CALIFORNIA
Pasadena Weekly
By Christina Schweighofer 08/01/2013
A reformist Roman Catholic priest from Austria who was barred from a Catholic parish in Boston in July will speak at Westminster Presbyterian Church on Friday.
Helmut Schüller and a group he represents and cofounded, the Austrian Priests’ Initiative, advocate greater lay participation as well as the ordination of women and of married people as a solution to the priest shortage. They have also called for the church to rethink its position toward remarried and gay people.
A soft-spoken, charismatic man, Schüller runs the parish of Probstdorf, a small town 30 minutes from Vienna. In the 1990s he served as the Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schönborn’s vicar general. In 2011, the Austrian Priests’ Initiative issued an “Appeal to Disobedience,” asking other priests to allow lay people of both sexes to preach. Seventy percent of Austrian Catholic priests and a vast majority of the Catholic faithful support the campaign, but the Vatican reacted by stripping Schüller of his formal title of monsignor.
In June, the initiative stated that it was hopeful Pope Francis will “lead the church in a new fashion.” But the Pope said in an unrelated press conference on Monday that his predecessor, Benedict XVI, had closed the door to female priests. He added that the church needed “a deeper theology of women” but did not specify.
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