although he also made clear the impossibility of changing the Church Magisterium, welcomed the fact that that the Pope has taken a public position [Excuse me, he has always taken a public position on the issues raised by the dissidents - the only difference this time is that he specified a group, even without calling them by name!], and he thinks it is because their reform demands have 'infected' other countries, starting with Ireland after having been shaken by the sex-abuse scandal. [The man is inhabiting a hallucinatory world and taking credit for a phenomenon that is 50 years old. His group's demands have been around since Vatican II - it's not as if the Pfarrer-Initiative was a milestone in protest. Since Vatican-II, dissident priests have been found in every country, though perhaps none of them have found the fertile ground that the Austrian priests have in what was once a most orthodoxly Catholic nation.]/DIM]
[The report goes on to quote what the Pope said in his homily about 'a group of priests in a European country'.]
The 'Pfarrer Initiative' was first launched in 2006 by Mons. Helmut Schueller, now 59 and parish priest of St. Stephan church in the village of Probstdorf. He was once president of Austrian Caritas and a vicar-general of Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn in the Archdiocese of Vienna. [The movement languished for a while until it was re-launched online in June 2011.]
After serving in the archdiocese, he published a 'call for disobedience' which demanded, among others, for women priests, communion for remarried divorcees, abolition of priestly celibacy, and a greater role for laymen in the sacramental life of the Church.
The passage that the Pope devoted to the theme of disobedience was detailed and dense with questions, as befits a man of the Church who does not shirk thorny questions.
Is disobedience a path of renewal for the Church? We would like to believe that the authors of this summons are motivated by concern for the Church, that they are convinced that the slow pace of institutions has to be overcome by drastic measures, in order to open up new paths and to bring the Church up to date.
But is disobedience really a way to do this? Do we sense here anything of that configuration to Christ which is the precondition for true renewal, or do we merely sense a desperate push to do something to change the Church in accordance with one’s own preferences and ideas?
But let us not oversimplify matters. Surely Christ himself corrected human traditions which threatened to stifle the word and the will of God? Indeed he did, so as to rekindle obedience to the true will of God, to his ever enduring word.
His concern was for true obedience, as opposed to human caprice. Nor must we forget: he was the Son, possessed of singular authority and responsibility to reveal the authentic will of God, so as to open up the path for God’s word to the world of the nations.
And finally: he lived out his task with obedience and humility all the way to the Cross, and so gave credibility to his mission. Not my will, but thine be done: these words reveal to us the Son, in his humility and his divinity, and they show us the true path.
Let us ask again: do not such reflections serve simply to defend inertia, the fossilization of traditions? No.
Anyone who considers the history of the post-conciliar era can recognize the process of true renewal, which often took unexpected forms in living movements and made almost tangible the inexhaustible vitality of holy Church, the presence and effectiveness of the Holy Spirit.
And if we look at the people from whom these fresh currents of life burst forth and continue to burst forth, then we see that this new fruitfulness requires being filled with the joy of faith, the radicalism of obedience, the dynamic of hope and the power of love.
"Thus disobedience is not the way, but neither is it hardening," says an editorial by Giovanni Maria Vian in the Friday issue of L'Osservatore Romano, who said that in his homily today, the Pope had delivered "a lucid and kind reflection which once and for all should cancel the stereotype of a weak Pope who cannot govern the Church". [I take issue with the way Vian states this. What stereotype? Marco Politi and other detractors have only lately begun this line of attack against the Pope, drawing ammunition from their exaggerated extrapolation of the relatively minor Curial peccadilloes disclosed by the puny Vatileaks, and completely ignoring that they have said this, and worse, of the Curia under other Popes (in the case of John Paul II, he was accused of having no interest in the Curia at all because he was more interested in his global role). In other words, the idea of Benedict XVI as a Pope who cannot govern has not been bandied about long enough to become a stereotype! Why should the editor of the Vatican newspaper lead in calling the notion a stereotype?]]
Questioned by TMNews, Mons. Schueller commented that the Pope's explanation was 'open' and therefore he sees a half-full glass.
"The Pope recognizes that we are acting out of concern for the Church andfor its future. But he cites John Paul II who said that the Magisterium cannot be modified on questions like women priests. We, and many faithful, do not agree with this. In the course of centuries, the Church has changed its teaching on many points". [Name one! The interviewer should have pressed him on this.]
"Overall, hweover," Schueller added, "The Pope's tone was not harsh". [He never is!]
