ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, January 11, 1997 TAG: 9701130003
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MUNICH, GERMANY
SOURCE: MARY WILLIAMS WALSH LOS ANGELES TIMES
THEY CALL THEMSELVES, Catholics, but these worshipers don't obey any pope.
Inside and out, St. Willibrord's looks every brick and candle the ordinary neighborhood Roman Catholic church.
On a sunny Sunday morning, little knots of parishioners in wool suits and Bavarian hats gather outside in the old churchyard, then move indoors, crossing themselves with holy water at an old stone font and genuflecting at pewside.
From the votive candles in red glass to the gold-leaf crucifix behind the altar, from the ``Gloria'' to the Benediction, nothing about the setting or the liturgy suggests that St. Willibrord's is the scene of a revolution in the making.
Until the priest's wife gets to her feet and asks if everybody has remembered to pick up a prayer book.
Yes, in this parish the priest is a married man, the father of three. Here, the divorced and the remarried are welcome as communicants, and contraception is just fine. This particular diocese ordained two women to the priesthood a few months back. And after Mass at St. Willibrord's, when one man rises to deplore the persecution of homosexuals in Romania, the pastor, Father Karl Harrer, accommodates him with perfect ease.
``We should give this our utmost attention,'' he urges his flock, then lifts his hands to deliver the Benediction.
What's going on here? Have the Catholics of Germany taken leave of their senses?
Not of their senses, but in small but growing numbers they are parting from the see of Rome.
In Germany, a neat trick has emerged for Catholics who love the traditions and much of the doctrine of the church but who can't, or won't, meet the standards of the current pope: They are joining a 126-year-old denomination called the Old Catholic Church, which is Roman Catholic in virtually all practical respects - but does not recognize the Vatican, and vice versa.
``We are first of all a Catholic Church, with everything that belongs to the Catholic Church,'' explains Harrer, who started his clerical life as a Roman Catholic priest nearly three decades ago but converted after seven years. ``But we're a Rome-free Catholic Church.''
In Germany, where religious-affiliation statistics are carefully kept by the state, the Old Catholic Church is the only officially recognized denomination growing today.
``We've had very good membership figures for about the last 15 years,'' says Bishop Joachim Vobbe, the senior Old Catholic Church cleric in Germany and a man with too keen a diplomatic nose to point out how closely this coincides with John Paul II's 18-year pontificate.
A key cause of Germany's disaffection from organized religion is simple lucre: Every member of a recognized house of worship is subject to a 9 percent payroll deduction overseen by the federal government.
In a country where the average worker is separated from about half of his paycheck by statutory withholdings, there is a powerful incentive to avoid taxes, and leaving one's church is a legal way to do so.
But money cannot be the only thing driving Roman Catholics from the fold, because no one would be defecting into the arms of the Old Catholic Church, where they still have to pay the ``church tax.''
Opposition to John Paul's unyielding conservatism also plays a part - particularly in a modern and well-educated country such as Germany, which has a long and proud tradition of challenging papal writ.
A spokeswoman for the Roman Catholic Church's highest office in Germany, the German Conference of Bishops, says she doubts that many Roman Catholic dropouts are leaving as a result of disaffection with some church doctrine.
``We're talking about very small numbers,'' says Heike Thome, adding that the German Conference of Bishops' own research shows that Roman Catholics may make knee-jerk remarks about the pope's dogmas, but when they ultimately leave the church, it is because of a much deeper and longer ``process of estrangement from the life of the religious community.''
While the German Conference of Bishops participates in ecumenical study groups with the Old Catholics, Thome said, the two denominations are not in shared communion.
The Old Catholic Church took shape in 1870, after Pope Pius IX convoked the first Vatican Council and pressed to make papal infallibility in matters of faith and morals a formal, take-it-or-leave-it element of church doctrine. Some bishops walked out; Rome responded with mass excommunications.
Left with no priests to baptize their babies, anoint the dying and otherwise fulfill their spiritual needs, dissident Catholics north of the Alps put together their own Rome-free dioceses. Like American colonists determined to create a new society stripped of any vestige of monarchy, the excommunicated northern Europeans pointedly built a church hierarchy that went no higher than bishop.
And these new bishops were to be elected by clergy and laity, ``as they had been in the early church,'' says Harrer, the pastor of St. Willibrord's.
At the moment, the Old Catholic bishops are struggling to arrive at a common position on the ordination of women.
As recently as 1976, they opposed this as a bloc, just like the Vatican. But, unlike what has transpired in the Roman Church, the Old Catholic laity was not willing to let the bishops make this decision for them. After years of agitation, the German diocese - at its triennial meeting of clergy and laity - ignored the proceedings of the bishops' council and voted overwhelmingly to admit women to the priesthood.
In the wings was Angela Berlis, a church activist who had been raised a strict Roman Catholic but who fell away in her teens, and then discovered the Old Catholic Church.
Berlis enrolled in a theological seminary in 1982, and completed its six-year course of studies, even though there was no prospect of taking holy orders at the time.
``I always considered myself a priest-in-waiting,'' she says.
After the German synod took its watershed vote, Berlis was consecrated as one of Germany's first two female Old Catholic priests. About 1,000 Old Catholics came to her ordination in May.
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