Church in Austria | 02/10/2025
Letter from 4 Austrian Church Reform groups to Cardinal Christoph Schönborn on his retirement 19 January 2025
(Direct translation from the German by Colm Holmes)
Dear Mr. Cardinal,
The Austrian church reform movements – “We Are Church”, Pastors' Initiative, Lay Initiative and “Priests Without Office” – congratulate you on your 80th birthday and wish you all the best and God's blessing for the time after your retirement.
During these holidays, we do not join the chorus of those who view your terms of office as Auxiliary and Archbishop of Vienna and as Cardinal with nostalgic and therefore, in a certain way, rose-tinted glasses.
Because it has not been forgotten how you initially reflexively defended your predecessor Groër against allegations of abuse and thereby damaged the victim's credibility - but it has also not been forgotten that you later openly admitted your initial helplessness and naivety in dealing with the Groër affair and how you subsequently turned to the painful topic of sexual abuse by clergy with increasing courage and from a new perspective, to the point of becoming a much-noticed one ORF conversation with Doris Reisinger.
It is not forgotten that in the Jerusalem Upper Room you badmouthed the Consolation of Mary and the Königstein Declaration and stabbed many bishops in the back in 1968 (and thus also your predecessor Cardinal König), as well as many Catholics who, after careful consideration, came to the moral certainty that they can and should live sexuality and family planning differently than “Humane vitae” demands - but it is also not forgotten how you later tried to give homosexual people a dignified place in the church and parish.
It must not be forgotten that, because you were so happy about new priests, you were sometimes not critical enough when it came to admitting people to the priesthood whose psychological maturity did not seem to adequately meet the requirements of this office, and it must also not be forgotten that the sometimes equally uncritical acceptance of so-called new movements into local pastoral work sometimes left deep and lasting wounds. But it has also not been forgotten how you put your authority as archbishop and cardinal into the balance when the appointment of a completely unsuitable auxiliary bishop, announced by the Vatican, threatened to plunge an entire diocese and with it large parts of the Austrian Church into a new crisis.
So our view of your term of office is characterized by ambivalence. We see – how could it be otherwise – what was successful and what was not successful, a church on the way. We are deeply grateful for the many successes we have achieved, and especially for those situations in which we have found open channels to you, such as around the 2010 service of repentance and lament, to which you invited the “We are Church” platform. About your relationship with “We are Church” you said at the time: “Even though there are many controversies between us, we still have a love for the church in common.”
Carried by this love, we say thank you today and “God bless you!” for your committed efforts for our common church, knowing that some efforts remain fragments and it is God who completes. We wish you his good blessings!
Gidi Ausserhofer, Wolfgang Payrich and Helmut Schüller (Pastor's Initiative)
Herbert Bartl and Peter Gardowsky (Priest Without Office)
Harald Niederhuber and Thomas Olechowksi (Lay Initiative)
Astrid Krogger, Martha Heizer and Harald Prinz (We Are Church)