He claims that more than 400 Austrian priests have signed his Call to Disobedience - about a tenth of them, but that according to a recent poll, 72% of Austrian priests 'sympathize' with his movement.
But above all, he cites how the movement has gone beyond Austria, citing besides Ireland, Germany, Slovakia, Australia, the USA, Latin America and Africa. [You are mixing up countries and continents, Monsignor! That's a dishonest ploy to make your 'influence' seem much wider than it is. I am sure that such dissident priest groups existed in those other places (except Ireland) independent of, and long before, his initiative! ]
"It's probably this internationalization that forced Ratzinger to face the problem of Austrian disobedience publicly for the first time". [Schueller really likes to take credit for too much. How about the Pope spoke out against them specifically because he has realized he can no longer count on the Austrian bishops to hold the line for the faith, because they have shown nothing all this years but an increasing inaction and impotence, and no spine at all, starting with the president of the Austrian bishops conference, the endlessly pandering Count von Schoenborn and Archbishop of Vienna.]
Schueller nonetheless finds its significant that the Pope has not threatened the group with excommunication. [Like he would ever make a threat in a homily on Maundy Thursday! Besides, the Church is prudent with potentially schismatic groups. It negotiated for quite a time with the Lefebvrians before they decided to go ahead and perform an unequivocally and prima facie excommunicable action - ordaining their own bishops without the approval of the Pope, in fact against his express prohibition.]
"The Pope is aware", he said, "that here in Austria, those topics are very much under discussion and that our ideas are followed by many if the faithful. [Hey, popular ideas are not always necessarily right - and the popularity of wrong ideas does not make them right! Besides, the Magisterium is not decided by popular vote, nor was it ever meant to be.] And that therefore the dispute cannot be resolved by sanctions".
In Vienna, Cardinal Schoenborn welcomed the Pope's words as 'an encouragement for the Austrian Church'. [Yes, but what is the 'Austrian Church' today but apparently a loose and unruly aggrupation of dissidents and do-as-you-please Catholics who have lost all sense that religion is necessarily a discipline? 'Encouragement' for them means pursuing their dissent more vigorously!]
Schoenborn - who recently decided uphold the election of a practising homosexual to a parish council over the objection of the parish priest and despite the failure of the candidates to sign a required statement professing adherence to Catholic teachings - has been very active in recent months in seeking to repair what he himself fears to be a potential schism.
Last January 23, as Guido Horst reported in Vatican Insider, Schoenborn along with the bishops of Salzburg, Graz and St. Poelten, came to Rome to meet with officials at the Secretariat of State and the Curia to consider what to do about the Schueller initiative. The Pope is also said to have discussed the 'disobedience' challenge when he met the Austrian Foreign Minister last September.
At the same time, the Archdiocese of Vienna has announced a new book coming out by a Viennese theologian, Jan-Heiner Tueck, which will have contributions by both Schoenborn and Schueller. [What is it that Benedict XVI continually reminds theologians? That they must write first of all with the attitude of 'sentire cum Ecclesia', not proposing what they wish but what the Church does teach.]
In Ireland. the dissident Association of Catholic Priests, which now claims a membership of 600, confirmed that their leader, Fr. Tony Flannery, is "under investigation by the Vatican" for the positions he has publicly taken and has stopped writing a column for the monthly magazine, Redemptorist Reality.
It will be recalled that among the conclusions drawn by the bishops who carried out an apostolic visitation of some dioceses, seminaries and religious orders in Ireland, was this:
Since the Visitators also encountered a certain tendency, not dominant but nevertheless fairly widespread among priests, Religious and laity, to hold theological opinions at variance with the teachings of the Magisterium, this serious situation requires particular attention, directed principally towards improved theological formation. It must be stressed that dissent from the fundamental teachings of the Church is not the authentic path towards renewal".
[Foreshadowing what the Pope said in his homily this morning!]
Now, let me indulge in a re-post of this Oct. 13, 2011, post of the reaction by a Houston professor of theology to the Austrian' 'initiative', and some of my rejoinders at the time:
The Austrian Priests’ Initiative
By Randall Smith
Oct. 13, 2011
I was glancing at the British journal The Tablet the other day and came across an editorial on something called “The Austrian Priests’ Initiative.” [The exact translation of 'Pfarrer-Initiative' is 'Parish Priests' Initiative', by which I suppose the core group intended to underscore that it wasn't just an initiative that originated from ordinary priests but from parish priests, no less.]
