On 16 June during their summer plenary, the Austrian bishops elected Archbishop Franz Lackner OFM of Salzburg, who has been vice-president of the conference since 2013, as their new president.
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, who has been conference president for the last 22 years, had already handed in his resignation as president in writing at the beginning of March. A new president would normally have been elected at the spring plenary in mid-March but that had to be hurriedly postponed because of the Corona pandemic. Schönborn was asked by the bishops to continue as president for the time being. At the same time the conference set up an ad-hoc commission headed by Schönborn and to which among others Lackner belonged which met on a weekly basis in a video conference and dealt with important and urgent matters during the crisis.
63-year-old Lackner was born in Feldbach in Styria. His parents were smallholders. After finishing his schooling at a secondary modern school, he began an electrical apprenticeship. His decision to become a priest matured when from 1978-9 he was serving with UN forces in Cyprus. Back in Austria he went back to school to do his A-Levels. In 1984 he joined the Franciscan order. Lackner went on to study theology and philosophy in Vienna and Rome, where he later taught metaphysics. In 1999 he became Franciscan Provincial in Vienna. He was appointed auxiliary Bishop of Graz-Seckau in 2002 and elected Archbishop of Salzburg by the Salzburg cathedral chapter in 2013.
Bishop Manfred Scheuer (65) of Linz was elected vice-president of the conference. Scheuer is from Upper Austria. He studied theology in Linz and then entered the seminary there.From 1976-81he continued his studies at the Gregorian in Rome. He taught dogmatics at Austrian and German universities until, in 2003, Pope St John Paul II appointed him Bishop of Innsbruck. Pope Francis appointed him Bishop of Linz in 2015. Scheuer is responsible for ecumenical affairs and relations with Judaism in the bishops’ conference. He was the postulator in the beatification procedure for Franz Jägerstätter.
“I am convinced it was the right time to hand over the reins”, Schönborn told Kathpress after the election. He looked back on the past 22 years of his presidency with great gratitude despite the fact that they had often been very difficult years - “full of conflict and scandal,” he emphasised.
The worst scandal by far that Schönborn had to deal with was the Groer-crisis when in 1995 the then Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, had been accused of sexual clerical abuse. In March 1998 Schönborn together with four other Austrian bishops publicly declared that they had reached the “moral certainty” that the allegations against Groer were “in essence” correct. They felt obliged to declare this openly, they said, as the Church’s pastoral work would otherwise “be burdened with the crippling suspicion that the reputation of a cardinal is more important than the well-being of young people.” Since then Schönborn has on several occasions had the courage to criticise certain church policies and the Vatican.
Loading ...
