Summary: The CNA Deutsch portal reports that Archbishop Josef Grünwidl of Vienna, in a March 11, 2026 sermon to Austria’s bishops, declared that “what comes from the Holy Spirit, canon law cannot hold back,” applying this to the role of women in the Church. Grünwidl, a former member of the schismatic “Priests’ Initiative” which advocated for women and married priests through “disobedience,” called for “renewal and change” and greater female leadership, citing the example of Jesus. This constitutes a public rejection of the immutable constitution of the Catholic Church and a capitulation to the feminist Modernism condemned by St. Pius X and Pope Pius IX.
Vienna Archbishop’s Heresy: Subverting Canon Law to Serve the Spirit of the Age
Factual Deconstruction: Grünwidl’s Apostate Trajectory
The article presents Archbishop Josef Grünwidl as a reformer within the post-conciliar structure. His biography, however, reveals a consistent pattern of dissent. He was a member of the Austrian “Priests’ Initiative,” a group that issued a call to disobedience explicitly advocating for the admission of women and married men to the priesthood—a direct repudiation of the Church’s divinely instituted hierarchy and sacramental discipline. While Grünwidl claims to have left the group because “Pope Francis had ‘overtaken’ the initiative’s proposals,” his subsequent statements prove he remains doctrinally aligned with their heretical core. His assertion that “what comes from the Holy Spirit, canon law cannot hold back” is not a pious sentiment but a revolutionary axiom that places personal, subjective discernment above the objective, binding law of the Church. This is the very spirit of Modernism, which St. Pius X condemned in Pascendi Dominici gregis as the belief that “the dogmas which the Church proposes as revealed are not truths of divine origin but are a certain interpretation of religious facts, which the human mind has worked out with great effort” (cf. Lamentabili sane exitu, prop. 22). Grünwidl’s “renewal” is the corruption of doctrine through the “pursuit of novelty” (prop. 1).
Theological Bankruptcy: Denial of Christ’s Kingship and Church Authority
Grünwidl’s argument rests on a fundamental error: the separation of the Holy Spirit from the visible, hierarchical Church He established. This is a Gnostic and Protestant notion, utterly alien to Catholic theology. Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas, which the article’s subject callously ignores, defined the Kingdom of Christ as encompassing all human society and requiring public obedience from rulers and states: “Let rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ… For what we wrote at the beginning of Our Pontificate… ‘When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed.’” Grünwidl’s focus on “listening to women’s voices” and “decision-making processes” reduces the Church to a mere human association, a “synodal” parliament where the Holy Spirit supposedly speaks through majority opinion or emotional appeals. This directly contradicts the Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX, which anathematizes the proposition that “The Church has not the power of defining dogmatically that the religion of the Catholic Church is the only true religion” (Error 21) and that “The ecclesiastical power ought not to exercise its authority without the permission and assent of the civil government” (Error 20). Grünwidl’s principle—that the Spirit can override canon law—is the logical extension of Error 24: “The Church has not the power of using force, nor has she any temporal power, direct or indirect.” He implicitly denies the Church’s potestas regiminis, her divine right to govern with binding law.
His selective reading of Scripture—highlighting women followers of Jesus—is a classic Modernist tactic, condemned by St. Pius X: “The Evangelists and Christians of the second and third generations invented the Gospel parables… In many narratives, the Evangelists did not report what actually happened, but what they thought would be of greater benefit” (Lamentabili, props. 13, 14). Grünwidl uses this historical-critical, demythologizing approach to strip the Gospels of their normative, hierarchical content (e.g., Christ’s ordination of the Twelve Apostles, all male) and reduce them to a vague principle of “inclusion” that his own agenda can define. He remains silent on the clear teaching of St. Paul: “I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to have authority over the man” (1 Tim. 2:12), a doctrine defined by the Church as divinely revealed and unchangeable.
