An Austrian bishop has loosed a firestorm of debate by announcing the excommunication of a Catholic entrepreneur who owns a shopping mall in which an abortion clinic has opened.Bishop Andreas Laun, an auxiliary of the Salzberg archdiocese, said that Richard Lugner was guilty of a grave offense, “aiding and abetting the killing of unborn children,” because he allowed the abortion clinic to operate in his mall.
When the German-language Catholic news agency Kath.net questioned whether Lugner had brought the penalty of excommunication upon himself, Bishop Laun replied, “Certainly.”
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn (bio - news) of Vienna told Kath.net that he had tried to persuade Lugner that he should not allow an abortion clinic as a tenant in his mall. “The destruction of life,” he said, “must not be seen as something like a shopping trip.”
However, the cardinal stopped well short of sayng that Lugner was excommunicated, and a spokesman for the Vienna archdiocese discouraged “academic discussions about excommunication.”
Undaunted by the furor his comments had created, and by Lugner’s threat to sue, Bishop Laun continued to speak out emphatically. The bishop-- who has joined other pro-life activists in prayer vigils outside Lugner’s shopping center in Vienna-- told Kath.net that the pro-life organization Action for Life Austria, which has won informal endorsements from the country’s episcopal conference, does not deserve Catholic support, because it has taken taken public stands on issues like contraception that are “in contradiction to the teachings of the Church and to right reason.”
In a lengthy German-language interview with Kath.net, Bishop Laun said that “in the beginning I was a fellow soldier with Action for Life Austria; now it would be against my conscience to support them.”
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Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Sotto Voce