Sexual abuse of boys by Roman Catholic clergy and the growing exodus of Catholics from the Church are expected to dominate discussion at a conference of Austrian bishops.The four-day Austrian Bishops Conference in the Lower Austrian capital St. Pölten is expected to discuss ways of empowering diocesan ombudsmens’ offices to enable them to improve screening of candidates for the priesthood by weeding out potential child molesters.
Graz Diocese Bishop Egon Kapellari said last week that the Church needed to deal with such cases in "a candid manner, without any false considerations."
Helmut Schüller from Pastors Initiative, a co-founder of the Vienna archdiocese’s ombudsman’s office, called today for the same rules for all in cases of sexual abuse and an open and aggressive response to it.
"The bishops should cooperate in that regard to the maximum possible degree," he said.
The bishops are also expected to look at stemming the flow of Catholics leaving the church.
Preliminary figures indicate that 53,216 Catholics left the Church in 2009, the highest number since 2004, when 52,177 did so, according to Catholic press agency Kathpress.
The number of departures last year, which amounted to 0.96 per cent of Austrian Catholics, was 30.9 per cent higher than in 2008.
The number of Catholics in Austria at the end of 2009 was 5.53 million, down by 0.8 per cent from the 5.58 Catholics at the end of 2008, Kathpress said.
The increase in Church departures last year was highest in Linz diocese - 43.5 per cent. Many observers said that had been largely the result of Pope Benedict XVI’s nomination of conservative Windischgarst Pastor Gerhard Maria Wagner as auxiliary bishop.
The ultra-conservative priest had labelled the Harry Potter books "the work of Satan," called homosexuality "curable" and said natural disasters like the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans had been God’s punishment of human sin.
The Pope later withdrew the nomination after the subsequent public outcry.
Diocese official Gabriele Eder-Cakl added that the Pope’s lifting of the excommunications of some bishops of the Pius Brotherhood last year had also caused some Catholics to leave the Church.
The Pius Brotherhood rejects some of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and includes a bishop who has denied the Holocaust.
Austria has the eighth highest percentage of people claiming to follow a religious faith - 79 per cent - among European Union (EU) member states, according to EU statistics.
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