Cardinal Schoenborn and Zionism

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1112152825625

http://www.rense.com/general63/papl.htm

Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn is the Archbishop of Vienna.

The Jerusalem Post, 1 April 2005, claims that Schoenborn "delivered a strong message in favour of Jewish settlement in the Holy Land on Wednesday night, rejecting the claim that European Christians' support for the State of Israel is based on Holocaust guilt and saying that all Christians should affirm Zionism as a biblical imperative for the Jewish people."

Archbishop of Vienna Cardinal Schoenborn was speaking at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on the topic of "God's chosen land."

Schoenborn said: "Only once in human history did God take a country as an inheritance and give it to His chosen people," Christians, Schoenborn said, should rejoice in the return of Jews to the Holy Land as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

(One assumes this Jerusalem Post story was not an April Fool joke)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1450759,00.html

Christoph Schönborn, 60, is from an upper class Bohemian family. John Paul II got him to prepare the document that sets out the church's official teaching.

He had to handle a scandal involving his predecessor, Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, who was accused of paedophilia.

He is not popular in Austria, where he has been accused of 'being shifty and evasive in personal dealings'. His health is suspect.

(The Cardinal Groer scandal began in 1998 when a former seminary student said Groer, his religion instructor, had abused him repeatedly in the early 1970s. The student said he decided to go public after hearing Groer declare that those who abuse children would not "inherit heaven.' Other former students at the all-male high school at Hollabrunn, 40 miles north of Vienna, came forward with similar charges. State prosecutors never became involved because the statute of limitations for sexual abuse of a minor had long since expired.)