Alfons Maria Stickler

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Cardinal coat of arms by Alfons Maria Stickler

Alfons Maria Cardinal Stickler SDB (born August 23, 1910 in Neunkirchen ; † December 12, 2007 in Vatican City ) was an Austrian theologian and canon law historian from the Salesian Order and since 1985 Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church with the title of Cardinal Librarian and Archivist of the Holy Roman Church .

Life

Alfons Maria Stickler graduated from the Fichtnergasse high school in Vienna - Hietzing in 1928 . He kicked his school years in the Congregation of the Salesians and laid on 15 August 1928, the vows from. He then studied philosophy and theology at various universities in Germany , Austria and Italy . On March 27, 1937, he was ordained a priest in the Lateran Basilica in Rome . There he studied ecclesiastical and secular law at the Pontifical Lateran University . He then taught canon law at the Salesian Theological College in Turin , was Dean of the Faculty of Canon Law from 1953 to 1958, and then served as Rector of the College until 1966 , which he headed between 1961 and 1965 during its gradual move to Rome . Here he worked until the completion of the new building at the provisional Roman seat of the Salesian College in Via Marsala and during the years of the Second Vatican Council he was involved as Peritus in the deliberations of several commissions, including the negotiations on the liturgical constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium .

On Ash Wednesday 1971, Pope Paul VI appointed him . to the Prefect of the Vatican Library . In this capacity, Stickler served as a consultor for several Vatican congregations . During his tenure as an active library manager, Stickler made a great contribution to the maintenance and modernization of the Vatican library. Among other things, a nuclear-bombproof bunker was built under his leadership, in which the most important treasures of the library (including the Codex Vaticanus ) are housed.

On September 9, 1983 he called Pope John Paul II. To Titular Archbishop of Volsinium ( Bolsena ) and pro-librarian of Holy Roman Church . He was ordained bishop on November 1, 1983 by the Pope; Co-consecrators were Eduardo Cardinal Martínez Somalo and Rosalio José Cardinal Castillo Lara  SDB. On July 7, 1984, the Pope also granted him the title of Pro-Archivist of the Holy Roman Church . On May 25, 1985 he accepted him as a cardinal deacon with the titled deaconry San Giorgio in Velabro in the college of cardinals and appointed him cardinal librarian and archivist of the Holy Roman Church . In the summer of 1988 Stickler resigned from his post as cardinal librarian for reasons of age.

Despite his advanced age, Cardinal Stickler, who was a great friend and promoter of the Tridentine liturgy in the form practiced before the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council , traveled repeatedly to Germany and Austria in the years following the decree of the Motu proprio Ecclesia Dei in 1988, where he celebrated pontifical offices at festivities and ordinations in the old custom. In 1998, Stickler took part in the celebrations of the 10th anniversary of Motu proprio with traditionalist pilgrims in Rome, together with Joseph Ratzinger , the then prefect of the faith , the traditionalist Benedictine abbot Dom Gérard , the German philosopher Robert Spaemann and representatives of the ancient ritualist associations Una Voce and Pro Missa Tridentina .

On January 29, 1996 he was appointed cardinal priest pro hac vice while retaining his title diakonia . Cardinal Stickler continued to live in Rome and was the oldest living cardinal in the world since the death of Dutch Cardinal Johannes Willebrands on August 2, 2006. In 2007, a few months before his death, he celebrated his 70th jubilee as a priest ; in a letter on this occasion, Pope Benedict XVI referred to him . as "Patriarch" and publicly expressed his benevolence and gratitude for his life's work. Before he was elected Pope, Ratzinger had been a direct neighbor of Stickler for many years, whose private apartment was right next to that of the Prefect of the Faith and with whom he occasionally exchanged ideas.

The tomb of the Salesians Don Bosco on the site of the Catacomb of Calixtus was chosen as the temporary final resting place . On October 7, 2010, Cardinal Stickler's body was reburied in his titular church San Giorgio in Velabro and finally buried there.

Alfons Maria Stickler was a brother of the Salesian and religious psychologist Gertrud Stickler  FMA .

