Pope Benedict XVI's decision to rehabilitate a Holocaust-denying priest and to appoint an ultra-conservative bishop in Linz has set back years of efforts to modernise the Catholic Church's image in Austria, critics say.The moves are "a slap in the face for the Austrian Church" and the sum of signals being sent by the Vatican was "appalling", said Erhard Busek, a Roman Catholic and former politician from the conservative OeVP party who served as Austria's vice chancellor between 1991 and 1995.
Busek last month launched a "Layman's Initiative" to reverse the decline of the Catholic Church in Austria, where the number of believers has been falling dramatically for years.
"It's not a message of peace, more a declaration of war," said the prominent Roman Catholic theologian Paul Zulehner, suggesting the church appeared to be in "self destruct" mode.
"The gap between believers and the bishops will continue to widen," Zulehner said.
The Austrian Church had already lost its liberal wing and was now in danger of losing its centre as well, he said.
Long criticized as being too rigid, the Catholic Church in Austria has seen the number of believers decline dramatically in recent years. Two high-profile sex scandals in 1995 and 2004 turned that outflow into a veritable haemorrhage.
In 1995, the archbishop of Vienna Hans Hermann Groer was dismissed amid allegations of sexual abuse; and in 2004, pornographic images, including those of children, were found on a computer in a seminary in St. Poelten, a scandal that led to the resignation of bishop Kurt Krenn.
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 received Pope Benedict XVI in Austria in 2007, has attempted to stem the flow.
In an unusually outspoken gesture, Schoenborn hit out at the Vatican's decision to lift the excommunication of Richard Williamson, a British bishop who has dismissed as "lies" historical evidence that six million Jews were gassed by the Nazis during World War II.
But Schoenborn has so far refused to comment on the nomination of controversial ultra-conservative priest Gerhard Maria Wagner as auxiliary bishop in Linz.
Wagner, 54, the rector of Windischgarsten parish, first gained notoriety in 2001 when he described J. K. Rowling's popular Harry Potter novels -- which take place in a witchcraft and wizardry school -- as "satanism" and warned against the magical spells and formulas used in the novels.
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."
And he asked: "Is the noticeable rise in natural disasters a consequence of environmental pollution or rather of spiritual pollution?"
Even the conservative governor of the province, Josef Pueringer, hit out at Wagner's nomination, saying it conveyed "the wrong image" of the church.
A group calling for the reform of the Catholic Church, "Wir Sind Kirche" (We are the Church), described Wagner as a "lobbyist for the crass traditionalists".
His nomination was "extremely insensitive and, in conjunction with the case of Richard Williamson, proves either the slovenliness of the Vatican or the extremely backward-looking policy of the current pope," the group said.
Busek's "Layman's Initiative" has started a petition demanding the abolition of the vow of celibacy for priests, and greater roles for women and laymen within the church.
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(Source: AFP)