“That’s nice,” I thought. “Priests taking initiative.” It quickly became clear, however, that these aren’t exactly priests eager to take on more. Indeed, as far as I can tell, they seem eager to shed the really challenging part of their job: namely, dealing with sin.
According to The Tablet: “The Church has been in turmoil since more than 300 priests led by Mgr. Helmut Schüller called for disobedience on matters such as priestly celibacy and Communion for re-married divorcees.”. [Yeah right, so much 'in turmoil' that the Archbishop of Vienna and president of the Austrian bishops' conference only had only one thing to say to them: 'Disobedience is a No-no! But if we sit down and dialog, we can work things out!" (exactly what the German bishops have been telling their own dissidents), without going into the doctrinal and theological fallacies that the priests advocate!" BTW, I don't know if the Tablet identified the movement more fully in its write-up, but it is emblematic of the dissenters within the Church that the Austrian manifesto is entitled 'A CALL TO DISOBEDIENCE'. If the Tablet did not mention that, then it is guilty of trying to 'soften' the profile of their fellow progressivists in Austria.]
By “the Church,” I take it they mean the “Austrian Church,” since the whole business hasn’t really rocked my world. Where I live, Mass is still being celebrated and confessions are still being heard.
Be that as it may, The Tablet goes on to add that: “The priests are drawing attention to the wide and growing disconnection between the norms of official church teaching, and everyday Catholic life as lived by many of the clergy and laity. Issues raised include birth control, Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried, priestly celibacy, and the treatment of homosexuals.”[And media outlets like the Tablet perpetrate this 'growing disconnection' by playing up the discontents into a vicious spiral of 'nattering negativism', as one Spiro Agnew once baptized MSM's adversary journalism.]
Why always the same old list: birth control, celibacy, homosexuality, divorce, and remarriage (a.k.a, “how to replace your old, annoying, unsexy wife with a newer, sexier model”)? Is there nothing these priests can think about other than sex?
How about greater support for Catholic parents who are struggling to raise six kids? How about better civic values and concern for the common good? How about better pay for teachers in Catholic schools and nothing less than a first-rate education for all Catholic school children? Nope. Just sex. [Perhaps the pathology of the malcontents begins there - that they view everything through the prism of sex, a monomania that is a sickness in itself. Which shows they never should have become priests at all. It is the height of dishonesty - to oneself above all - to spend all that time training to be a Catholic priest knowing in your heart that you will probably never be able to reconcile yourself with the vow of celibacy that Catholic priesthood entails.
Someone like Joseph Ratzinger, at the age of 69, was honest enough to speak to an interviewer [Salt of the Earth, 1996, pp 55-56) about the hours he spent asking himself before his ordination "whether I really could relate to people... lead and inspire young people, instruct kids, deal with the old and the sick, whether I would be able to do that all my life" and "whether I would be able to remain celibate, unmarried my whole life long". Adding that the latter was a practical problem since during the last two years of his studies at the theological faculty attached to the University of Munich, postwar conditions meant that "male and female students lived at such close quarters that the daily encounter definitely made the question of renunciation and its inner meaning a practical one".
No aspiring priest can nor should make the decision lightly, but once he has made that decision, he should do his best to live by it. After all, no one forced him into the decision - and I don't suppose any of the Austrian priests involved in the 'initiative' was subjected to force majeure to become a priest!]
These priests must imagine that all of us who are married are getting sex all the time. I hate to disappoint them, but modern women tend to take a rather dim view of husbands who think of their wives as regular sex machines. If you’re not ready for celibacy, guys, you’re probably not ready for marriage.
“What Catholics hunger for,” says The Tablet, “and not just in Austria, is a Church of integrity, without hypocrisy, doublespeak or pathological denial.” [Implying, of course, that those attributes describe the Church today!]
If by that they mean people should practice what they preach, then absolutely. If they mean people should stop preaching what’s hard to practice, well then, that’s just silly. Nobody ever said Christianity was going to be easy.
When surveys come out trumpeting that such-and-such a percentage of Catholics don’t practice what the Church teaches on, say, contraception, I feel like pointing out to them that 100 percent of Catholics don’t practice what the Church preaches about loving their neighbor as themselves, forgiving as they have been forgiven, not stealing, and not coveting their neighbor’s possessions. (Once you throw “coveting” in there, things get really dicey, don’t they?)
