The president of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, Cardinal Kurt Koch, has cancelled his visit to the Fatima Apostolate celebration at Retzbach in the Würzburg diocese on 13 May, because a newly ordained priest with an anti-semitic past will be giving a blessing at the High Mass Cardinal Koch was to have presided over.
The new 30-year-old priest was one of three seminarians at Würzburg who made international headlines in 2013 when they were found guilty and expelled for celebrating Nazi rituals in beer halls and making anti-semitic jokes at fraternity meetings. An external commission called in by Archbishop Ludwig Schick of Bamberg and Bishop Friedhelm Hofmann of Würzburg, who shared responsibility for the seminary at the time, came to the decision to expel them. The commission found the seminarians guilty of telling “completely unacceptable and unbearable jokes about concentration camps” and both bishops said their behaviour was “absolutely unacceptable”.
The new priest, whose name has not been disclosed to date, then applied to and was accepted by the seminary in Eichstätt. He was ordained deacon by Bishop Hanke in June last year (2017) and duly ordained priest earlier this month.
The president of the Central Council of German Jews sharply criticised Bishops Hanke’s decision in the German media. “The good relationship and cooperation between the Catholic Church and the Jewish community in Germany have been harmed by this decision,” he said on Bavarian radio at the time. Bishop Hanke defended it saying it was an “act of mercy”. The chairman of the external commission, former judge Norbert Baumann, who had found the man guilty in 2013, deplored the fact that the commission had not been consulted.
The new priest was duly ordained this year. Hanke said he had given him a second chance. “Coming to terms with the past most certainly demands justice but mercy is also called for when people change their lives,” he emphasised. The priest had undergone psychotherapy and regretted his past, Hanke said and recalled that the Church did “not ordain saints but ordinary men”.
It was only through the media that the diocese of Würzburg heard that the new priest would be giving his first blessing at the High Mass which Cardinal Koch was to have presided over. Auxiliary Bishop Ulrich Boom of Würzburg immediately contacted Cardinal Koch, as he feared that if Koch appeared together with the new priest that would further damage the Church’s relationship with Judaism. Whereupon Koch replied that “under the given circumstances I can unfortunately not take part in the Fatima celebrations in Retzbach on 13 May”.
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