Succession question for Archbishop Wolfgang Haas is topical

Archbishop Wolfgang Haas will celebrate his 75th birthday next year. According to Vatican regulations, he would then have to offer the Pope his resignation as head pastor of the Archdiocese of Liechtenstein. In particular, circles that are critical or hostile to the Archbishop, who has been in office since 1997, are calling for transparency – both with regard to the Archbishop’s successor and the continued existence of the Archdiocese of Liechtenstein. This demand is related to the version, which has never been officially confirmed, that the archdiocese of Liechtenstein was founded 25 years ago solely for the purpose of getting rid of the controversial Haas as bishop of the diocese of Chur.

Archbishop Haas recently made a lengthy statement in response to the demand for transparency about the future of the archdiocese, which he believes was “embarrassingly penetrative”: The decision was not up to him, just like the Holy See without his help about the establishment of the archdiocese and its appointment to the head of the new diocese. It is an internal church matter and it is exclusively up to the pope whether his resignation is accepted and whether the archdiocese is continued “as a stable, individual church”.

«Rome has decided»

Liechtenstein Prime Minister Daniel Risch made a similar statement to Parliament: the government has no say in planning for the future of the Archdiocese. The head of government also pointed out that a diocese had never been dissolved when a bishop retired. And that there are no signs that the Roman Catholic Church is considering abolishing the Archdiocese of Liechtenstein.

A scenario like that of the founding of the Archdiocese 25 years ago could repeat itself, when the head of state, government and deanery were surprised and presented with a fait accompli. At that time, the Apostolic Nuncio Oriano Quilici traveled to Vaduz on November 28, 1997 and handed Foreign Minister Andrea Willi a letter from the Pope marked “personal / strictly confidential”.

However, the papal message was not intended for the Foreign Ministry, but for Prince Hans-Adam II. However, the head of state at the time was abroad, which is why the papal envoy contacted the Foreign Minister in order not to have to leave without having achieved something. In the letter, Pope John Paul II informed the Prince of his decision to appoint Liechtenstein as an independent Archdiocese and Haas as Archbishop.

With the sentence “Rome has decided”, the then information officer of the Diocese of Chur rejected all efforts to persuade the Pope to withdraw the decision. Neither the intervention of the government in the Vatican nor the protest of the parliament against the lack of involvement of the Liechtenstein authorities were able to prevent the archdiocese. The Holy See was also unimpressed by a petition signed by more than 8,000 people, with which the faithful demanded that Liechtenstein remain in the Diocese of Chur.

On the other hand, the archbishop’s efforts over the past 25 years to unite supporters and opponents of the archdiocese into a common flock of believers have also been unsuccessful. The sentence in his first sermon that he had been appointed archbishop but wanted to be a “heart bishop” for Liechtenstein remained a mere play on words.

Muddled situation

The separation of church and state, which was demanded immediately after the Pope’s decision, proved to be almost impossible to manage when looking realistically at the interdependencies that had grown over the centuries. But even a disentanglement, which was tackled as a more realistic variant, has not yet been implemented. At a symposium of the Liechtenstein Institute in 1999, Haas offered his hand for a regulation without committing himself to the details.

The reform of the state church law presented by the government as a result contained a package solution: a concordat with the Holy See, a constitutional amendment with the abolition of the privileged position of the Roman Catholic Church as the only “state church” and a religious law to regulate the relationship with the other religious communities and theirs Financing via a mandate tax.

The package solution has so far proved to be unworkable. Parliament took note of the constitutional amendment, but postponed the decision on it. Although the religious law was passed by parliament, it could not be put into effect because the archdiocese and the 11 parishes had to be separated first. In most communities, the archdiocese and community authorities were able to agree relatively quickly on the key property issues, but in two communities the ideas about the demerger turned out to be so different that the negotiations were broken off without a result.

At the political level, there has so far been no great desire to get the situation moving. An attempt by the Green Free List to unravel the package solution and enact the undisputed parts of it found no support from the governing parties in parliament.

Haas’ successor will have to deal with the demerger issue. In principle, Haas is positive about an institutional separation of church and state, as he explained more than two decades ago with reference to the independence and autonomy of the church demanded by the Second Vatican Council. From this point of view, there are no fundamental concerns about entering into a contractual solution with the State of Liechtenstein, as the Holy See has already done with various other states.

But he had already hinted at the time that a church-friendly separation would require time and patience. However, critics suspect a conscious strategy on the part of the Archdiocese behind the difficult demerger negotiations: as long as the concordat with the Holy See has not been concluded and the constitutional amendment has not come into force, the Roman Catholic Church will retain its status as the “state church” – and the communities will finance it through the normal household the majority of the expenses for the church system.