THE half million Austrian Catholics who signed a petition last June calling for radical church reform wanted to strengthen the Catholic Church, not to weaken it, Austria's leading religious commentator said in Dublin.
Dr Hubert Feichtlbauer was giving a lecture yesterday evening at Trinity College, Dublin, entitled "A Church in Revolt the Austrian Experience".
He said the petition was aimed at making the church more credible, the bishops more loved and trusted, and leaving the Pope with as much authority "as is possible in order to serve Christian unity".
The petition had been triggered, in a society which had been "soaked with Catholic thought and tradition over the centuries", by an accusation that the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Groer, had sexually abused a boy in a Catholic boys' home over 20 years ago.
This led to the emergence of a national consensus that any holder of public office, ecclesiastical office included, was answerable to the public.
The popular petition focused on two issues democracy and sex. It sought to bridge the gulf between clergy and lay people to give the inhabitants of a diocese a proper say in the selection of their bishop equality for women in the church to allow diocesan priests to choose between celibacy and married life the development of morals around peace, social justice and the integrity of creation, so as to end the impression that the church is obsessed with sexual morality only the acceptance of individual conscientious decisions in sexual matters, particularly contraception and a more humane attitude towards those such as remarried divorcees and married priests and their families.
Dr Feichtlbauer said "Given the technical difficulties (many had problems finding out where they could sign almost all churches were closed to petition canvassers) the result was an overwhelming success. And the bishops knew it and hurried to admit it. They scrapped the agenda of their autumn conference (as the Irish bishops did for a similar reason at the same time) to concentrate on debating the petition. The result was meagre in the eyes of many, but for the first time the bishops' conference had to react directly to church people's requests."
The most important effect of this, he said, was that a process of "open and uninhibited debate" had been started in the Austrian church ... The debate is to wind up with some all Austrian Christian conference around the turn of the century", Dr Feichtlbauer said.