(kreuz.net) Christoph Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna won't be naming any more priests "till further notice" to parishes.
The was covered by the newspaper 'Die Presse' yesterday in connection to insider information.
The reason for the measure: The pastor has rights against his Bishop, which the latter must respect.
It is primarily through the respect of these rights that priests are protected from the arbitrariness of their Old Liberal Bishops.
In the lead on the way down
This step will prepare the way for the coalescence of 660 parishes and for "new forms of community leadership".
The newspaper calls the measures a "blow for freedom".
"The announcement is the kernel of an unpublished pastoral letter, which will be read in all the churches of the Archdiocese of Vienna" -- says the anti-Church newspaper.
With this the Cardinal is opening the next chapter, "to makes his church fit for the future" -- gushed 'Die Presse' in the high estimation of the leftist Cardinal.
Nowhere else in Austria is the ecclesiastical decline greater than in the Archdiocese of Vienna.
The number of Catholics in the city of Vienna are estimated at about less than forty percent.
The left led Archdiocese is also in the lead for people leaving the Church throughout Austria.
Just before the End
The upcoming measures will lead to the situation where numerous parish churchs are transformed into filial churches.
"All alternations will serve a large number of living communities in their place" -- was the Cardinal's euphemistic way of putting it.
In any wise, he also describes the actual condition of the Diocese, destroyed by Old Liberal officials:
"There are fewer Church members, and even that number who participate in their parish, is even less."
And: "In most parishes children and young people are absent. Our financial and personnel resources are thin."
And with the Old Liberal Ideology in the Future?
Cardinal Schönborn is supposedly to direct the renewal under the motto, "mission first".
For that reason the three last Old Liberal Diocesan Assemblies have been implemented in the Stepensdom.
Actually, the Old Liberal Ideology is the opposite of an outwardly oriented, missionary Church.
They limit themselves to playing solitaire, inner-Church trench warfare and ecclesiastical solipsism.
