By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
Pope Benedict XVI is said to have severely criticized the Austrian Bishops who were summoned to Rome last week for a private meeting with him, accusing them of timidity and inaction in the face of widespread dissension in their dioceses.
Less than a week after the June 15-16 meeting, details of the event are beginning to emerge. Sandro Magister of Italy’s Chiesa says the Pope let the bishops know he was not impressed with their progress after the last time they met to discuss the declining state of the Church in Austria in 2005.
In November, 2005, after their “ad limina” visit, the pope accused the bishops of remaining silent on important points of Christian teaching and morality, out of fear of protest and ridicule. He urged them to finally take the catechism in hand and to teach it from start to finish. He ordered them to “change course.”
This has not happened and as a result, rebellion inside the Church in Austria has grown even worse. Priests are living openly with mistresses, the ranks of the faithful are steadily declining, and the recent appointment of a “conservative” priest, Fr. Gerhard Wagner, as a new auxiliary bishop in the Diocese of Linz caused such an uproar among the liberal members of the Church that the Vatican was forced to withdraw the appointment.
“The worst thing, in Rome’s view, was that the Austrian bishops were careful to avoid defending Wagner’s appointment, and so were many of the clergy,” Magister wrote. “The archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, also went along with the crowd.”
When the Vatican withdrew the appointment, one of the leaders of the revolt against Wagner, a prominent priest in the diocese of Linz, “in declaring victory also revealed that he was living with a woman and paid no attention to the obligation of celibacy, with the approval of his parishioners and of other Austrian priests who also have lovers, and with the tolerance of the bishops,” Magister reports.
But the Wagner case was only the culmination of a much broader malaise, he writes. “The final statement of the meeting on June 15-16 listed an extensive series of critical points concerning doctrine, pastoral action, the teaching of the catechism, the clergy, the seminaries, the theological faculties,” Wagner writes.
Also included in the close-door meeting were five heads of the curia: the cardinals Giovanni Battista Re, of the congregation for bishops, William J. Levada, of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, Claudío Hummes, of the congregation for the clergy, Zenon Grocholewski, of the congregation for Catholic education, and Stanislaw Rylko, of the pontifical council for the laity. There was also the apostolic nuncio to Vienna, Peter Stephan Zurbriggen.
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