Schism Is In The Air

Everywhere I look around.

Eponymous Flower broke the story not long ago about a parish in Freiburg that had decided to go its own way, choosing instead to be an "ecumenical parish" that is "formerly Catholic."

As if that wasn't bad enough, Fr. Z tells the tale of a group of 300 Austrian priests to initiate a "Call to Disobedience." That's 7% of the priests in the whole country.

Priests who support the document pledge

to pray for Church reform at every liturgy, since “in the presence of God there is freedom of speech”

not to deny the Holy Eucharist to “believers of good will,” including non-Catholic Christians and those who have remarried outside the Church

to avoid offering Mass more than once on Sundays and holy days and to avoid making use of visiting priests--instead holding a “self-designed” Liturgy of the Word

to describe such a Liturgy of the Word with the distribution of Holy Communion as a “priestless Eucharistic celebration”; “thus we fulfill the Sunday obligation in a time of priest shortage”

to “ignore” canonical norms that restrict the preaching of the homily to clergy

to oppose parish mergers, insisting instead that each parish have its own individual leader, “whether man or woman”

to “use every opportunity to speak out openly in favor of the admission of the married and of women to the priesthood”

While this is tragic and horrible, perhaps there is some good that can come out of it. Since the hierarchy hasn't taken any action to affirm that heretics and schismatics are not part of the Church, the heretics/schismatics are doing it for us. Consider Cardinal Schonborn's response to the latter incident:

“The open call to disobedience shocked me,” Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna said in a July 7 letter, noting that many professionals would have “long since lost their jobs” if they had called for disobedience.

Yeah, we know that. So why hasn't it happened yet?