Pastoral care or emergency care | The Daily Mail
In the beginning there was the word, a question and a promise: What will happen to the parishes in the diocese of Innsbruck, which includes the Austrian state of Tyrol? Answer: Our way into the future is the way into the pastoral care rooms! And: This should be planned, organized and accompanied; no one should be left alone with their concerns and arguments! This is the starting point in 2004: “Although many priests and lay people are involved in an exemplary manner, some developments give cause for concern: the parish communities are thinning out. The self-evidence of faith and community membership is increasingly being questioned, people are moving away or turning away completely. The number of priests available for active ministry in the parish is aging and fewer. The legitimate wish that every parish has a local priest or that one is only responsible for one parish cannot be fulfilled in the current situation with the best will in the world.”
So they looked for solutions, drew up big plans and made the decision in February 2005: “The consistory decides to consistently follow the path of parish renewal and the establishment of pastoral care rooms in the pastoral work of the Innsbruck diocese.” What the then diocesan bishop Manfred Scheuer also confirmed: “The decision to take this path provides an answer to the question of how things should basically continue, how parish communities can be maintained in view of the personnel situation and how their independence can be promoted. For priests it includes the opportunity to further develop their professional identity. It opens up concrete spaces of experience for a constructive cooperation between priests and lay people in order to prepare the way for the coming of the kingdom of God. It is a concrete perspective, but not the solution to all problems.”
Start your own prayer groups
A decade and a half has now passed and Bishop Manfred Scheuer was recalled to the head of his home diocese of Linz (Upper Austria). There he soon began a far-reaching restructuring process, which, however, was not supported by all creditors and some even considered it “Protestantization of the Catholic Church”.
Things are different in Innsbruck. Time seems to be standing still here. If you ask about the status of development or about a (new) future vision for the diocesan reform, you get astonished looks and counter-questions: “Are you talking about the ongoing synodal process? Or are you thinking of the ordinariate development 2020+?” As if it were a semantic problem and not, as it later turns out, a problem with the actually intolerable situation that under Bishop Hermann Glettler, who has been the “Church in the Mountains” as the fifth bishop of Innsbruck, nothing fundamental has happened.
This was underlined by an alarming statement by the rain of the Innsbruck-Feldkirch seminary and Vicar General Roland Buemberger in 2020: “We mustn’t watch and wait to see if we get back from the bishop [mit Priestern] be taken care of. We need to look at how local communities can be alive. How can we start prayer communities ourselves? How can we celebrate church services ourselves and keep the faith alive?” If this does not succeed, the priest continues, the diocese should probably soon, as suggested by the pastor’s initiative, “declare a pastoral emergency”.
No pastoral care worthy of the name
That should give food for thought, get things moving and put massive pressure on those responsible; After all, it is about ensuring the priestly pastoral work on site, with the people, and that it is available and close to life. Neither nice headlines nor cheap lip service will help (“In the middle we render a ministry of confidence!”), when the number of vocations falls down the valley, while the number of parishes, which are grouped together in the so-called pastoral care rooms and hung around the clergy working there like millstones, increases until nothing works anymore, certainly no pastoral care worthy of the name.
If you talk to affected priests, you quickly understand what the terms “Discouragement”, “disorientation” and “overuse”. Some wave it off because they are on the subject “Pastoral care rooms” can’t think of anything that would be new or enlightening, the other reports of everyday frustration, increasing overwork and the nagging feeling of not being able to give their believers enough of what is sought in trusting conversation: a listening, attentive and above all time-consuming counterpart.
Pastor Herbert Traxl, who works in the rather small pastoral care center of Zams-Zammerberg-Schönwies, knows these problems all too well, but comes across as surprisingly calm in his portrayal of his own disillusionment: “Some of my colleagues tell me that they don’t see a common thread in the bishop’s decisions at this time. A lot of things seem like a hasty shot, the echo of which will soon fade away. What is still considered the ultima ratio today will be discarded as a failure tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. With the best will in the world, one cannot therefore see that a future-oriented plan will do any harm here. Because of my skepticism, I never actively got involved in the procedure myself.”
impoverishment of religious life
If you compare this statement with the pastoral message from 2006, in which Bishop Manfred Scheuer explains what the formation of pastoral care rooms entails, you can see the serious difference between desire and reality: “It is about a movement outwards, a structural reform of our diocese, and your inwards die constant renewal and strengthening of our faith. [ ] In the formation of pastoral care rooms, pastoral care in the parishes is and remains the main focus. The parishes should retain as much autonomy as possible. The concretely lived, celebrated and shared faith in families and communities cannot and must not be delegated to other levels. [ ] A mere external structural renewal of our parishes and diocese would be a pure symptom treatment. It also needs inward movement, the constant renewal and strengthening of our faith as individuals and as a community. [ ] We will not be able to simply copy the past in the coming years. There is new territory to be entered: Take new territory under the plough. (Jer 4:3) Even in times of need you need to look ahead.”
True, but where should the focus be today, in 2022? According to reports, the diocese of Innsbruck is treading water; It is true that 67 of the planned 75 pastoral care rooms have been completed (56) or partially (11) since the beginning of the structural renewal, which appears to be a success. However, if you look behind the facade of the statistics and ask about inner renewal, then the calculation is already negative, because the shortage of priests is blatant, the vocations are hardly worth mentioning and pastoral care in the parishes and pastoral care rooms can hardly be managed, which is devastating the spiritual home and an impoverishment of religious life for the remaining believers in Tyrol.
The print edition of the Tagespost completes current news on die-tagespost.de with background information and analyses.