Priest Says Grouping Parishes Will Weaken Church

By Lisa Wangsness
Boston Globe
July 18, 2013

http://www.bishop-accountability.org/AbuseTrackerArchive/2013/07/#086045

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An Austrian priest who advocates ordination of women and married men, a position that led Boston church leaders to bar him from speaking at a local parish, said Wednesday that plans like the one Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley has put forward to group parishes and priests into clusters weaken the church rather than strengthen it.

The Rev. Helmut Schuller, who has long been concerned about how power is concentrated at the top echelons of the church hierarchy, is organizing a major priests’ movement in Austria that grew out of priests’ opposition to parish closings and restructuring plans that require clergy to minister to multiple churches. He argues that expanding the priesthood is a better answer than clustering plans that spread priests too thin, undermining their relationships with parishioners.

“They are doing it like downsizing a corporation, but we are not a corporation,” he said. “We are not the post or the train system or Starbucks. The local parish is very important, because it’s a question of companionship with the people in their lives.”

Schuller spoke in an interview at the Globe Wednesday in advance of an evening talk at a Unitarian-Universalist church in Dedham, where more than 500 people sat in sweltering heat to hear him. He lamented at one point a system that has overburdened priests dispensing sacraments “like a supermarket.”

Terrence C. Donilon, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Boston, said Schuller did not appear to understand the archdiocese’s approach to clustering parishes. He said the whole point of the plan, which he said has broad support, is to help priests have the time and support they need to focus on strengthening parishes. Vibrant parishes, as O’Malley sees it, are the key to bringing more Catholics back to church, which in turn will bring more young men into the seminaries.