In addition, 100 percent of Catholics don’t consistently care for the poor or live up to the demands of the Beatitudes. So should the Church “bow to reality” and dump those things too, because they’re hard? Look, if only 40 percent of Catholics are failing to live up to the Church’s teaching on contraception and conjugal union, then I’d say we’re still about 60 percent ahead.
What exactly are these priests thinking? I assume nearly everyone is going to be stuck in the rut of sin pretty much every day. That’s why I find accusations of “hypocrisy” a bit odd.
If going into a Catholic church were a public proclamation of being sinless, then, yes, we’d all be hypocrites. But since I take it that going to church implies: “I’m a sinner who wants to do better, in need of the forgiveness of Jesus Christ,” then charges of “hypocrisy” are simply misplaced. Catholics don’t claim to be perfect. People who aren’t sick don’t need a doctor.
As for the “disconnection between the norms of official church teaching and everyday Catholic life” the Tablet is worried about, let me be the first to admit to a pretty healthy distance in my life between theory and practice. I call the gap between the two: “sin.”
The theory is: “love my neighbor as myself.” But I act like a selfish jerk. That’s precisely why I need a priest who’s willing to go through that struggle with me, not one who finds the messy business of dealing with sin just too. . .what?. . .unsophisticated?
This business in Austria seems pretty serious. One headline called it “Austria’s Moment of Truth.” Another talked of “schism.” Wow. Schism. Really? Over what?
In centuries past, people argued over deep theological issues such as the nature of Christ, the Trinity, and the sacraments. These priests seem willing to walk away from a two-thousand-year-old Church because it teaches that a married couple shouldn’t turn fertility into a pathology that needs to be treated with drugs or sterilized with the sexual equivalent of a latex surgical glove.
But look, if these priests feel they have to walk away, God go with them. Being a priest and dealing with sin is admittedly hard. No one can force you to do it. Just one thing, though: If you leave the Church, guys, leave the church.
Schismatics somehow think they get to keep the beautiful buildings. Gentlemen, the places where you live and work were built over centuries by generations of faithful men and women dedicated to principles you now reject.
The buildings don’t belong to you just because you’ve lived in them for a precious few years. You were merely holding them in trust for the next generation. If you no longer wish to carry on the tradition handed down to you, fine. Walk away if you must. But please, go build your own churches. We’d like ours back.
{Actually, none of them have any intention of walking away! What they expect is for everybody else to leave the 'institutional' Church and rush to join their initiative. What are they, though? Other than a ragtag band of ideologues who have forgotten that God is supposed to be the center of Church life, not they and their bloated flatulent egos. Do they really think they can inspire spirituality in anyone when they lack it themselves?]
Just for background, here are the statistics about the Church in Austria provided by the Vatican at the time of the Pope's visit there in 2007:
Population - 8,220,000
Catholics - 5,976,000
Catholics as % of population - 72.7%
Ecclesiastical districts - 12
Parishes - 3,072
Other pastoral centers - 1,002
Catholics per pastoral center - 1,467
And here are the Pfarrer-Initiative's membership as their website shows it today (10/14/11):
Members: 338 priests and deacons (56); median age 58.8
Supporters: 69 priests and deacons (4); median age 58.6
Supporters: 1004 lay faithful; median age 50.2
Considering that Austria had more than 3,000 parishes in 2007, the participation rate in terms of member priests is 338-56 = 282 parish priests, or less than 10% of the parishes. Why the other 65 priests are merely listed as supporters not members, once can only guess. And what does it say that they have only managed to attract 1004 lay supporters in seven-plus months ? Perhaps 1004 is the true number of 'We are Church' activists in Austria today, because otherwise, if they had tens of thousands, or even millions as they claim, they would have taken over St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna by now and kept Cardinal Schoenborn hostage...
And note the median age of the participants! The priests are nearing 60 years old, which means they began seminary studies around the end of Vatican II, while the laymen were toddlers at around that time. So guess what was their primary if not exclusive experience of the faith? Certainly not the faith of our fathers, as in Fathers of the Church, but the faith of the progressivist Vatican II fathers which seems to be much closer to Protestantism than to Catholicism - but apparently without Martin Luther's continuing zeal for God and his grace!
I don't doubt that the dissidents probably have many more sympathizers out there among their fellow priests who just do not want to come out into the open. But if the 'movement' were so compelling, would it not have spread like wildfire by now? Beware of being taken in by the generalizations of liberal mouthpieces like the Tablet who always blow up any dissent against the Church as if it were the definitive tsunami that is about to sink the whole Church, Pope and all.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/04/2012 15:40] |