Continuing Crisis in Austrian Church: Wagner Resigns

Also in the news today, Gerhard Maria Wagner, the right-leaning auxiliary bishop-to-be in Linz, Austria, about which I’ve blogged a number of times (here), has declined Benedict XVI’s appointment of him to the episcopacy (here). And the media are reporting that Benedict has accepted Wagner’s response to the promotion. Apparently the deciding factor was the vote of no-confidence by 31 of 39 deans of the Linz diocese, about which I blogged several days ago (here).

As the posting to which I just linked also notes, the Viennese Cardinal Christoph Schönborn convened a meeting of the bishops of Austria today to deal with the crisis in the Austrian church precipitated by the appointment of Wagner and Benedict’s rehabilitation of the Society of St. Pius X. Cardinal Schönborn has stated that the meeting is necessary to do “damage control” in the Austrian church, in which there has been an unprecedented number of resignations following these two papal actions.

I suspect it’s going to take far more than damage control to retrieve the shattered confidence of many Catholics. Nothing less than the future of the church is at stake here—just as nothing less than the retrieval of Vatican II following years of “restorationist” attack on that council is at stake if the church’s future is to be safeguarded. The no-confidence vote of those 31 peers of Wagner is a good sign. It’s an assertion of the right of the local church to make its voice heard as episcopal appointments are made.

Unfortunately, there is no official mechanism at all in the Catholic church for such expressions of the sensus fidelium. And in the American church, where bishops have for generations been notoriously slavish about bowing to papal dictates, there’s not likely to be such a mechanism anytime soon.

Weekly News Roundup: Austrian Church Crisis, Rabbi Yehuda Levin, Knoxville Shooter

Lots of stories today following up on ones discussed in recent postings on this blog. A number of websites are reporting that the Catholic bishops of Austria will meet on Monday to deal with the crisis caused in the Austrian church by Benedict’s rehabilitation of SSPX and his naming of Gerhard Maria Wagner as auxiliary bishop of Linz (here and here). These decisions are having the following effect:

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.

On Tuesday this week, 31 of the 39 deans of the Linz diocese issued a statement of no confidence in Wagner. On the same day, Salzburg Archbishop Alois Kothgasser said that the church must avoid shrinking into "a sect ... with few but strictly obedient members" through such decisions that alienate more and more Catholics of good conscience shaped by Vatican II.

Meanwhile, as my e-friend Colleen Baker reported on her Enlightened Catholicism blog this week, Rabbi Yehuda Levin of the right-wing Rabbinical Alliance of America, has praised Benedict’s choice to rehabilitate SSPX and anti-Semite Richard Williamson (here and here). Levin, who supported Patrick Buchanan in his failed 1996 presidential bid, and who has participated in anti-gay demonstrations with Fred Phelps (who maintains the God Hates Fags website), has told Lifesite news that Benedict deserves support because he is seeking to weed the church of left-wing Catholics and fill its pews with morally upright believers. Levin states,

I understand that it is very important to fill the pews of the Catholic Church not with cultural Catholics and left-wingers who are helping to destroy the Catholic Church and corrupt the values of the Catholic Church. This corruption has a trickle-down effect to every single religious community in the world.

Levin believes that there is a conspiracy of a “strong left wing” in Catholicism, which is using events like the media furor over Richard Williamson’s outspoken anti-Semitism to undermine Benedict’s platform to purify the church of dissidents. In his view, this conspiracy involves an alliance between the “strong left wing” of the Catholic church and the “homosexualist” movement. Levin calls on Benedict to preserve his version of Catholic orthodoxy, and states that he is willing to overlook the anti-Semitism of SSPX because of that group’s other morally and politically upright views.

Vis-à-vis that “homosexualist” conspiracy, also in the news this week is an allegation by Tony Perkins of the influential religious-right organization Family Research Council that lesbians are ultimately responsible for the choice of Nadya Suleman to have octuplets through in vitro fertilization, in addition to the six children she already has. Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin has that lesbians-made-me-do-it story (here).

Also in the news this week is the sentencing of Knoxville, Tennessee, church shooter Jim David Adkisson for his rampage in a Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church in July 2008. Adkisson opened fire in the church without warning and killed two people. He was sentenced this week to life in prison.

At the time Adkisson was apprehended, he indicated that his motive for the shooting was his hatred of liberals and gays. A manifesto Adkisson wrote before the shooting has just now been released (here). It indicates that he hoped through his murderous actions to spur similar actions across the country to rid the United States of the “cancerous pestilence” of liberalism and homosexuality.

Adkisson writes,

The worst problem America faces today is Liberalism. They have dumbed down education, they have defined deviancy down.

