Austrian cardinal eyed
Reform-minded vicar Schoenborn holds advantage: nationality
VIENNA—Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn is a soft-spoken conservative who is ready to listen to those espousing reform. That profile that could appeal to fellow cardinals looking to elect a pontiff with widest-possible appeal to the world’s 1 billion Catholics.
His nationality may be his biggest disadvantage: Electors may be reluctant to choose another German speaker as a successor to Benedict XVI.
A man of low tolerance for the child abuse scandals roiling the church, Schoenborn himself was elevated to the its upper echelons of the Catholic hierarchy after his predecessor resigned 18 years ago over accusations that he was a pedophile.
Respect
Multilingual and respected by Jews, Muslims and Orthodox Christians, Benedict XVI’s friend and former pupil was one of the cardinal electors in the 2005 papal conclave that chose the German as head of the Catholic church. A scholar who is at home in the pulpit, Schoenborn also is well connected in the Vatican— and appears willing to make it his home, if reluctantly.
Asked if he would like to succeed Benedict on news of the pontiff’s plan to step down, he said: “my heart is in Vienna, my heart is in Austria—but naturally with the whole Church as well.”
Such reticence is not unusual for a prince of the church known for a quiet management style focused on steering the Austrian church around controversy.
That has not always been possible. The austere Schoenborn owed his own elevation to the scandal involving his predecessor, Hans Groer, who was accused of abusing young boys.
Appointed Vienna’s archbishop in 1995, Schoenborn initially stayed silent. But he showed courage three years later, personally apologizing “for everything that my predecessors and other holders of church office committed against people in their trust.”
Fired
In a measure of his dislike of confrontation, he fired his reform-minded vicar, Helmut Schueller, in 1998 by shoving a dismissal letter under Schueller’s door.
Yet, while grappling with the pornography scandal roiling the church in 2005, he took on the Vatican.
“It’s sad that it took so long to act,” he said of Rome’s reluctance to investigate the wrongdoing, saying later of the scandal: “The church is greater than its human weaknesses.” He went further than that as cases of sexual abuse continued rocking the church, calling for a re-examination of priestly celibacy in 2010—only to roll back in typical style shortly after, by having his spokesman issue a denial that he was questioning the rule on priests not marrying.
While accepting the possibility of evolution, Schoenborn criticized certain “neo-Darwinian” theories as incompatible with Catholic teaching, writing in a 2005 New York Times editorial, that “any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.”