When Synodality Stops at the Cloister Door: Rome suspends the abbatial election at Heiligenkreuz

One of the oldest, largest and most conspicuously flourishing monasteries in Western Europe is about to lose its abbot. That in itself need not be controversial. What is extraordinary is what comes next. More than eighty solemnly professed Cistercians will be permitted to elect the man who governs them — but Rome has determined that, for three years, they may not elect him as their abbot. The distinction matters. So does the reason publicly offered for it. At Heiligenkreuz, a monastery whose remarkable growth has been acknowledged by the Holy See itself, an abundance of younger monks has become part of the justification for suspending one of the oldest rights of the monastic community.

There is an irony about the date which would seem contrived if somebody had invented it. On 20 August, the feast of St Bernard of Clairvaux, Abbot Maximilian Heim OCist announced to the monks of Heiligenkreuz that he will relinquish the abbacy on 14 September. In the traditional Benedictine cycle for the daily reading of the Rule, 20 August is also the day appointed for the beginning of Chapter 64, De ordinando abbate — “On the appointment of the abbot”. St Benedict’s presumption is wonderfully uncomplicated: the abbot is to be chosen by the community, either unanimously or by that part whose judgement is sounder. He even anticipates the exceptional case in which outsiders must intervene because a community conspires to elect an unworthy man. The normal principle nevertheless remains clear: the monks choose their father.¹

On that same 20 August, the monks of Heiligenkreuz were informed that this is precisely what they will not presently be permitted to do.

The facts require some care because the initial reporting has occasionally made the intervention sound more absolute than it is. Maximilian Heim, sixty-five, will relinquish office on 14 September — appropriately, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, from which Heiligenkreuz takes its name — after sixteen years as abbot and approximately thirty years in positions of responsibility as novice master, prior, abbot and, from 2016 until 2025, Abbot President of the Austrian Cistercian Congregation. He cites his serious heart illness last year, the completion of two terms of office and his belief that the time has come to place responsibility in younger hands. He does not intend to leave the community, but to return to pastoral and theological work.²

After his departure, however, there will be no ordinary election of the 69th Abbot of Heiligenkreuz. Following consultation with the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, the community will instead elect an administrator for three years. More than eighty solemnly professed monks will participate. Thus it is not quite correct to say, as some reporting has suggested, that the monks have been deprived altogether of the right to elect their superior. They will vote. They will apparently choose the administrator from among themselves. What has been withheld is something more precise and more important: **their normal right to elect an abbot.**²

That distinction does not diminish the seriousness of the decision. It concentrates it.

For an administrator is not simply an abbot with a shorter contract. An abbot is the stable spiritual father of an autonomous monastic family, elected according to the proper law of the institute and invested with an office which belongs organically to the life of the abbey itself. His authority is not merely managerial. It is spiritual, paternal and ecclesial. The Rule speaks of him as one who holds the place of Christ in the monastery and who must answer before God for the souls committed to him. The abbatial election is therefore not simply a mechanism for filling a vacancy. It is one of the defining acts by which a monastic community perpetuates its own ordered life.

An administrator, by contrast, governs provisionally and for a defined purpose. However extensive his powers may be, his very title announces an abnormal situation: ordinary government has been suspended while something else is being accomplished.

The anomaly is therefore exact. Heiligenkreuz has not been judged incapable of electing a superior. It has been judged capable of electing the man who will govern it, but incapable — for three years — of electing him as its father.

That is what Rome has yet adequately to explain.

To understand why the question matters, one first has to understand what Heiligenkreuz is.

This is not an obscure religious house of marginal significance. The Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Cross in the Vienna Woods is one of the great surviving institutions of Western monastic Christianity. It was founded on 11 September 1133 by St Leopold III, Margrave of Austria, at the urging of his son Otto. Otto had encountered the new Cistercian movement while studying abroad, entered the Abbey of Morimond in Burgundy and later became Abbot of Morimond and Bishop of Freising. Twelve monks were sent from Morimond to establish the Austrian foundation. Almost nine centuries later, they have never left.³

When Pope Benedict XVI visited Heiligenkreuz on 9 September 2007, he called it quite simply “the oldest continuously active Cistercian monastery in the world.” He had not come merely to admire medieval architecture. He wanted, he said, to draw attention to the fundamental Benedictine principle that nothing should be preferred to the Divine Office. For Benedict, Heiligenkreuz represented something desperately necessary in European Christianity: a place where the primacy of God remained visible because men continued to order an entire common life around His worship.⁴

That continuity is almost astonishing. Heiligenkreuz survived the religious convulsions of the Reformation, the Ottoman threat, Josephinism, secularisation, the Napoleonic period, the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, National Socialism, war and the extraordinary decline of European religious life in the twentieth century. Its Romanesque and Gothic heart remains intact, surrounded by the architectural additions of subsequent centuries, because the institution itself was never extinguished. The bells did not become museum exhibits. The choir stalls did not become archaeological curiosities. The Divine Office continued.