I’m struck by that oft-heard complaint of the American political and religious right: "[T]hey have defined deviancy down.” It appears that, in the view of Jim David Adkisson, taking a gun and walking into a church full of people (including children) and opening fire is not deviancy. This act, is, rather, a response to deviancy.

And there, in a nutshell, we see, I would argue, just why the rhetoric of the American religious and political right has become so dangerous to our democracy and should be monitored vigorously by those concerned to safeguard our democracy. Shooting unarmed gays and liberals at worship and placing their children at risk in the process,is not deviancy. Being gay and/or liberal is.

And finally, headlines I like this week:

"Next Time, Let’s Have the Women Study the Men” at NCR, on the recent Vatican announcement that it will be "studying" American women religious to ascertain whether they are doing a proper job of carrying on their founders' charisms (here); and

“Reaching Right” at America on Benedict’s decision to rehabilitate SSPX (here).

A Reader Writes: The Real Cost of Benedict's Smaller, Purer Church

In this posting, I’d like to give attention to a comment that an astute reader of this blog recently posted in response to my reflections on the thinkability of papal resignations (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/02/on-thinkability-of-papal-resignations.html).

Carl is responding to a comment made by a previous poster at the same thread, who had stated, “The church now is not losing members . . . . Where the faith is traditional, it is growing. Where it is radical, it is withering away.”

In response to the statement that the church is not losing members, Carl writes,

Quite bluntly, that is a lie! Pew forum reports that the Catholic Church is experiencing a net loss of 7.5% of its membership annually. That number is escalating. This week, the German Government reports that record numbers of German catholics are renouncing their membership in the Catholic Church. While there are old members returning, I myself am one, the numbers are far too small to offset the numbers who are leaving. Those loses are not sustainable. There is no way the RCC can survive this level of losses.

Carl’s comments then link to recent Pew Forum reports at http://religions.pewforum.org/portraits and http://religions.pewforum.org/reports#.

For anyone seeking accurate information about what is happening demographically in American Catholicism, the Pew Forum data are a sine qua non. They provide a very troubling snapshot of what the restorationist agenda of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, upheld by American bishops largely hand-picked by those two popes, means, precisely, in terms of continuing affiliation of American Catholics with the Catholic church.

As I reported in November (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/11/points-to-ponder-approaching-election.html), the Pew data show the following:

Percentage of Americans who are former Catholics: 10%

Percentage of American adults raised Catholic who have left the church: 33%

At the present moment in the history of the American Catholic church, a tenth of all American adults are now former Catholics, and a third of all American adults raised Catholic have left the church. As the same posting notes, as of February 2008, statistics from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) show the percentage of American Catholics attending weekly Mass at 23%. I suspect the number is lower now.

Carl’s posting also notes that, in the wake of Benedict’s rehabilitation of Richard Williamson and his SSPX confrères, resignations from the Catholic church in Germany have been “escalating.” I’ve been reporting on this phenomenon (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/02/living-in-hope-petition-of-german-swiss.html). As the posting to which I just linked notes, on 7 February, the newspaper Deutsche Welle reported that German Catholics are leaving the church “in droves” following Benedict’s action: that is, they are officially leaving by going to their local governmental office that maintains lists of church members for tax purposes, and having their names removed from those rolls.

Patrick Allard’s blog reported on this still-unfolding story on 7 February, with a transcript of a 6 February article from Der Spiegel, which indicates that all over Germany, Catholics are officially resigning from the Catholic church in unprecedented numbers following Benedict’s rehabilitation of SSPX (http://patrickattard.blogspot.com/2009/02/spiegel-catholics-leave-church-out-of.html). As I have also noted (see the link above to my Living in Hope posting), a similar situation exists in Austria, where there has been a mass exodus from the Catholic church in the past several years—and where media reports indicate further resignations following Benedict’s recent action.

And the situation I am describing is not different in other developed nations of the world. Even in formerly staunchly Catholic countries like Spain and Ireland, the Catholic church is dropping members at an unthinkable rate.

I agree with Carl: in light of these numbers, it seems strange, indeed, that Catholics enamored by the restorationist agenda still speak of their movement as one that is saving the church, returning people to church and to the practice of their faith. The numbers speak for themselves: precisely the opposite is happening in developing nations with Catholic populations. And the numbers of those leaving are skyrocketing in the wake of recent decisions by Rome.

And, it must be remembered, those statistics capture only the numbers of those officially leaving. They do not count those of us who have accepted, with heavy hearts, the church's decision to exclude us, and who longer participate in church life and liturgy because we have been given a clear message that we are not wanted.

