GERMANY


Pope to address German parliament


Christa Pongratz-Lippitt In Vienna


THE VATICAN has confirmed that the Pope will pay a state visit to Germany from 22 to 25 September, visiting Berlin, Freiburg and Thuringia. In Berlin he will address the Bundestag, which will be the first time that a Pope has ever addressed the German par- liament. The German President Christian Wulff said he was pleased the Pope was includ- ing an eastern German diocese, Thuringia (formerly in Communist East Germany, the DDR), in his visit. “It will be an impressive way of paying tribute to the contribution made by the Christian Churches to the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe,” he said. “This is an honour for us Germans, for our Bundestag and for our democracy,” Bishop Hans-Jochen Jaschke, an auxiliary in Hamburg, told Domradio. “He is a moral authority to whom many people look up. I think it important that we here in Germany, especially at a time when Christianity is fal- tering, will have the privilege of experiencing this moral authority. And that perhaps we will be able to realise that the Church will not disintegrate after what has weighed so heavily on us throughout the past year with its terrible abuse scandals.” While the conservative CDU/CSU and the


FDP, the ruling coalition parties, as well as the Left Party, welcomed the fact that the Pope will address the Bundestag, the German


SWITZERLAND Koch anticipates new phase in Catholic-Anglican relations


WHILE TAKING stock of his first 100 days in office in interviews with Catholic news agencies, Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (PCPCU), has said relations with the Anglicans could be entering a new era. Asked whether the situation with the Anglican Church was “difficult”, he told Germany’s KNA and the Swiss KIPA/APIC in December: “A new phase in our relations begins next year and I am most confident. At the PCPCU Jubilee in Rome recently, Archbishop Rowan Williams emphasised that we should above all reflect together on the Eucharist. To arrive at a common understanding of the Eucharist is a very promising way forward in my eyes.” Accompanying the Pope to Britain in September 2010 had been his first journey abroad as PCPCU president, Cardinal Koch said. “There were some most important ecu- menical encounters, above all the joint Evening Prayers at Westminster Abbey and the heartfelt


sign of peace that the Pope and Archbishop Williams exchanged.” Asked whether the new Vatican structures for Anglicans who wanted to convert were proving a burden for relations between the two Churches, Cardinal Koch replied: “I don’t think they are much of a bur- den. We in the Vatican deal with the two aspects separately. The Congregation for the


■AUSTRALIA: The bishops charged with establishing the Australian ordinariate for groups of Anglicans joining the Catholic Church have declared that “there is every reason to be optimistic that our goal for unity will soon be achieved”, writes Mark Brolly. Bishop Peter Elliott, the


Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference delegate for the ordinariate, and the


Doctrine of the Faith is responsible for Anglicanorum Coetibus, that is for enabling Anglicans to join our Church, whereas our PCPCU continues to be responsible for Catholic-Anglican dialogue. I can understand that the situation isn’t easy for Anglicans, but if people come knocking at our door, there isno reason not to open it.”


Adelaide-based Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, Archbishop John Hepworth, said in a joint statement that a meeting they had convened in Melbourne had formed the Australian Ordinariate Implementation Committee. “This groundbreaking and


historic initiative was unanimously agreed to by a working party including


clergy of the Anglican Church of Australia and official representatives of the Traditional Anglican Communion in Australia,” the statement said. “They resolved to work closely together to bring to fruition their shared desire to be in full communion with the Catholic Church through the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus.”


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Greens did not. The Green Party MP Christian Ströbele said he would leave the parliament chamber during the speech. The Pope was a religious leader first, the Green Party whip Volker Beck told the German Press Agency. The Bundestag would now have to consider which other religious leaders to invite, he said. However, the CDU/CSU whip, Volker


Kauder, and other members of the CDU/CSU would also like the Pope to celebrate a large- scale Mass in Berlin. The Pope’s visit should not only be a political but also a religious event, Mr Kauder told the Catholic Press Agency KNA. “The Church mustn’t hide but must stand by its missionary presence in Berlin.” The programme of the visit, which is now being mapped out, should not give the impres- sion that Church and State were divided and that “the Pope’s visit to Berlin was the political part and that the religious part was reserved for Freiburg and Thuringia”, he insisted. But the opposition centre-left Social Democrat (SPD) MP, Rolf Schwanitz. said he was not certain the visit was a good idea. “I have reservations,” he said. Mr Schwanitz is the founder of an SPD group called Laizisten in der SPD (“Lay people in the SPD”) which advocates separation of Church and State. The Archbishop of Berlin, Cardinal Georg Sterzinsky, is known to be sceptical about the Pope celebrating a large-scale Mass in Berlin as he fears the turnout will be low and that there will be protests as there were when Pope John Paul II visited the city.


AUSTRIA


Exodus from Church ‘has silver lining’


AS MANY AS 80,000 Catholics may have left the Austrian Church in 2010 as a result of the clerical-abuse scandals, according to Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt. This would be the highest number to abandon the Church in a single year since the time of the Third Reich. However, Cardinal Schönborn told the Tiroler Tageszeitung that the crisis also had its positive side. “If one remains in the Church today, one has to explain why and that strengthens one’s sense of belonging to the Church,” he said. “The Church and I have learned a lot this


year. ‘Only the truth will set you free’ – for me that was the only way to do justice to the victims, as hushing things up would have given them the feeling of being victimised yet once again,” he stressed. “It’s a lot easier to live with truth and I find myself strengthened by the comments Pope Benedict made in the [book of interviews with Peter Seewald] Light of the World.” In his end-of-year review, Cardinal Schönborn emphasised that in the coming years it would be important to keep our eyes on discrimination against Christianity in Europe and elsewhere. A positive signal in his eyes was that the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe had expressly put the monitoring of such discrimination on its agenda.


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