Its importance to Austrian history is correspondingly immense. The abbey was intimately connected with the Babenbergs, the dynasty which shaped medieval Austria. Four members of the family, including Friedrich II, the last male Babenberg duke, lie buried in the chapter house. In 1188 Duke Leopold V presented Heiligenkreuz with the great relic of the True Cross which remains among the monastery’s most treasured possessions. The abbey’s history is therefore interwoven not merely with that of Austrian Catholicism but with the formation of Austria itself.³

Heiligenkreuz was never intended merely to preserve itself. It became a mother-house. From it came foundations at Zwettl in 1138, Baumgartenberg and Czikádor in 1142, Marienberg, Lilienfeld, Goldenkron and Neuberg. The same instinct for foundation astonishingly survived into the modern age. Heiligenkreuz established the Cistercian priory at Bochum-Stiepel in Germany in 1988 and supplied the monks who restored Cistercian life at Neuzelle in Brandenburg in 2018. The abbey which Rome is now subjecting to three years of provisional government is therefore not merely living on accumulated medieval prestige. It is still capable of generating new monastic communities.³

That matters enormously because the predicament facing European monasticism is ordinarily the opposite.

Across much of Western Europe, monasteries which once numbered hundreds have declined to a handful of elderly religious. Houses close because no novices arrive. Provinces amalgamate because they can no longer supply superiors. Historic convents are sold because communities can no longer maintain them. Religious institutes publish glossy documents about renewal while quietly calculating whether their median age permits them another decade.

Heiligenkreuz presents almost the inverse problem.

The abbey and its dependent communities now number more than one hundred monks. In April this year, when the apostolic visitation concluded, approximately one hundred monks belonged to the community — a figure reported as a historic high in its nearly nine centuries. More than eighty are solemnly professed and therefore entitled to participate in September’s election. Alongside the monastery stands the Philosophical-Theological University Benedict XVI, with about three hundred students, and the interdiocesan Leopoldinum seminary with around forty seminarians. The abbey also carries responsibility for extensive parish ministry and several dependent houses.⁵

Its present electoral difficulty, if one accepts the explanation publicly offered, arises in part from the very fact that so many of its monks are younger men who entered during Heim’s long abbacy and have therefore never previously had occasion to elect an abbot.

That theological institution is itself significant. Heiligenkreuz has conducted organised theological education since 1802. In 2007 Benedict XVI raised its theological school to pontifical status, and the institution subsequently took his name. The connection was not decorative. Benedict’s visit expressed a conviction central to Joseph Ratzinger’s theology: that theology degenerates when separated from prayer and that liturgy becomes impoverished when detached from theological truth. He praised precisely the conjunction found at Heiligenkreuz — monastery and theological school, worship and intellectual formation, the search for God and the disciplined exercise of reason.⁴

Maximilian Heim belongs personally to that Ratzingerian story. His doctoral work examined Joseph Ratzinger’s ecclesiology; he became a member of the younger Ratzinger circle and an adviser connected with the publication of Ratzinger’s collected works. In 2011, only months after his election as abbot, Benedict XVI awarded Heim one of the inaugural Ratzinger Prizes for Theology.⁶ Whatever judgement is eventually made about Heim’s government of Heiligenkreuz, he cannot credibly be portrayed as some marginal ecclesiastical adventurer running an eccentric independent enclave.

The abbey’s influence has extended considerably further than seminaries and theological faculties. In 2008 its monks recorded Chant: Music for Paradise, consisting of the Gregorian chant which already formed part of their daily prayer. It reached number seven in the official United Kingdom album chart and topped classical charts internationally.⁷ Millions of people who had never entered a Cistercian monastery encountered Heiligenkreuz through the sound of monks singing Latin plainsong.

That cultural episode was revealing. At precisely the moment when great sectors of Western Catholicism appeared convinced that inherited Catholic forms were incomprehensible to modern man, a community singing Gregorian chant discovered that modern man was voluntarily buying it.

Heiligenkreuz is therefore significant precisely because it does not fit the established narrative of Western ecclesial decline. It is ancient without being dead, traditional without being archaeologically frozen, intellectually serious without retreating into academic irrelevance, liturgically recognisable without being institutionally estranged from Rome, and capable of attracting young men to a form of life which fashionable ecclesiastical wisdom has repeatedly assured us belongs to another age.