Symptomatic of the Conciliar Apostasy: The Silence on Supernatural Realities
The gravest accusation against Grünwidl’s sermon is not merely its errors but its systematic omission of the supernatural. In his call for “renewal and change,” there is no mention of sin, no mention of grace, no mention of the Sacrifice of the Mass, no mention of the state of souls, no mention of the Final Judgment. This is the hallmark of the post-conciliar “Church of the New Advent”: a naturalistic, humanistic club that speaks the language of sociology (“participation,” “leadership,” “decision-making”) while being mute on the things of God. This is precisely the “abomination of desolation” standing in the holy place (Matt. 24:15). Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus, condemned the error that “Moral laws do not stand in need of the divine sanction” (Error 56) and that “The science of philosophical things and morals… may and ought to keep aloof from divine and ecclesiastical authority” (Error 57). Grünwidl’s entire program operates on this secularized plane, where “the Sermon on the Mount” is reduced to a vague ethical “love” divorced from its context of obedience to Church authority and the necessity of sacramental grace.
His invocation of the “Holy Spirit” is a diabolical inversion. The true Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son and guides the visible Church, the hierarchy, into all truth (John 16:13). The spirit that inspires rebellion against canon law, the spirit that demands the ordination of women (a biological and theological impossibility, as the priest acts in persona Christi, a role reserved to a man), is not the Holy Spirit but the spirit of Modernism, which Pope St. Pius X defined as “the synthesis of all heresies.” Grünwidl’s spirit is the spirit that, in the “Priests’ Initiative,” called for disobedience—a direct contradiction of the Catholic principle that “the Church listens cooperates in such a way with the Church teaching… that the Church teaching should only approve the common opinions of the Church listening” (Lamentabili, prop. 6, which is condemned as an error). For the integral Catholic faith, the Holy Spirit is bound to the Magisterium; to claim the Spirit can contradict the Magisterium is blasphemy.
The Naturalistic Heresy: Reducing the Church to a Human Rights Organization
Grünwidl’s framework is pure naturalism. He speaks of “women’s participation” and “leadership roles” using the vocabulary of corporate governance and civil rights, not of sacramental theology or divine law. This is a capitulation to the errors of the French Revolution and the Masonic principles condemned by Pope Pius IX: “The State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits” (Syllabus, Error 39). Grünwidl transfers this statist, human-rights paradigm into the Church. He treats the Church as a human institution that must “evolve” its structures to meet “modern progress,” exactly as condemned in the Syllabus: “The method and principles by which the old scholastic doctors cultivated theology are no longer suitable to the demands of our times” (Error 13).
In contrast, the unchanging Catholic doctrine, as proclaimed by Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas, holds that the Church is a perfect society (societas perfecta) with rights conferred by her Divine Founder, which no human authority can violate: “The Church, established by Christ as a perfect society, demands for itself by a right belonging to it, which it cannot renounce, full freedom and independence from secular authority.” Grünwidl’s position is the opposite: he demands that the Church’s internal law (canon law) bend to the secular spirit of the age. He thus joins the ranks of those whom Pius IX called “the synagogue of Satan,” who “boldly turn the help of powers and authorities… to trying to submit the Church of God to the most cruel servitude, to undermine the foundations on which it rests.” His “renewal” is not the restoration of Catholic Tradition but the final phase of the Modernist infiltration: the imposition of feminist, egalitarian ideology upon the Bride of Christ.
Conclusion: A Call to Reject the Apostate Conciliar Sect
Archbishop Josef Grünwidl, by his own admission a former leader of a disobedience movement, now preaches from the pulpit of the post-conciliar sect a gospel of “change” that denies the Kingship of Christ over His Church, rejects the binding force of canon law as an expression of divine law, and replaces supernatural revelation with the spirit of the age. His silence on the necessity of the sacraments, the doctrine of hell, the Immaculate Conception, and the Real Presence is deafening. He represents the “public apostasy” of which Pope Pius XI warned in Quas Primas, the apostasy that has led to the “seeds of discord sown everywhere, flames of envy and hostility.”
There is no “renewal” possible in this apostate body. The only “change” that can come is the repentance of those who have embraced Modernism and their return to the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church as it existed before the robber council of Vatican II. The “Holy Spirit” that Grünwidl invokes is the spirit of the Antichrist, for it seeks to dismantle the Church’s hierarchical, sacramental, and dogmatic structure. The true Catholic response is not to “listen” to the voices of feminist dissent but to heed the unchangeable voice of Christ speaking through His Church before the revolution: “He who listens to you listens to me, and he who rejects you rejects me” (Luke 10:16). Grünwidl rejects that voice. Therefore, he must be rejected by all faithful Catholics.
Source:
Vienna’s archbishop: ‘What comes from the Holy Spirit, canon law cannot stop’ (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 18.03.2026