500,000 petition for church tolerance

National Catholic Reporter, July 14, 1995 by Ingrid Shafer

More than half a million Austrian Catholics have backed a bold Kirchenvolks-Begehren, or "We Are the Church," petition calling for greater democracy and tolerance within the church.

The petition drive, which ran from June 3 through June 25, rallied five times more support than the original 100,000 signature goal set by organizers.

The response was "very impressive," in the words of sociologist and priest Andrew Greeley. "It won't change anybody's mind in the Vatican at all, but it's still impressive. It certainly shows where the people are, but unfortunately they don't count."

The platform of the petition called for the building of a church of sisterly and brotherly love based on co-responsibility of laity and clergy and on the people's right to have a voice in choosing their bishops; full, equal rights for women, including ordination; free choice of a celibate or noncelibate way of life for priests and laity; appreciation of the goodness of sexuality and separation of the issues of birth control and abortion; and Frohbotschaft statt Drohbotschaft!, loosely translated as "Affirmation not Condemnation!"

In addition to Austria, several thousand petitions were distributed in countries across the globe. An English version of the petition was posted on the Vatican2 Internet List, the official electronic forum for the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church, ARCC. Through these channels, the document reached Canada, the Netherlands, even China. According to data-processing analyst Thomas Luger, all five continents were represented in the drive.

According to petition organizers, reverberations from the petition drive continue. Catholics in Slovenia are planning their own initiative patterned after the Austrian effort. Groups in Germany and Switzerland are discussing similar campaigns.

As of July 4, Austrian organizers had received a total of 507,425 signatures, with 2,271 invalid, leaving 505,154 valid supporters. Among the signers were 14,389 non-Catholics and 4,017 non-Austrians, primarily Germans and Swiss. Non-Europeans included 68 from the United States and 24 from Canada.

A total of 6 million Austrians claim the Catholic faith, while 1.2 million attend church regularly. The document was distributed primarily in churches and rectories, except in those dioceses where bishops expressly banned the drive.

Bernard Deflorian, head of a major parish council, one of the original organizers of the drive, estimates that one-third of the 3,000 pastors in Austria participated officially. Ironically the response rate was highest in those areas where bishops had expressly forbidden priests to participate. Those areas included dioceses like Feldkirch, run by the controversial Opus Dei bishop, Klaus Kung. In Feldkirch, with a population of approximately 271,000 Catholics, 30,246 people signed.

In St. Polten, with a Catholic population of 630,500, there were 56,000 responses to the petition, despite prohibition of the drive by the ultraconservative Bishop Kurt Krenn. He is now calling the organizers of the initiative antichrists, accusing them of heresy and comparing the campaign to a 1938 plebiscite in which Austrians overwhelmingly welcomed Hitler. Krenn dismissed preliminary figures of 400,000 signatures saying, "The people are prone to error."

How did the Kirchenvolks-Begehren begin? Disregard for papal authority throughout Austria dates back to the late 1960s, following the distribution of Humanae Vitae, the birth control encyclical. Since then, Austrians have become increasingly frustrated with Rome's hardline stance on everything from what goes on in the bedrooms of married couples, to policies concerning divorce and remarriage, to the imposition of unpopular bishops and the rigid opposition to the ordination of married men and of women.

That frustration turned into a large-scale exodus from the church when church officials attempted to cover up the scandal that resulted from accusations of pedophilia by former students against Cardinal Hans Groer, archbishop of Vienna and Pope John Paul II's personal choice for that position.

Many Austrian Catholics began to worry whether there would still be a church for their children and grand-children. On Good Friday 1995, a tiny reform-minded group from Innsbruck held a televised news conference.

The group's founder, Dr. Thomas Plankensteiner, suggested a petition drive, and he encouraged interested individuals to contact the Innsbruck organizers -- himself, Dr. Martha Heizer and Bernadette Wagnleithner, all educators involved in teaching Catholicism on the secondary or university levels.

Within a couple of weeks, a central committee of 15 had been established, and the initiative began to spread from Tyrol throughout Austria. On May 21, a nationwide platform session was held in Salzburg, and 1,500 volunteers from the nine provinces of Austria -- including one contact person for every diocese -- showed up to assume responsibility for their regions and for duplicating, distributing, gathering and mailing petitions.