AUSTRIA
Vatican Insider
The co-founder of the “We are Church” movement on a collision course with the Vatican
GIACOMO GALEAZZI
Vatican Insider
Martha Heizer, teacher of religion in Innsbruck, co-founder and director of “We are Church”, challenges the Vatican and announces her intention to celebrate Mass even at the risk of excommunication. In reality, the issue is definitively closed as a result of the answer of the then prefect of the former Sant’ Uffizio, Jospeh Ratzinger, about the doctrine of the apostolic letter “Ordinatio sacerdotalis”.
Doubt was raised regarding the faculty of the Church to confer sacerdotal ordination to women. The “no” of the doctrine to women priests, clarified the current Pontiff, is “definitive” because such doctrine is founded on the Word of God written and constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church from the beginning. The doctrine has been proposed infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium (dogmatic constitution “Lumen gentium” by the Second Vatican Council). Rooted in the New Testament, the Christian sacerdotal ministry, from the beginning, was conferred only to men. The Tyrolean theologian Martha Heizer and her group of believers propose to render the Eucharist possible without clergymen, thanks to private forms of celebration. It is a procedure that needs to be referred immediately to the Holy See because it figures among the delicta graviora. “The seven points contained in the appeal to disobedience by the parish priests promoting the Pfarrer-initiatives are to be examined individually and not like a package,” emphasizes Adista, the catholic news agency. “Communion to re-married divorced people, for example, could be granted only under determined conditions.” In April of 1995, a small group of Innsbruck Catholics, led by Thomas Plankesteiner and Martha Heizer, promoted an “Appeal from the people of God” in five points (more democracy in the Church, greater role of women, optional celibacy for the priests, different sexual moral). It was appealed directly to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church hoping to obtain concrete answers.
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