AUSTRIA
National Catholic Reporter
Christa Pongratz-Lippitt | Jun. 1, 2015 NCR Today
In an interview published May 26 in Austrian daily Salzburger Nachrichten, Fr. Helmut Schüller spoke about a disconnect between bishops and the people of the church and weighed in on the priest shortage.
“The pope at the very top and the church communities at the very bottom of the church understand one another well,” Schüller said. “In between there is the episcopal level, that is the bishops — and they somehow do not really seem to want to.”
Schüller, 63, a former vicar general of Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, founded the Austrian Priests’ Initiative for church reform in 2006. In 2011, he initiated the initiative’s “Call to Disobedience,” which called on priests to offer the Eucharist to “all people of goodwill,” including divorced and remarried Catholics and members of other Christian churches, without waiting for the necessary church reforms. The initiative’s priests want to pave the way for a new model of priesthood rather than merging parishes.
Schüller is in close contact with the International Network of Church Reform Movements and attended its conference in Limerick, Ireland, in April, where international Catholic reform leaders discussed issues such as church governance, greater accountability of hierarchies, the full participation of Catholics who are divorced and remarried, and the place of LGBT Catholics and interfaith families in the life of the church.
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