Moved by a Different Spirit

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 pew side.

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.”

And that appeals to many these days in northern Europe’s ranks of well-educated, relatively free-thinking, frustrated Catholics.

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.

Although Old Catholics number just 60,000 or so, mostly in six countries in Europe, Vobbe notes that at the moment, more than enough new members are joining to replace those who die each year.

And no one can say that about the big workhorse churches of traditional Germany. On the contrary: They are shrinking at a calamitous rate.

Loss of Faithful

The Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church together account for about three-fourths of the faithful in Germany, with about 28 million members apiece--but the Roman Catholic hierarchy is faced with about 150,000 formal resignations each year, and the Lutherans with about 290,000.

As a result, money for conventional church work such as running hospitals and providing social services--also known as the corporal works of mercy--is in constant short supply here. Some concerned observers fear that if things do not change, these great institutions, part of the ancient warp and woof of European culture, will eventually pale to insignificance.

“The path of this decline is long, and it appears to be irreversible,” warns Eugen Drewermann, the most widely read dissident Catholic theologian in the German language today. His criticism of Rome led to a stripping of his teaching privileges in 1991, and he was defrocked in 1992, but he continues to make waves and enjoy support in Germany.

A key cause of Germany’s disaffection from organized religion is simple lucre: Every member of a recognized house of worship here is subject to automatic tithing, in the form of a 9% payroll deduction overseen by the federal government.

In a country where the average worker is separated from about half of his paycheck by various 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 the Pope

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.

“The pope represents everything I dislike about the Roman Catholic Church,” says Christa Muggli, a Munich high school teacher who until 1995 was a serious, practicing Roman Catholic.

Muggli, the bustling mother of two grown sons, used to attend Mass every Sunday and saw her parish as a handy place to organize for her favorite cause, the environment.

For years, she managed to overlook the usual sticking points that alienate many Catholics in the industrialized West--the barring of women from the priesthood, the ban on artificial contraception, scandals involving libidinous priests. (In neighboring Austria, the archbishop of Vienna had to step down in 1995 amid reports that he had once sexually abused boys in his spiritual care.)

But then came the United Nations’ World Population Congress in Cairo two years ago, “the last drop that made the cup run over,” as Muggli puts it. She said she watched in mounting outrage as--against Egypt’s sprawling canvas of poverty and female subjugation--the Vatican delegation delayed and tried to weaken the final resolution’s language on abortion, birth control and sex education.

She went straight to her parish rectory and announced her departure to a nonplused pastor.

But once a Catholic, always a Catholic, as so many writers have said for centuries.

Muggli discovered that out on her own, without the cherished rituals and rhythms of faith that had comforted and inspired her throughout her life--the chants, the out-loud creeds, the saints and symbols, the transcendent moment of grace at altar and Communion rail--there was an aching hole in her life.

“People of my generation have been taught that if you don’t go to church every Sunday, you will be condemned forever,” she says. “It’s difficult to throw this fear off.”

She dabbled briefly with Lutheranism but didn’t find what she was looking for in the ground zero of the Reformation.

And then a colleague from her school told her about St. Willibrord’s. Muggli went to Mass there and was delighted to discover all the familiar practices and appointments of Catholic worship--in a climate of intellectual freedom.

“Here, we have a more democratic institution,” says Muggli, who now once again uses her parish as a podium to spread the good news about bicycle groups and car-sharing societies. “The individual counts more. We can say, ‘Well, my conscience counts more than what the bishop says.’ ”

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 for reasons similar to Muggli’s.

“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.

To emphasize their adherence to the pre-Rome ways, the new churches called themselves the Old Catholics. In 1889, they united under a bishops’ council, the Union of Utrecht, which in subsequent years threw out the use of Latin, mandatory priestly celibacy and the obligation to confess one’s sins to a priest.

Today, major Old Catholic decisions are still being made by this bishops’ council, which meets once a year. Besides Vobbe, there are two Old Catholic bishops from the Netherlands, one each from Switzerland and Austria, four from Poland, and a number of retired bishops from all over who come to the meetings but have no voting rights.

In addition, the Polish National Catholic Church in the United States and Canada, a denomination with about 50,000 members that also belongs to the Union of Utrecht, sends five voting bishops.

(Vobbe says that there are other groups in the United States calling themselves Old Catholics, but he says these are not affiliated with the Union of Utrecht or the 126-year-old Old Catholic movement.)

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 en 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.

“My synod decided this by a 97% majority,” Vobbe says. “It was like a vote in [Soviet-era] Russia, but without the pressure.”

Ordination of Women

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.

These doings in Germany have caused tremendous consternation within the Polish National Catholic Church. Made up mainly of Polish Americans, it is more conservative than the European Old Catholic Church, and it continues to oppose the ordination of women.

Vobbe worries that if this issue is not resolved, it could shatter the Union of Utrecht.

Berlis, meanwhile, says she has encountered remarkably few problems on a day-to-day level in her pioneering role. The mother of two preschool-aged girls--her husband is also an Old Catholic priest--commutes regularly between her parish church in the Netherlands and a second job as assistant professor of theology and chaplain at the University of Bonn.

“People are very curious to see what it feels like to have a woman priest at the Eucharist, and I get a lot of invitations to say Mass,” she says.

Berlis says she is also asked to preach to congregants of the church she left as a teenager, the Roman Catholic Church.

She is happy to do so, she says, knowing that her former co-religionists want to have her around as a way of keeping the reform debate alive. To them, she is proof that change isn’t necessarily fatal.