An Austrian Cistercian moral theologian has received both criticism and support after being suspended from his teaching position for comments defending past popes for executing heretics — despite his insistence that he does not advocate such a punishment today.
Father Wolfgang Klausnitzer, rector of the Benedict XVI Philosophical-Theological University in Heiligenkreuz, Austria, suspended Father Edmund Waldstein Sept. 4 from teaching at the college, saying he would not be able to return while the rector served out his term, and redirected Father Waldstein to doctoral study in Rome.
Father Klausnitzer called Father Waldstein’s comments “unspeakable,” adding that he would not accept such theological principles from a first-year student. According to the rector, Father Waldstein did not withdraw the comments when the rector asked for a scholarly explanation; the Austrian priest was on leave when the rector’s decision was reported.
The apparent trigger for Father Waldstein’s suspension relates to remarks he made in a 2019 blog post. After calling for prudence when tending to the baptized, he wrote that sometimes to protect the common good, punishment is required for those who “violate their baptismal obligations,” while at the same time being careful “not to scrape off the rust too violently, lest she break the vessel.”
“In certain circumstances, this can mean that [the Church] needs to call in the secular arm to put heretics to death,” Father Waldstein wrote in the post on his blog Sancrucensis. “This power can be abused, but it also has a legitimate use. In fact, one of the errors of Martin Luther, condemned by Pope Leo X, is the proposition ‘That heretics be burned is against the will of the Spirit.’”
The online article has since been removed but Father Waldstein returned to the subject in a fresh blog post in May last year after Sigrid Rettenbacher, a German theologian, accused him in a letter to Austrian bishops of being a “dangerous right-wing extremist.”
He firmly denied such a charge, and defended what underlies this dispute: his support for neo-integralism — a Catholic political theory that seeks to order society under the social kingship of Christ, holding that political authority should serve humanity’s supernatural end and be subordinate to the Church’s spiritual authority.
‘Fundamental Continuity’
Father Waldstein, whose father, Michael Waldstein, is a widely regarded academic and was a close friend of Joseph Ratzinger, wrote that he has always tried to show “a fundamental continuity” on the level of principles between the teaching of popes in the Middle Ages and popes of the Second Vatican Council and the post conciliar era. And while acknowledging he had “sometimes gone too far” in applying those principles, he stressed that his defense of Pope Leo X’s teaching on the death penalty for heretics, which the Pope made in his 1520 papal bull Exsurge Domine, should be “understood in this context.”
“I do not advocate for such punishments today,” Father Waldstein stressed. “I fully accept that the papal magisterium today rejects the application of the death penalty in general and the punishment of heretics by the secular arm.” He added that he has always wished to show religious submission of will and intellect to the teachings of the popes, including Pope Francis’ change to the Catechism of the Catholic Church to call capital punishment “inadmissible.”
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We're no longer allowed to discuss the historical application of violence under divine mandate? Was God's massacre of all the firstborn of Egypt wrong? What about the destruction of the Canaanites? We'll have to completely reinvent our understanding of why King Saul was replaced by David.
Modernism and the dictatorship of relativism strike again.
Totalitarians do not tolerate dissent from the Party line, ordination and academic research are not exceptions.