Theological influence

Theologically, Stickler is assigned to Catholic traditionalism .

His passionate defense of clerical celibacy made him stand out throughout his life. He was known as a sharp opponent of the reintroduction of the permanent diaconate by the Second Vatican Council, which allows married men access to the clergy , and warned on many occasions of what he believed to be disastrous effects of this innovation on the life of the Church. In addition, with his book on clerical celibacy , he is considered to be the real artifex behind the hypothesis, later developed by Stefan Heid and also adopted by authoritative church historians such as Walter Brandmüller , but rejected by the majority of historical scholars as untenable, that the Christian apostles were already in the 1st century remained celibate or, if they were married, would no longer have had sexual relations with their wives.

According to his own testimony, Stickler belonged to a group of nine cardinals (alongside Joseph Ratzinger, Paul Augustin Mayer , Silvio Oddi , Agostino Casaroli , Bernardin Gantin , Antonio Innocenti , Pietro Palazzini and Jozef Tomko ) who responded to the question in 1986 at the request of the Pope whether Pope Paul VI. or another ecclesiastical legislature would have ever forbidden the celebration of the Tridentine liturgy in a canonically binding manner and whether the bishops were allowed to forbid their priests to use the preconciliar form of the Roman liturgy. The cardinals are said to have answered both questions unanimously in the negative, which is said to have moved the Pope to his decision to make the old liturgy accessible to interested believers through his Motu proprio Ecclesia Dei (1988). Stickler's story of this episode, which has been circulating since the 1990s, also served as a widespread narrative to explain the re-admission of the old Mass rite by Pope Benedict XVI, which was surprising and sometimes disturbing for many believers. as a so-called “extraordinary form” of the Roman rite with its Motu proprio Summorum pontificum from spring 2007.

Stickler was a formative theological teacher of Tarcisio Bertone  SDB, who later succeeded him as rector of the Salesian University and then as secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and finally cardinal state secretary for many years as the right hand of Joseph Ratzinger. Stickler was also influential in his home country Austria, where he built up an active church political network of influence for many years with the Lower Austrian international lawyer and Federal Council member Herbert Schambeck , who is assigned to Opus Dei .

Awards

He was a member of the Academies of Sciences in Vienna, Bologna and Siena , the Medieval Academy of the United States, Honorary Senator of the University of Heidelberg .

Publications

  • The clerical celibacy. Its history of development and its theological foundations. 1st edition. Kral Verlag, Abensberg 1993, ISBN 3-87442-038-8 ; Unchanged 3rd edition Sarto-Verlag, Bobingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-943858-03-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rome Pilgrimage 1998. Documentation on the website of the Pro Missa Tridentina Association , accessed in January 2019.
  2. ↑ Pope congratulates Cardinal Stickler . In: Vatican Radio , March 27, 2007 (with the wording of the greeting message from Benedict XVI on the 70th anniversary of Cardinal Stickler's priesthood in Latin).
  3. ^ Peter Hertel : Creeping takeover. The Opus Dei under Pope Benedict XVI. Publik-Forum Verlag, Oberursel 2007, ISBN 978-3-88095-161-7 , p. 212.
  4. ^ Paul M. Zulehner : dowry. Another kind of autobiography. Patmos Verlag, Ostfildern 2014, ISBN 978-3-8436-0542-7 , pp. 113–116.
  5. ^ Erwin Brunner, Joachim Riedl : The Vatican siege. How the Papal Church wants to discipline Austria again. In: Die Zeit 17/1987 (April 17, 1987), accessed on December 28, 2018.
predecessor Office successor
Eugenio Valentini Rector of the Pontifical University of the Salesians (UPS)
1958–1966 		Gino Corallo
Antonio Cardinal Samore Archivist and Librarian of the Holy Roman Church
1984–1988 		Antonio María Cardinal Javierre Ortas SDB
personal data
SURNAME Stickler, Alfons Maria
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stickler, Alfons Maria Cardinal SDB
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Neunkirchen
DATE OF DEATH December 12, 2007
Place of death Vatican city