VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter
by John L. Allen Jr. | Dec. 6, 2012
ROME — Famously, the behavior of bureaucracies is often driven as much by compromise, by an effort to balance competing agenda, as by strict logic. It’s a rule of thumb that certainly applies to the Catholic church, and there’s probably no better recent example than the Vatican’s decision to strip Austrian Fr. Helmut Schüller of his title as “monsignor.”
It’s a rap on the knuckles obviously intended to make a statement, and yet no one in authority seems to want to say out loud quite what that statement is.
Beyond confirming that it happened, senior Vatican spokespersons have directed inquiries about the move to the Vienna archdiocese. Meanwhile, Michael Prüller, a spokesperson for Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, has told reporters that the decision “was made in Rome” and “has nothing to do with us.”
The result is that while the world knows Schüller is no longer a monsignor, there’s no official explanation as to why.
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