This phenomenon appears not to perturb either Benedict or most bishops around the world—the majority of which have been appointed under the last two papal regimes and are solidly in the restorationist camp. As I’ve noted on this blog, the weeding out of Catholics who raise critical questions about the place of women in church and society, about sexual ethics, and about the political strategy of the church (e.g., in the pro-life movement) is deliberate. It is taking place under the aegis of purer, truer Catholicism: the restorationist agenda that has been at the center of Benedict’s church politics for decades now, from the period when he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as Cardinal Ratzinger, intends and celebrates the exclusion of vast numbers of Catholics from the leaner and meaner "restored" church.

In the view of those promoting the restorationist agenda, authentic Catholics (even avowedly anti-Semitic ones) will remain and are welcome. The rest are unwelcome and should go, because we are disobedient children. As I’ve also noted, the new right-wing bishop in Linz, Austria, Gerhard Maria Wagner captures the nonchalant (and belligerent and intransigent) attitude of the church’s present pastoral leaders about this loss of millions of Catholics who took hope from Vatican II by arguing that the church cannot permit itself to be blackmailed by those leaving.

As if those leaving the church in large numbers are leaving primarily because we have sought to force change in the church, and not because our consciences no longer permit us to collude with a system that hides pedophile priests and welcomes anti-Semites and makes a shambles of an ecumenical council of the church. The consciences that the church itself has formed, through its teachings about ethical issues . . . .

In my view, the response of the current pastoral leaders of the church (and those who defend them from the center) to the pastoral needs of millions of Catholics experiencing a crisis of conscience because of the behavior and decisions of those pastoral leaders is not merely inadequate: it is a shocking betrayal of all that pastoral leadership is about. The charge given to the church’s pastors is to seek out the lost members of the flock, and to feed the flock—not to drive away and starve the flock.

Historians will one day ask how people given such a charge could drive away and starve the flock entrusted to their care. By then, of course, it may well be too late to ask that question in anything but a theoretical sense, since starved and dispersed flocks have a way of disappearing altogether.

Holocaust Denial and the Denial of Universal Human Rights

In the interview with the German journal Spiegel that I cited in my first posting today, Richard Williamson is asked if he recognizes university human rights. His response is illuminating:

When human rights were declared in France, hundreds of thousands were killed throughout France. Where human rights are considered an objective order for the state to implement, there are constantly anti-Christian policies. When it comes to preserving the individual's freedom of conscience against the democratic state, then human rights perform an important function. The individual needs these rights against a country that behaves like a Leviathan. But the Christian concept of the state is a different one, so that the Christian theories of human rights emphasize that freedom is not an end in itself. The point is not freedom from something, but freedom for something. For good (http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,606323,00.html).

This response speaks volumes. At the heart of the denial of Vatican II by groups such as the Society of St. Pius X is a denial of human rights. What such groups are essentially combating is the movement within Catholicism after Vatican II to adopt the language of universal human rights as an appropriate way of speaking about ethical issues and about the church's mission to the world.

Strong currents within the Catholic church resist the use of that language because they resist--at a very fundamental level--human rights themselves. They resist the extension of fundamental human rights to groups (e.g., to women) who have previously been denied rights and have been relegated to positions of subservience in many societies.

It is this ineluctable movement to recognize the fundamental rights of all human beings that generates the critique of modernity that runs through groups like SSPX. Unfortunately, the current pope in many ways endorses that critique and its implication that the language of human rights is a flawed, politicizing way of talking about ethical issues and the mission of the church.

It will be interesting to see if the Catholic church, in its central governing structures, recognizes and acknowledges the dilemma it creates for millions of its faithful by telling us to respect the human rights of all, and then by allying itself with fascist movements that resist rights for all. When asked recently about all those the church is losing in nations like Austria and Germany due to its continuing intransigent infatuation with fascism and betrayal of its own message of human rights, Gerhard Maria Wagner replied that the church cannot allow itself to be blackmailed.

This response--shocking in a pastoral leader--spectacularly (and deliberately) misses the point. The crisis of conscience that is causing German and Austrian Catholics to renounce their church membership after Benedict rehabilitated SSPX is due precisely to the conflict Catholics of good conscience experience when the same church that calls them to respect human rights turns around and tramples on rights--and welcomes those who deny the tradition of universal human rights.

Papal Appointment of Homophobic Bishop: American Catholic Silence

The whole world is talking about the statement of Benedict's new episcopal appointment, Gerhard Maria Wagner, in Linz, Austria--that is, about his statement that Hurricane Katrina was a visitation of divine wrath on New Orleans for its tolerance of gay human beings. The British press contains numerous articles noting this statement--in the Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/02/pope-controversial-austrian-bishop), the Times (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5634146.ece), the BBC's news articles (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7863254.stm), etc.

