Date: 2017-01-28  Written by Matthias Jakubec

Activities of the Movement "We are Church" (WaC)

April 9, 2016: Annual conference of WaC in Salzburg. Discussion about homosexual marriage. There is unanimity among us, that there should be the possibility for homosexual people to gain a secular partnership with rights equal to marriage. Only half of our supporters would agree to call this a marriage.

June 24-26, 2016: Together with WaC Germany we could run a stand at the 17th ecumenical Bodensee church rally.

October 17-20, 2016: Martha Heizer from WaC and Helmut Schüller participate in the 3rd international meeting of initiatives of catholic pastors in Chicago, USA.

November 4-7, 2016: Martha Heizer participates in the IMWAC meeting in Rome, Italy.

4 issues of our news letter “Wir sind Kirche” (We are Church).

Several press releases.

Events in the Austrian Church:

January 17 2016: Manfred Scheuer becomes bishop of Linz. As bishop of Innsbruck, who he has been before, he was the one who has stated the excommunication of Martha end Gert Heizer. The people of Linz consider him open minded.

September 30 - October 2, 2016: The roof organization of the Austrian Episcopal lay organisations (Katholische Aktion) together with others organised a conference about refugee aid. Members of WaC participated.

November 12, 2016: The Austrian church reform groups together organize a very vivid study day about church and young people (“Die alte Kirche und die jungen Leut’”).

The lack of ordained ministers and the fact that less and less people attend Sunday mass leads to bigger and bigger pastoral units. Additionally dioceses have financial reasons to combine parishes and make different economical use of their properties. WaC thinks, the number of pastors has to follow the number of communities and not vice versa. We support communities who fight for their right to stay alive.

Looking Forward to 2017: Activities and Events

A bishops’ synod about youth will be prepared, which needs to be supported.

The anniversary of reformation has to be accompanied by some action. Details are not yet fixed.

We will try to raise the awareness of priests concerning the growing endangering of Eucharist due to the increasing number of parishes without ordained ministers.