A complete change of culture in dealing with authority – “especially spiritual authority” – would be the best way to prevent abuse, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn told the press after the Austrian bishops’ conference’s spring plenary in the third week of March.
Asked if the abuse crisis had “created a momentum for extensive church reform”, Schönborn said he was sceptical as to whether the reforms that were being called for would solve the abuse problem. Many local Churches had great hopes in the coming Amazon Synod as they hoped that, due to the drastic shortage of priests particularly in the Amazon area, the rules for admission to the priesthood would be expanded, he recalled, but newly regulating the admission rules for the priesthood would not solve the abuse problem, he felt. Even opening the priesthood for women was of secondary importance, as abuse had also occurred in church institutions head by women, he said.
At the recent Vatican summit on abuse in the Church, it had become quite clear “that a change in culture in dealing with spiritual authority is imperative”, Schönborn recalled. This change in culture had already begun and should, in his eyes, develop in the direction of the “Open Society” envisaged by Sir Karl Popper, author of “The Open Society and its Enemies” (completed in 1943, published in two volumes in 1966).
At the end of the press conference, the cardinal informed the journalists present that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The operation was scheduled for the beginning of May. “This isn’t at all tragic, as prostate cancer is in most cases curable. I will therefore disappear from the public eye in May. The public will survive that well – and, hopefully, so will I!”
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