Close on the heels of the pope’s rehabilitation of a group of schismatic bishops, including one who denied the Holocaust, a second scandal has compounded a debate within the church over whether Pope Benedict XVI’s focus on doctrine and his perceived insensitivity to political tone are alienating mainstream Catholics and undermining the church’s moral authority.On Sunday, a priest known for such provocative statements as blaming the sins of New Orleanians for Hurricane Katrina asked the pope to rescind his appointment as an auxiliary bishop in Austria.
The affairs have engendered a storm of criticism of the church hierarchy and led to frantic efforts to mollify angry and confused parishioners around the globe, while the latest controversy has raised concerns that the actions could be part of a disturbing pattern.
The Vatican expert George Weigel, in a recent essay in First Things, an American religion journal, criticized the Vatican for its “chaos, confusion and incompetence.”
In Vienna on Monday, 10 Austrian bishops convened a crisis session to deal with the fallout. Erich Leitenberger, a spokesman for the Vienna Archdiocese, said church officials around the country had been inundated with letters, phone calls and e-mail messages, including from parishioners saying they were leaving the church.
Austria, a majority-Catholic country with a complicated Nazi past, had been reeling from the pope’s revocation of the excommunication of four schismatic bishops from the ultraconservative Society of St. Pius X, including Bishop Richard Williamson, who has denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers as well as the scale and genocidal intent of the Holocaust.
While that firestorm was still raging, Benedict ignited another by appointing the Rev. Gerhard Maria Wagner, known for his Katrina comment and for saying that homosexuality was curable, as the auxiliary bishop of Linz.
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the highest ranking Catholic official in Austria, said Monday that the decisions about the schismatic bishops and Father Wagner were unrelated, and that they were “made on different tracks.”
But their proximity intensified the rancor among more reform-minded Austrian Catholics.
Mr. Leitenberger said, “The displeasure grew exponentially.”
Outside St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, Elisabeth Felbermair, 28, said she was relieved that Father Wagner was stepping aside.
“Thank God he’s going,” she said, calling his views “too reactionary.” She said she would probably leave the church, though for personal reasons not directly related to the controversies of recent weeks.
For many Catholics, the issues are larger than Father Wagner. As the Austrian newspaper Die Presse said on its front page on Monday, “His name stands for a battle over direction: should Linz be more faithful to Rome or should the church be more democratic and more liberal?”
Likewise, the outrage over Bishop Williamson was directed not only at his Holocaust denial and the Vatican’s delay in fully condemning it, but also over concerns by centrist Catholics about the direction of the church and their place within it.
Indeed, even as local churches have scrambled to reassure parishioners that the controversies were anomalous, others see Benedict’s interest in reaching out to traditionalists as perfectly consistent with his past views.
A theologian more at home in the library than the stadium Mass, Benedict was for two decades head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and was more attuned to the theology of esoteric doctrinal questions rather than their potential political ramifications.
If his recent missteps had unintended consequences, they have still demonstrated to many parishioners that his concerns are far removed from theirs.
“We had to restore a lot of confidence to those who were upset, who needed to know that we recognize the concerns of many Catholics,” said Msgr. Bernard Podvin, the spokesman for the French Bishops Conference. “It’s a very, very big job.”
Monsignor Podvin said the French Catholic hierarchy had been trying to explain that the values of the Society of St. Pius X did not represent the views of “the Catholic community.”
The society was founded in 1970 by a French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, in opposition to the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which included a commitment to religious liberty and a document absolving contemporary Jews of responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus.The four schismatic bishops were excommunicated in 1988 after Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated them without a papal mandate. In revoking the excommunications, the pope sought to heal a lingering schism, seemingly oblivious to how it might play beyond the walls of the Vatican.
The most intense outrage came from Benedict’s native Germany, where the Holocaust remains a third rail and its denial is a crime. Both Chancellor Angela Merkel and the German Catholic hierarchy have been fiercely outspoken in their criticism of the pope.
The Vatican later called on Bishop Williamson to recant and said that the pope had not known of his views at the time of the decision. Bishop Williamson has apologized for the “media storm” caused by his remarks, but not for their content.
In the United States, “the outrage is coming not so much from the pews, but from the community of professional theologians who fear that by accepting the bishops of the Society of St. Pius X back into the church, the liturgical and theological reforms of Vatican II are somehow endangered,” said the Rev. James Massa, the executive director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He called that fear “an overreaction,” noting that Benedict’s “whole career as a priest and scholar has been shaped by the council.”
In Mexico, another crisis is undermining confidence in the church: this month, the Legionaries of Christ, a conservative religious order, said that its founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, had led a double life and fathered a child in an affair.
Before his death last year at 87, Father Maciel was forced by the Vatican to leave his ministry after allegations that he had sexually abused seminarians.
In his criticism of the Vatican hierarchy, known as the curia, Mr. Weigel said a curia that allowed the Bishop Williamson controversy to explode was not “a curia capable of conducting an investigation that can command public credibility.”
The quick decision by the Vatican to accept Father Wagner’s withdrawal in Austria may reflect a new sensitivity to that concern and would not have been made lightly, says Hubert Feichtlbauer, an author in Vienna who writes about church issues.
“The Vatican really took a risk, and had to consider the possibility that other places might put up similar resistance to unwanted candidates,” he said.
That risk may have been overridden by other concerns.
“The larger problem is the inability of the church leadership to come to terms with the modern world,” Mr. Feichtlbauer said.“The problem is a long-term one, and in no way is it solved.”
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(Source: PBRC)