Even the AP, not noted for its sensitivity to gay persons and gay issues, has produced news articles noting the homophobic statement of Wagner in a 2005 parish bulletin (www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5igLGCLTAYGIPQ7ZA_tywOPzU5p9AD962RLQO1).

But for American Catholics of the center, it's as if the homophobic statements don't exist (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/02/brother-that-dare-not-speak-his-name.html, www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=2747).

Which is to say, it's as if gay human beings don't exist. As if we're invisible. As if our claim to a place at the table has no merit. As if one can continue talking about love, inclusion, communion without uttering a word about an entire group of people who have been made invisible.

What does it imply when we act as if a group of people simply doesn't exist? What does it imply about us? About our catholicity?

These are questions that have very much demanded discussion for years now in American Catholicism, and especially among those who occupy the seats of power in the knowledge class of the center--theologians, journalists, bloggers. They are questions that become more important to discuss with each new initiative from Rome these days.

And yet they are not being discussed--not by the knowledge class at the center of the American Catholic church. Why not, I wonder? What does the silence imply?

Meanwhile, it interests me that no discussion I've seen about Gerhard Maria Wagner's 2005 remarks seems to be paying attention to one of his most outrageous claims about Katrina and New Orleans. A transcript of Wagner's 2005 parish bulletin statements which claims to be precise is at the Austrian Catholic news site Kath.net (www.kath.net/detail.php?id=21996).

There, I find that as Wagner talked about the annual New Orleans gay pride event, Southern Decadence, which was canceled in 2005 due to Katrina, he stated that press reports of the previous year indicated that "Christians" protesting the parade would be jailed.

Really? If that's true, it's the first I've heard of it. I lived in New Orleans from 1968 to 1976 and again from 1987 to 1991. Though the Southern Decadence parade was not my cup of tea and I never attended it, I did read news coverage about it during my periods of residence in New Orleans, and never once did I hear of any threat to jail "Christians" protesting the event.

I encountered some of those "Christians" at Mardi Gras parades over the years, particularly in the French Quarter, where gay events were concentrated and where "Christian" protesters flocked as a result. I found many of these protesters aggressive, hostile, courting violent responses--though I never saw any violence directed towards any of them. I often wondered why they were in the French Quarter protesting on Mardi Gras day when there was a lot more sin to protest, in my view, on Wall Street and in D.C. on almost any day of the week.

I never saw anyone try to curb the freedom of "Christians" to protest at any gay event in New Orleans.

The claim that God destroys cities tolerant of gay celebrations is a tired old trope of the American religious right (www.repentamerica.com/pr_hurricanekatrina.html). The appearance of this trope in the rhetoric of an Austrian Catholic parish priest indicates how far the influence of the religious right--and its toxic political agenda--has spread beyond the boundaries of the U.S.

The continued influence of this trope of natural disasters-as-divine punishments depends on our willingness to ignore any and all natural disasters that don't fit into our predetermined scheme of punishment. When a natural disaster strikes an area inhabited by God-fearing American families of the middle, one never hears that God has had a hand in that disaster. To the contrary, any such rhetoric would be immediately dismissed as extremely mean-spirited.

We have become so brain-washed, many of us, about God's willingness to hurl down punishment on gay human beings that we don't even stop to think about how selective our use of natural events has to be, in order to maintain that belief. Some years ago, when I was teaching students in North Carolina who were absolutely convinced that God sends hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and fires to wipe out the gays, a tornado tore through our area.

On its way to North Carolina through Alabama, the same storm system caused the collapse of a church in Alabama, in which children giving an Easter performance were killed. In Charlotte, the largest city near our college, the tornadoes ripped the roofs off several businesses, skipping over an x-rated video shop in the middle of the row of businesses. The porn shop was totally unharmed while the neighboring workplaces were all seriously torn apart.

When I asked my students to think about what that set of tornadoes implies about our theories that God uses natural disasters to punish gays--and other sinners--they were unable to process the information. The facts got in the way of their predetermined beliefs. The determination to target gay human beings is so strong in parts of our culture that nothing, it appears, can cause many of us to stop and think about the lack of rationality, humanity, and real religion in our approach to gay human beings.

These students who were intent on holding their anti-gay views in the face of all evidence to the contrary chose silence as a response to facts that troubled them. It's clear to me why they did so.

The American Catholic center chooses silence in the face of all appeals for free, inclusive, respectful discourse about the presence of gay human beings in the world. It's becoming more and more clear to me why that silence is there--and it's also becoming clear to me to what an extent the silence about these human beings undermines the claims of many at the center to be interested in love, inclusivity, communion, etc.