Dissident Ex-Priest Gives Retreat at Melk Austria for 8,000 Euro

Ex-Catholic and Ex-Priest Drewermann

Edit: Stift Melk is more than 900 years old with a dwindling number of monks.   Truly a decadent community as caretakers of one of the most beautiful churches in what’s left of Christendom.  So this doesn’t come as a surprise.

(Melk) every year in the Benedictine Abbey of St. Lambrecht in Styria there is a so-called annual retreat for the entire convent of the famous Benedictine Abbey of Melk, set in Lower Austria. For several days, all the monks of the Austrian "Escorial" take spiritual exercises at St. Lambrecht.

This year, the retreat took place from 2 July to  29 June.  The guidance of the retreat, which will serve as spiritual exercises a deepening and renewal of faith of the monks was entrusted to the former priest and psychotherapist Eugen Drewermann in 2014.

Eugen Drewermann left the Catholic Church in 2005 and had been suspended in 1992 as a priest after he  had been deprived from his  teaching and preaching  license by the bishop of Paderborn. The starting point were the measures in 1986 by the then Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who expressed his concern about Drewermann's increasingly radical departures away from the Catholic doctrine. For his 65th birthday, Drewermann announced his withdrawal from the Catholic Church.

What Brings An Ex-priest and Ex-Catholic and Benedictine Monks Together?

What might the Melk Benedictine in "spiritual exercises” learn exactly in spiritual exercises from an apostate priest as beaten from the Church?  Certainly not the Catholic Doctrine and the  Catholic Faith, anyway.

Eugen Drewermann is to have received an 8,000 euro fee for the four days of "retreat" from Melk Abbey and celebrated the Eucharist at the daily services in the Abbey of St. Lambrecht. The ex-priest and ex-Catholic was hired on behalf of the Melk of Abbot Georg Wilfinger by Father Jeremiah Eisenbauer who is also a psychotherapist and is also involved with Helmut Schüller’s Pfarrer initiative of dissident priests.

A reaction of the Diocese of St. Pölten where the Melk Abbey is located, and the Apostolic Nunciature in Vienna is not yet known.

Text: Martha Weinzl
image: Wikicommons (assembly Katholisches.info)
Trans: Tancred vekron99@hotmail.com
Link to Katholisches…
AMGD