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“The task has always delighted me,” said Cardinal Schönborn of his time in office. “I simply enjoyed doing it.”
“Compassion is what makes a society human. Mercilessness poisons society and ourselves,” Cardinal Schönborn said at a Mass marking his retirement.
The farewell Mass for Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, after almost 30 years as Archbishop of Vienna, turned into a national event with 4,000 guests where Austria’s President Alexander Van der Bellen – a Lutheran – praised him as a “pontifex austriacus”.
The main liturgy on 18 January was in St Stephen’s cathedral, broadcast live on national television, with parallel Masses in the nearby Dominican and Jesuit churches.
The soft-spoken Dominican pleaded in his sermon for more understanding for refugees, a hot topic in Austria only two weeks after the far-right Freedom Party was asked to form a government.
“Compassion is what makes a society human. Mercilessness poisons society and ourselves,” he said. “My greatest wish is that mutual goodwill should never be lost, even when we have conflicts.”
He bemoaned the contrast between the joyful thanksgiving at his farewell and Europe’s “widespread religious illiteracy” and the numbers leaving the Church. But he added: “Where danger grows, so does salvation.”
President Van der Bellen said Schönborn “stood on the side of the weak, excluded and disadvantaged – not always to the delight of the politically powerful”.
“You ultimately led the Church out of rough waters into calmer seas, always standing up for people on the margins in accordance with the Gospel values of compassion, charity, concern for the poor and care for the needy.”
On 22 January, Schönborn’s eightieth birthday, the Vatican confirmed that Pope Francis had accepted his resignation and appointed Fr Josef Grünwidl as apostolic administrator of the Archdiocese of Vienna. A statement from the archdiocese said the selection of the next archbishop was “already well advanced” and was expected in the coming weeks.
Schönborn, whose aristocratic ancestors included several cardinals and bishops under the Holy Roman Empire, was born in Bohemia in early 1945. His family fled to Austria later that year when Czechoslovakia turned against its once-influential German-speaking minority.
After editing the 1992 edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, he took over the Archdiocese of Vienna in 1995 at the height of a sexual abuse scandal, succeeding the disgraced Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer (1919-2003). He was one of the first Church leaders in Europe to establish an office for abuse victims.
As chairman of the Austrian bishops’ conference in 1998-2020, Schönborn hosted papal visits in 1998 and 2007, maintaining close contacts with Muslims and Jews, and defending refugees and asylum-seekers. He was widely considered Europe’s leading candidate for the papacy in 2013, and was asked to stay on in Vienna after reaching 75 in 2020.
Reviewing his busy life, Schönborn was typically modest. “The task has always delighted me,” he told one of many interviewers. “I simply enjoyed doing it.”
“Above all, I have to thank God and I have to thank you all,” he said in a video message on Wednesday. “The decisive experience in my almost 30 years in office has been: Church only works together, society only works together.”
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Publish date : 2025-01-22 05:50:00
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