The Exile of Pater Edmund

They have dispatched the monk to Rome. Said quickly, it sounds like a promotion. Said slowly, with the facts laid out in order, it sounds like what it is: the quiet destruction of a scholar’s life by men who lacked the courage to try him or the honesty to say they had.

On September 4, Wolfgang Klausnitzer, rector of the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Benedikt XVI, in Heiligenkreuz, announced to a German news outlet, Kirche und Leben, that Fr. Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.—until recently, lecturer in moral theology at his own abbey’s college at Heiligenkreuz—will teach no more courses for as long as Klausnitzer holds office. The rector cannot yet strip him of his title of Dozent (Lecturer). That indignity will have to await the reconvening of the academic Senate in the winter term. In the meantime, the abbey has released Fr. Edmund for doctoral studies in philosophy in Rome.

The Austrian theological establishment received the verdict with much the same glee that had once welcomed Barabbas. One Innsbruck professor pronounced: “Integralist positions clearly contradict Catholic teaching and the legal framework of a democratic constitutional state.” The dean of the Salzburg faculty hailed the exclusion, reminding everyone of the joint declaration in which Austria’s Catholic faculties had set their faces against the wrong sort of Christian, the type that misuses Christian theology to “legitimize anti-democratic, anti-feminist, and exclusionary ideologies.”

What did he do? Exactitude is necessary here; for his enemies certainly haven’t extended him that courtesy. Fr. Edmund Waldstein is one of the most serious integralist thinkers writing in English, a founder member of The Josias, a man whose abiding project—whatever one makes of it—has been the patient, public, footnoted argument that the social teaching of the preconciliar popes and the teaching of the Second Vatican Council form one continuous body of doctrine. He defended the coherence of Exsurge Domine, Leo X’s bull against Luther, including its condemnation of the proposition that burning heretics is against the will of the Holy Ghost. He argued, as a historian of theology must at least be permitted to argue, that the popes of the 16th century meant what they said.

For this he was asked to explain himself, and he did—and that ought to have ended the affair. He affirmed in plain words that he does not advocate such punishments today. His intention, as he stated it, was always “den Lehren der Päpste religiösen Gehorsam des Willens und des Verstandes zu erweisen”—to render religious obedience of will and intellect to the teachings of the popes. Note here the echo of Lumen Gentium 25a and Canon 752: “obsequium religiosum intellectus et voluntatis.”

Fr. Edmund even conceded, with remarkable candor, that in defending the old teaching he had sometimes gone too far at the level of application and that he meant to correct his exaggerations in scholarly dialogue with his critics, whom he thanked. Read that again. A monk, publicly humiliated, thanks his critics and promises to learn from them. And the rector’s answer, delivered through the press, was that Fr. Edmund’s theological method—“Theologische Prinzipienlehre”—was unworthy of even a first semester student.

Notice what was never done. No canonical process was opened. No proposition of his was formally examined and censured by any competent authority. No dubia were sent, no responses weighed.

Fr. Edmund’s enemies wielded newspaper articles. When his faculty at Innsbruck pressured him to withdraw the Habilitation thesis he had spent years preparing, the dean said openly that the ground was media reporting placing Waldstein near reactionary networks. A paper insinuated—insinuated; no evidence has yet been produced—a link between Fr. Edmund and anonymous threats made against women theologians.

His own college publicly asked the accusers to substantiate the charge. They never did. The accusation did its work anyway. The absence of evidence did not matter. In this affair, evidence has never once mattered.

And through all of it, Fr. Edmund obeyed. When his abbey forbade him to write further for The Josias, he stopped. When they asked for clarifications, he gave them. When they sent him to Rome, he went. He has behaved, at every turn, precisely as a monk under vows ought to, while the men judging him have behaved precisely as a modern academic bureaucracy on the hunt behaves: verdict first, process impenetrable, and a parallel media trial.

Now the real offense, because that is really at the heart of it: Pater Edmund’s crime was to refuse the one act that would have saved him: the ritual anathema against the Church’s own past. He was willing to say the old penalties should never be applied today. He was willing to submit to the magisterium. What he would not say is that the popes who taught otherwise were simply wrong—that Leo X, Pius IX, and the whole line of them taught error until the enlightened emerged to correct them.

He held, instead, to continuity of principle with change of application, which is, whatever its difficulties, a serious theological position with a distinguished pedigree. It is, indeed, close kin to the hermeneutic Benedict XVI proposed to the Roman Curia in 2005. The college that has now cast him out bears the name of Benedict XVI. One would laugh if one were not nearer to weeping.

The progressive theologians applauding Fr. Edmund’s sacking venerate Congar, de Lubac, Rahner—men silenced by craven authority and later vindicated. They learned that suppressing a scholar for his conclusions disgraces the suppressor. Apparently, the lesson had a footnote: that disgrace only ever flows in one direction.

Note: Many of the outlets reporting on the Waldstein affair are German. All translations are mine.