Schoenborn for pope?

(The Tablet, 17 April 2004)

In 1996 he noted that the use of the condom in given situations could be the lesser evil, and on women’s ordination said “we are not at the end of the debate”

Nor is Schönborn as rigid as his Balthasarian desire for a “clear Catholic identity” might suggest.

Although he has not said much about either since, in 1996 he noted that the use of the condom in given situations could be the lesser evil, and on women’s ordination said “we are not at the end of the debate” despite the Pope’s “clear” teaching on the matter.

And in 1999 he surprised many people by telling a concerned Protestant in a letter that anyone who in good conscience can say “Amen” to the eucharistic prayer of the Mass may take communion in a Catholic church. This “simple little rule”, he said, could always be applied when in doubt. (He was annoyed with The Tablet when we described his statement in a headline as a “radical statement on intercommunion”; it was not radical at all, he explained in a letter to the editor. But it did go much further than the English and Welsh bishops’ 1998 stipulations in One Bread, One Body that non-Catholics can receive Catholic Eucharist only when there was a pressing need.)