 “I see it as against Christian love of my neighbor if I refuse to serve someone Communion who wants to receive it,” Gotthold Hasenhüttl told Ecumenical News International on November 25.
 He was suspended as a priest in 2003 by the then bishop of Trier, Reinhard Marx, after a service during an ecumenical gathering in the German capital at which non-Catholics were invited to take the bread and wine at the Catholic Eucharist presided over by Hasenhüttl. Â
 Official Roman Catholic teaching prevents Protestants and Catholics from sharing the Eucharist. In 2006, Hasenhüttl’s Catholic teaching license as a professor of systematic theology in Saarbrücken was also revoked by Bishop Marx.
 Hasenhüttl said he had written in May to the new bishop of Trier, Stephan Ackermann, requesting that his suspension as a priest be lifted, and then again in October when he had received no reply.
 Bishop Ackermann replied to Hasenhüttl in November and at the same time, the bishop gave an interview to the local Saarbrückener Zeitung newspaper. Ackermann said dialogue with Hasenhüttl depended on the suspended priest accepting Roman Catholic dogma and adhering to the discipline and the teachings of the Church.
 Hasenhüttl, who has retired, said that chances of dialogue about his suspension were less under Ackermann than they had been under Marx.
“He wrote that I no longer followed the dogma of the Catholic Church. This is completely new to me. This goes much further than the arguments used by Bishop Marx,” said Hasenhüttl.
 He said that he had for years offered Communion to Protestants and that other Catholic priests have been quietly doing the same. One of them had even written to Bishop Marx at the time to say he did the same as Hasenhüttl and suffered no consequences, he added.
 In 2003, hundreds of people packed into a Protestant church for the ecumenical service in the Gethsemane church in eastern Berlin. “All are invited,” said Hasenhüttl, when inviting the 2,500 Catholics and non-Catholics to take the bread and wine together. After the service, the priest said, “I hope what we have done tonight will take place more and more often.”
 However, at the time, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the Vatican’s chief doctrinal guardian, today Pope Benedict XVI, condemned the event, saying it was a “political action.”
 In his interview with ENI, Hasenhüttl said, “Benedict XVI thrives on the 19th century. As Pope he is leading the Church back to fundamentalism.”
Hasenhüttl was an academic assistant to Swiss-born theologian Hans Küng at the University of Tübingen in Germany when Ratzinger was called to be a professor there in the 1960s.
