GERMANY: A Roman Catholic bishop in Germany suspended a priest yesterday for sharing communion with Protestants, making him the second cleric punished for taking Christian unity too far at an ecumenical church meeting.
The Bishop of Trier, Dr Reinhard Marx, said he had suspended Father Gotthold Hasenhüttl for undermining Church authority and refusing to show remorse after giving communion to Protestants at a Catholic Mass he said during the meeting in Berlin in May.
Father Bernhard Kroll from Eichstätt, in central Germany, was suspended for taking bread and wine at a Protestant service during the Ecumenical Church Congress, an unprecedented joint convention of German Catholics and Protestants. Pope John Paul II reasserted in an encyclical in April the Church doctrine that forbids joint communion, a ban liberal Catholics like Fater Hasenhüttl and Father Kroll consider contrary to efforts to promote unity among all Christians.
"The Church is not some arbitrary system in which everyone can just apply the rules according to their own convictions," said Bishop Marx, who also stripped Father Hasenhüttl of his right to lecture as a professor of theology at Saarland University.
"When there is open dissent of this sort, a priest cannot continue in his position - the credibility of the Church is at stake," he told a news conference in Trier near the Luxembourg border.
The Vatican bans joint communion because Catholics believe the bread and wine used at Mass are transformed into Christ's body and blood while Protestants see the service as a symbolic re-enactment of his Last Supper with his apostles.
Protestants invite all Christians to communion. Ecumenical groups in Europe and the United States sometimes share communion in defiance of Vatican rules, but usually do so quietly. Father Hasenhüttl (69) has been unrepentant, insisting in interviews that his act was in the Church's wider interests.
He told German television he planned to challenge the suspension. He called the steps "draconian measures" and said they were out of all proportion.
"I feel as if I acted at the Pope's behest," he told Der Spiegel news magazine recently. "I only celebrated a Catholic Mass, not together with a Protestant minister, but rather with an open communion, which the Pope allows."