25 Mar Austria priest suspended due to anti-gay hate speech
Austria’s Roman Catholic Church has forbidden a priest from preaching to his flock at Easter Mass because of his comments against gays and Muslims.
The move comes after the 75 year-old priest, Karl Tropper, has been repeatedly warned to desist from inciting hate against gays and Muslims.
Last week he called gay people ‘homo-deranged’, he has also described Islam as ‘pure racism’.
Tropper has a history of using hate language, in numerous press releases from his Church he referred to LGBT people and Muslims in hateful terms, reported the daily Kleine Zeitung.
Austria’s Catholic Church previously put these comments down to Tropper’s old age but explicitly warned him on Thursday (21 March) to stop inciting hatred or else face retirement.
Tropper ignored the warnings and in an interview the following day (22 March) with the daily Kleine Zeitung he described gays as ‘perverts’, adding: ‘If you can no longer say this, you have to go as a parish priest into retirement’.
In response, Georg Plank spokesperson of Austria’s south eastern Graz-Seckau diocese said that Tropper, has repeatedly used an ‘unacceptably simplistic and inciting tone’ about homosexuality and Islam.He added that this can no longer be explained away with ‘stubbornness that comes with age’, and that Tropper was banned from preaching ban on Easter to his parish Church of St. Veit am Vogau.
Plank also added Tropper will retire on the 31 August.
The anti-discrimination unit of Austria’s Styria province said it was in the process of considering legal action.
Kleine Zeitung also reported that previously there had been two complaints against Tropper on suspicion of incitement to the public prosecutor in Graz – one dated April 2012 from the Graz based group Pink Purple Panther Women and in February 2013 from the activist Kurt Zernig.