Bishops of Past, Present Occupy Pope in Austria

The majesty of bygone bishops and the mischief of a living one dominated Pope John Paul II’s prayerful rounds Sunday in this picture-book city that calls itself “the German Rome.”

Amid great pageantry in the lee of a 400-year-old cathedral, the Pope warned well-fed Austrian burghers against the dangers of consumerism. There must be more to life, John Paul warned sternly, than “the tedious cycle of working-consuming-working again.”

But behind the ceremonial scenes, the papal retinue lit backfires against schism-bound archconservative Bishop Marcel Lefebvre, who is opposed to changes in the liturgy and other church reforms.

Joaquin Navarro, the Pope’s spokesman, told reporters Sunday that the Vatican expects that only about 20% of Lefebvre’s followers would follow him out of the church.

The 82-year-old Lefebvre and four priestly followers will incur automatic excommunication Thursday if, as planned, he elevates them to bishop at his headquarters in Switzerland without papal permission. That would produce the first major schism in the church in more than a century.

“A lot of people believe in Lefebvre’s traditional ideas, but not in a rupture,” Navarro said. Lefebvre claims millions of followers in more than two dozen countries. The Vatican officially estimates that about 500,000 Catholics use priests who follow Lefebvre for some aspect of their spiritual life.

Vatican Secretary of State Agostino Casaroli told reporters that the schism would be “a painful wound; a break that will not be immediately repaired.”

“I am confident, however, that Lefebvre will not have a large following. People will realize that the Pope did all he could,” Casaroli said.

There were reports late Sunday attributed to an Austrian bishop that a top official of Lefebvre’s St. Pius X Fraternity had put out feelers for a last-minute compromise. Vatican officials had no immediate reaction.

At the major public gathering on the penultimate day of his Austrian visit, John Paul presided at an elaborate high Mass in the Residenzplatz, the main square of an old salt trading center ruled for centuries by bishops.

This modern tourist center and the birthplace of Mozart, which became the setting Sunday for papal meetings and ceremonies, is the legacy of Renaissance bishops who were also princes of the Holy Roman Empire.

The most famous among them, Rome-reared Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, elected archbishop in 1567, dreamed of making his capital the Rome of the north. Employing Italian architects, he and two successors transformed the small town on the banks of the Salzach River into a splendor of churches, palaces and Italian-style piazzas.

Von Raitenau, in his own way, was as out of step with modern Vatican thinking as Lefebvre. One of his projects was a mansion for Salome Alt, a Jewish woman of bewitching beauty who bore the archbishop 15 children.

The Pope concludes his Austrian journey tonight after a stop in alpine Innsbruck.