Nor is Heiligenkreuz an SSPX stronghold or an anti-conciliar enclave. This point deserves emphasis. Its identity has been conspicuously Roman. Its theological faculty is pontifical. Its modern development was encouraged by Benedict XVI. Its monks work in ordinary Catholic parishes. Its abbots have exercised responsibility throughout the Austrian Cistercian Congregation. Its very prominence makes it one of the more visible examples of how substantial liturgical and monastic tradition can coexist with institutional communion with the Holy See.

None of that makes Heiligenkreuz impeccable.

Indeed, the present controversy did not begin this week. On 5 June 2025, the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life ordered an apostolic visitation of the abbey, appointing Abbot Primate Jeremias Schröder OSB and Sr Christine Rod MC as visitors. The decree gave the visitation a substantial remit. It included examination of the overall style of government of the abbey and Heim’s personal exercise of leadership; the manner in which allegations of abuse and other grave misconduct were handled; vocational discernment; initial formation; and continuing formation within the community.⁸

These were legitimate subjects for scrutiny. No monastery, however venerable, is entitled to invoke antiquity, orthodoxy, vocations or liturgical beauty as an immunity from proper investigation. If allegations of abuse exist, they must be examined. If formation is defective, it must be corrected. If government has become dysfunctional, authority has both the right and the obligation to act.

The visitation was extensive. Ninety monks were interviewed, together with numerous persons outside the community. When it formally concluded on 8 April 2026, the Dicastery prescribed work concerning internal and external communication, strategic planning and prioritisation, theological and spiritual orientation, the introduction of young men to monastic life and the priesthood, and a clearer articulation of Heiligenkreuz’s identity and self-understanding.⁹

Yet the same communication contained a fact which cannot simply be ignored. The Dicastery explicitly thanked Maximilian Heim for his outstanding personal commitment to the abbey and said that it had contributed to the community’s “remarkable flourishing”. The visitor Sr Christine Rod described Heiligenkreuz as a spiritual place and spoke of the considerable willingness to cooperate which she had encountered. Abbot President Pius Maurer spoke of the abbey’s “many good monks” and expressed confidence that the community would remain dynamic and monastic.⁹

This was not the language used of a religious house judged incapable of continuing Catholic life.

Then came 20 August.

Heim announced his departure. Maurer announced what would replace him. And the reason publicly offered for suspending the ordinary abbatial election was astonishing: more than one third of those entitled to vote have never previously participated in an election for an abbot.²

No allegation has publicly been made that eighty solemnly professed monks are canonically incapable of voting. No claim has been made that the monastery lacks suitable candidates. No suggestion has been offered that the community has fallen below the numerical threshold necessary for an abbey. On the contrary, the inexperience identified is largely a consequence of the fact that Maximilian Heim has been abbot since 2011 while the monastery has continued receiving vocations during his tenure.

If such reasoning were generalised, successful monasteries would face a peculiar ecclesiastical penalty. A community in which the same shrinking body of elderly monks has participated in four abbatial elections would possess abundant electoral experience. A growing monastery in which thirty or forty younger solemnly professed monks had arrived during the tenure of one long-serving abbot would be considered deficient because too many electors were exercising the right for the first time.

But every elector has a first election.

This is difficult to reconcile with common sense. It is more difficult still to reconcile with the constitutional principles of the Cistercian Order.

The Order’s General Constitutions state that its monasteries are sui iuris. An abbey is normally governed by an abbot. That abbot is elected by the conventual chapter. An abbot-administrator or prior-administrator may indeed be appointed, but the constitutions specifically associate that exceptional arrangement with “grave reasons” and require consultation of the community. The same constitutions say that a conventual priory requires only eight solemnly professed monks besides its superior, and that thirteen solemnly professed monks are sufficient, with the other conditions fulfilled, for elevation to an abbey. Heiligenkreuz has more than eighty solemnly professed electors.¹⁰

The point should not be exaggerated juridically. The Austrian Cistercian Congregation possesses its own proper constitutions, approved by the Holy See, and the complete text of whatever Roman directions now govern the transition has not been publicly produced. The Holy See possesses authority which cannot simply be deduced from one article of the General Constitutions. It would therefore be irresponsible to declare the September arrangement canonically invalid on the basis of the presently available evidence.

But it is entirely legitimate to ask what the grave reason is.

The Code of Canon Law requires religious superiors to be constituted according to the constitutions of their institutes and insists that both those conferring offices and members taking part in elections observe universal and proper law, seeking before all else God and the good of the institute.¹¹ Monastic election is not therefore an accidental custom, preserved because monks enjoy quaint ceremonies. It is part of the juridical ordering of religious life.

And beneath the juridical order stands something older still.

For St Benedict, an abbot is not a chief executive. He is the father of a spiritual family. The Rule says that he holds the place of Christ in the monastery and will render an account for those committed to his care. The election of an abbot therefore concerns the peculiar intimacy of monastic life: men who have promised stability usque ad mortem — unto death — participate in choosing the man beneath whose spiritual paternity that stability will ordinarily be lived.

