Dear Cardinal Christoph Schönborn:
The Episcopal Church welcomes you!
Have a great time on the slippery slope...
nanetteclaret (formerECUSA)
I’d rather he petition to allow priests to marry. There is historical precedent in the past for married priests.
OTOH, I have not actually seen any historical precedents in the Christian church where women were ordained priest.
Just my humble opinion.
Grrrr. I can’t wait until all these modernist bishops finally pass from the scene. They do infinitely more harm than good.
I didn't know that there were any "important" Austrian Catholics. From what I've seen, the Church there is virtually moribund.
The situation has reached "disaster" proportions in the Diocese of Linz (also mentioned in the article) where the Pope's nomination for auxiliary bishop recently withdrew amidst a storm of protest.
Schonborn has no business even bringing this "initiative" to Rome with him. It should have gone straight in the trash. He's a lame duck. A "pastor" tagging along meekly behind a lost and headstrong flock.
To think this guy wrote the Catechism or played a large part in it.
Still waiting for Lesbian ordinations with right to marry the same and ceremonial orgy liturgies including the precious children holy communions laying on of hands and other parts via the bodies of the congregation assembly.
This centuries old repression of the disadvanteged must end.
Dear Cardinal: No.
I will certainly be dicussing this with a close friend of mine who continues to work closely with this cardinal on church matters. They have been close friends and collaborators for decades.
I am having trouble believing the spin that the cardinal is off the reservation. Perhaps he is mismanaging PR, but the cardinal compiled the catechism we all appreciate so much and the gesture of presenting a petition he has declared to be deeply flawed is more likely imprudence rather than an indicator of heterodoxy.
I hope this comment from the original thread source (a blog) gives pause to some of the harsh criticism:
John Ashley writes: “And if the Cardinal believes the truth why then has he not explained it to the Austrian Catholics rather try to slough it off on the Pope. Such nonsense coming from the faithful(?) seems to be evidence of the incompetence of the bishops.”
My dear sir, how much more do you want Cardinal Schoenborn to do? There is scarcely a bishop in Europe who has made greater efforts to catechize his flock. In sermons, pastoral letters, city missions, monthly catechetecal talks, interviews, articles etc., he has constantly tried to teach the Catholic Faith which comes to us from the Apostles. But the flock has stuffed its ears. By provoking the evolution debate he hoped to prepare the ground again by turning people’s attention to “preambula fidei” without which he sees the gospel falling on deaf ears. It is a sign of what hard work sowing the gospel here is. The Cardinal is truly doing his best. You accuse him of being incompetent, but do you think his predecessesor, the outspoken conservative Cardinal Groer was more effective? Remember that Schoeborn witnessed Cardinal Groer brutally driven out of his office by the “official laypeople” who have run the Austrian ecclesiastical bureaucracy since Vatican II. The cleverly orchestrated campaign of slander drove Groer out (despite the fact that the false witnesses who accused him unnatural crime were all completely discredited in court). A little while later he witnessed the similar fall of the courageous, but imprudent bishop Krenn, through a similar conspiracy. If Schoeborn walks a bit too timidly at times (I don’t deny that he is sometimes too timid) one has to understand that he is trying to walk an extremely narrow line.
I can tell you that despite his timidity he he has done more to encourage the new evangelization here than practically any other bishop — especially through inviting thriving new religious communities and lay movements into his diocese.
Those who call him a protestant are simply ignorant of the facts. Would a protestant write this reflection on the primacy of Peter, and of his current succesor, Pope Benedict XVI: http://kath.net/detail.php?id=22084 ?
The petition, which he showed to Card. Hummes is the latest move of the same clique of people who organized the downfall of Groer and the “Latrocinium of Salzburg”. To blame it on Cardinal Schenborn’s “incompetence” that people twenty years older than he are still pushing the same nonsense that they were pushing before he became bishop is simply unreasonable.
As for those who think that he is a “protestant”, or that agrees with anything in the petition which he showed to Cardinal Hummes, they simply don’t know what they are talking about. There is not a single point in that petition that he has not repeatedly rejected on numerous occasions both in speech and in print (on priestly celebacy see for example, http://kath.net/detail.php?id=22612).
Cardinal Schoenborn is not perfect, but he is genuinely doing his uttermost for the Church of God. To those who confidently condemn him as a heretic I quote Bishop Krenn: “die Lügner sollen das Maul halten!”