Schönborn donates church to Serbian Orthodox of Vienna AUSTRIA


CARDINAL Christoph Schönborn of Vienna has given a Catholic church to the city’s growing Serbian Orthodox community, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt. Explaining the decision, he


said: “We Catholics share almost all our beliefs with our Orthodox sister Churches.” The cardinal has


GERMANY


Lutherans gratified by warm papal welcome


THE LEADER of the Bavarian Lutherans has welcomed the Pope’s suggestion that the Churches should celebrate the 500th anniver- sary of the Reformation in 2017 “ecumenically” and praised the warmth of the welcome Benedict XVI accorded a Lutheran delegation visiting Rome, writes Christa Pongratz- Lippitt. The delegation of German Lutherans met


the Pope at the end of their pilgrimage to Rome in Luther’s footsteps. In an interview with the Austrian Catholic news agency Kathpress, the leader of the Bavarian Lutheran Church, Bishop Johannes Friedrich, said he thought it most important for Lutherans not to celebrate the anniversary alone and above all not to “celebrate themselves”. The fact that Pope Benedict had sugggested and agreed to an ecumenical celebration was the most important part of the delegation’s private audience, Bishop Friedrich empha- sised. Pope Benedict had listened carefully to what they had to say, he said, and recalled that the Pope had always been “very open- minded ecumenically”. “Without Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the


1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification by the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church would never have been possible,” Bishop Friedrich recalled.


Günther Beckstein CSU, a committed


Lutheran and the first Protestant Bavarian premier from 2007 to 2008, who was one of the delegation, told Domradio that the Pope had underlined that it was important not only to celebrate the 500 years since the Reformation but also to consider the 1,500 years before it and above all mutually to admit the faults of which both Churches had been guilty since 1517. The most important issue at the moment was to find a way of spreading Christianity in a secularised world, the Pope had told them. “We were welcomed with open arms and not as heretics,” Protestant Bishop Hans Mikosch of Weimar told the German website thueringer-allgemeine.de.


26 | THE TABLET | 5 February 2011


vowed that no Catholic churches will be closed or sold in Vienna and said that he wants churches that are no longer needed for pastoral care of Catholics to still be used for the proclamation of the Gospel and the celebration of the Eucharist. The Serbian Orthodox Bishop


BELGIUM


Léonard celebrates old-rite Mass as abuse crisis deepens


Tom Heneghan In Paris


ARCHBISHOP André-Joseph Léonard cele- brated a Tridentine Mass last Sunday – the first such liturgy led by a Belgian primate in four decades – while new revelations about clerical sexual abuse buffeted the Belgian Church. Some 500 people attended the Mass held by the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter at the Minimes Church in central Brussels. While traditionalist blogs hailed it, Jürgen Mettepenningen, the archbishop’s former spokesman, said it was “not the signal of a Church wanting to show it is contemporary”. Archbishop Léonard also faced protests from the laity for saying last month that the Church had no legal responsibility to com- pensate abuse victims but might choose to help them as it would victims of a natural dis- aster. A parish sent an open letter saying he was not welcome there during his tour of parishes in his archdiocese. “Some of your comments in the media have been incompre- hensible. After your controversial statements, we are confronted with negative comments and ridicule,” the parish in Bornem wrote. Following a wave of criticism from politi- cians, church lawyer Paul Quiryen said the bishops wanted to draw up a proposal for compensation before the publication in April of a parliamentary commission’s report on


■FRANCE: Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, prefect of the Congregation for Clergy, has described the Church’s support for celibacy as a “question of evangelical radicalism” and an effective arm in the fight against secularism, writes Tom Heneghan.


Linking celibacy with another major Vatican concern, he said the


the abuse crisis in the country. The initiative for this approach came from other bishops and Archbishop Léonard, who is also presi- dent of the bishops’ conference, has not opposed it. Flemish Jesuit and Salesian leaders have told the parliamentary commission that they would contribute to therapy costs of abuse victims in their schools. An internal church report leaked to the Brussels daily Le Soir showed that 134 cases of abusive priests had been reported over sev- eral decades but only one in six of them ever led to the priest in question being suspended. Even fewer were ever convicted by the courts. Complaints were filed either to the Church or the judiciary in 70 per cent of the cases reported, Le Soir said. About 90 of the 134 priests listed in the report are still alive. In another revelation, a crusading Belgian priest asked for a campaign to nominate him for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize to be stopped as he sexually abused the young son of his cousin 40 years ago. Fr François Houtart, now 85, spoke up after his case emerged among the 475 complaints to the church abuse commis- sion raided by Belgian police last June. A poll in the Brussels daily De Standaard found only 8 per cent of Belgians trust the Church now compared to 28 per cent in 2009. A VTM television poll showed three-quarters of the Flemish population thought Archbishop Léonard “not suited for the job”.


secularisation of modern society had made it increasingly difficult to understand the Church’s tradition of unmarried priests. “We must have the


courage to ask ourselves, as the Church, if we wish to resign ourselves to such a situation,” he told a colloquium on celibacy held last week by the Society of


St John Mary Vianney in Ars in central France. “The reasoned support of celibacy … might represent some of the most effective means to overcome this secularisation.” Cardinal Piacenza rejected the frequently heard argument that celibacy could be changed because it was a question of canon law rather than a core doctrine.


of Central Europe, Bishop Konstantin (Djokic), thanked the cardinal for his generosity in a homily and said: “This gift is a gesture of the recognition that in Vienna there is great ecumenical understanding.” The Serbian Orthodox


community in Vienna numbers


around 100,000, and is the oldest in Central Europe, dating back to the seventeenth century. It has trebled in size over the past 40 years through immigration but has only three churches in the city. It will take over the


Neulerchenfeld church in the early summer.


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