Pope casts Austrian Catholicism into crisis [Update: Wagner withdraws]

Controversial pastor Gerhard Maria Wagner said Sunday he will ask the pope to rescind the promotion to auxiliary bishop in Linz, Austria's third largest city.

The Associated Press reported:

"Regarding the fierce criticism, I am in prayer and, after consulting the diocesan bishop, I have decided to ask the Holy Father in Rome to take back my promotion as auxiliary bishop," Wagner said in a statement released by Linz Diocesan Bishop Ludwig Schwarz.

More is expected to be disclosed at the meeting Monday, detailed below.

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Pope Benedict XVI's de-excommunication of a Holocaust-denying priest and appointment of an ultra-conservative to bishop in Linz have together set off a crisis in Austrian Catholicism that bishops are meeting in emergency session Monday to address.

The controversial appointee, Gerhard Maria Wagner, has condemned the Harry Potter books as satanic, said homosexuality was curable and ruled out lay participation in Church affairs. After the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005, he commented: "It's no coincidence that in New Orleans all five abortion clinics as well as night clubs were destroyed."

Together the appointment of Wagner and the de-excommunication of Richard Williamson sent an "appalling" signal from the Vatican, commented Erhard Busek, a Roman Catholic who served as Austria's vice chancellor between 1991 and 1995. A signal that the pope is either remarkably careless, or else intends to impose the most conservative kind of orthodoxy on the church. Unless, as Neil Schoenherr at the University of Chicago suggested, "underreported strokes suffered by the Pope in 1991 and 2003" are affecting his judgment.

The crisis includes and extends beyond the clergy. Notably:

• Reuters reports that "Four times as many Catholics have officially quit the Church in Linz so far this year as in early 2008, the Austrian Press Agency APA reported, and departures have also been running higher than usual in Vienna, Salzburg, Tyrol and Lower Austria."
• The liberal lay Catholic movement We Are Church urged Austrians not to contribute money to the church and announced it would set up "solidarity accounts" for contributions to be held "until the situation improves."
• Franz Wild, chief church dean (senior priest) of Upper Austria province and pastor in the town of Traun, told the Associated Press that 31 out of 35 Upper Austrian church deans present during an informal meeting late Tuesday voted for a declaration of no confidence in Wagner.
• The conservative governor of Linz, Josef Pueringer, hit out at Wagner's nomination, saying it conveyed "the wrong image" of the church.

Crisis comes against the background of the Catholic Church in Austria whose clerical rigidity was driving church membership down when two "high-profile sex scandals in 1995 and 2004 turned that outflow into a veritable haemorrhage." Austria was 91% Catholic when World War II began. Now:

In the past 15 years, more than 370,000 people have quit the church, 40,500 in 2008 alone, bringing the number of believers down to 5.58 million or 66 percent of the population as a whole.

Vienna's current archbishop, Christoph Schoenborn, who called Monday's meeting, has labored to remedy the problem. Only to see the pope's twin controversial decisions unraveling all he has woven together.

Prominent Roman Catholic theologian Paul Zulehner told AFP, the church appears to be in "self destruct" mode, and "The gap between believers and the bishops will continue to widen." An Austrian church which has already lost its liberal membership, is in danger of losing its center, and Monday's crisis meeting can in itself not reverse that.