AUSTRIA
Vatican Insider
The Archbishop of Salzburg, Alois Kothgasser, is in a hurry to retire
Giacomo Galeazzi
Vatican City
Kothgasser is 75 and in a hurry to retire. He has asked permission to pope Benedict XVI who has already met with him about a potential successor. Mgr. Manfred Scheuer’s allure as a candidate for this See grows. He is 57 years old and bishop of Innsbruck, he is also negotiating with the Austrian rebel priests to avoid a schism. Mgr. Manfred Scheuer is playing a pivotal match for the Austrian Catholic Church and has shown a certain amount of openness towards some of the requests of the “disobedient” clergy. In his opinion the seven points of the ‘Appeal to Disobedience’, promoted by the priests who support the “Pfarrer-initiative”, should be viewed individually and not as a package: for example, since there is “real need” for change on the matter of divorcees who have remarried, perhaps they could be allowed to receive the holy communion under certain conditions. “I hope the Church will carry on dealing with this matter in the years to come” said Mgr. Manfred Scheuer . He also suggested taking into consideration whether it might be “necessary from a pastoral point of view” to let “lay people deliver sermons during the Holy Communion”
The main candidate to this prestigious See in Salzburg is on the frontline, facing an explosive situation. In Austria (like in Ireland, Belgium and Germany) after the scandal of paedophilia in the clergy exploded in 2010, groups of priests kept and still keep pressuring Rome asking for reforms on matters like the abolition of the vow of celibacy, the ordination of women as priests and allowing divorcees who have remarried to take the Holy Communion. There is the risk that something may happen in central and northern Europe. Some people in the clergy fear this ‘something’ to be another schism like the Lefebvrian one, but of opposite character.
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