Down the Easy Road

William J. Tighe on the Terminal Novelties of the Old Catholics

My first Touchstone contribution was a little piece in the May/June 1998 issue (11:3) entitled “The New Terrorism.” It related how Erich Ickelsheimer, the Old Catholic parish priest of Klagenfurt, Austria, was stigmatized as a “conscience terrorist.”

The Austrian Old Catholic Church was then debating the ordination of women to the priesthood, and in the course of that debate, Fr. Ickelsheimer observed that the ordination of women would constitute an affront to the consciences of those who, like himself, held firm to the foundational beliefs of the Old Catholic churches as held in common by the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) churches in the first millennium, before their separation. The most outspoken proponent of women’s ordination, Dr. Elfriede Kreuzeder (1927–2013), subsequently the first woman ordained to the priesthood in the Austrian Old Catholic Church, responded by coining the term “conscience terrorist” to characterize her opponent. The idea was of someone invoking his conscience to “terrorize” those promoting changes in church beliefs and practices, disagreement or resistance being equated with psychological terrorism.

History & Alliances

The Old Catholics constitute a small communion of churches, numbering today perhaps 50,000–60,000 members worldwide, which originated as a schism within the Catholic Church in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century. For well over a century thereafter its bishops claimed to be good, orthodox Roman Catholics, despite the papacy excommunicating each successive bishop when consecrated to that office. But when the First Vatican Council in 1870 promulgated the dogmas of papal infallibility and universal jurisdiction, the Old Catholic bishops concluded that the papacy had embraced error and thereby forfeited its authority.

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William J. Tighe was Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, until his retirement in 2024. He is a member of St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.He is a senior editor for Touchstone.

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