Rome has not abolished that principle. Neither does intervention necessarily violate it. Chapter 64 of the Rule itself envisages external correction if monks collectively choose wickedly. But precisely because St Benedict recognises exceptional intervention, the contrast teaches us something important: the exception requires a reason commensurate with the interruption of the norm.

Previous electoral inexperience among younger monks is not, by itself, an intelligible grave reason.

And the contradiction becomes sharper still when one remembers what the monks are being allowed to do. They may elect the administrator. They may judge between candidates. They may pray, deliberate, cast their ballots and entrust one of their brethren with government over a community of more than one hundred monks, extensive apostolates and substantial institutions.

They simply may not elect an abbot.

Perhaps there is an answer. Perhaps the administrator is being given a carefully defined reforming mandate flowing directly from the findings of the visitation. Perhaps Rome considers that certain changes need to become embedded before the abbey returns to ordinary government. Perhaps there are serious matters contained in the visitation report which cannot responsibly be disclosed because they concern confidential testimony or the rights of individuals.

All of that is possible.

But if so, that is the explanation which ought to be given.

The allegations made by Silere non possum about Abbot General Mauro-Giuseppe Lepori should meanwhile be treated with appropriate caution. The publication alleges that Lepori has exercised disproportionate influence over the Roman Dicastery and attributes the course taken at Heiligenkreuz to his intervention; it further portrays Abbot President Maurer as unwilling to oppose him.¹² These are serious allegations. They may deserve investigation. They are not, on the publicly available evidence, established facts.

Nuntiatoria does not need them.

Indeed, the case against opacity is stronger when it is not burdened by speculation. The Cistercian Constitutions themselves carefully distinguish different levels of government. The Abbot General possesses important powers of visitation and oversight, especially in grave circumstances, but Article 86 states plainly that he cannot himself administer the property or persons of a community or congregation.¹⁰ That provision does not prevent the Abbot General from advising Rome, communicating concerns or exercising whatever other rights the constitutions give him. It does demonstrate, however, that Cistercian government is deliberately constructed so that higher authority does not routinely absorb the proper government belonging to the lower level.

Which brings us to the word the Church has spent so much energy teaching us to pronounce: synodality.

The Heiligenkreuz affair could scarcely provide a better practical examination of whether the contemporary rhetoric means what it says.

The Church now speaks incessantly of listening, participation, discernment, co-responsibility, decentralisation and subsidiarity. These ideas are no longer merely the vocabulary of conference documents. Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, made subsidiarity remarkably explicit. Higher authority, he teaches, should recognise and support the responsibility of persons and local communities rather than supplanting them. Decisions should be made at the level closest to those affected wherever possible. Even more significantly, Leo insists that this teaching is an examination of conscience for the Church herself: subsidiarity should guide ecclesiastical governance, with genuine rather than merely nominal participation.¹³

It would be difficult to devise a better test case.

Here is not an ephemeral listening group assembled by a diocesan office. Here is a real community.

The monks of Heiligenkreuz live together. They rise together before dawn. They sing the Divine Office together. They make stability to this monastery. They eat at the same table, labour within the same institutions, receive novices, care for the elderly and bury their dead. Their knowledge of one another is not the manufactured familiarity of a weekend consultation exercise. It is the knowledge created by common life.

And more than eighty of them have solemnly promised that life until death.

If synodality, co-responsibility and subsidiarity mean anything within Catholic ecclesiology, surely they ought to mean something here.

The contrast is difficult to ignore. Across the Catholic world, great effort is expended creating structures through which people with little or no canonical responsibility for the government of a diocese may be invited to participate in ecclesial consultation. Their voices are gathered, synthesised, discerned and reported. Considerable significance is sometimes attributed to these exercises as expressions of a listening Church.

At Heiligenkreuz, by contrast, men who have permanently bound their lives to one particular monastic family possess an ancient, constitutionally recognised and theologically intelligible responsibility to elect its father.

And suddenly participation requires a three-year suspension.

This is where an unhealthy form of clerical centralism can masquerade as discernment. Participation is encouraged so long as it remains consultative. Local responsibility is praised so long as the final decision remains safely elsewhere. Synodality becomes a method by which everybody may speak while the decisive act is still controlled from above.

That is not subsidiarity.

It is managed participation.

The problem is not that Rome has authority. The Holy See plainly does. Catholic ecclesiology cannot reduce the monastery to an independent republic whose chapter is accountable to no higher jurisdiction. The problem is the assumption that establishing the existence of authority is sufficient to justify every particular exercise of it.

It is not.

Authority is measured not only by jurisdiction but by purpose, proportion and justice. The stronger the power, the greater the obligation to demonstrate that exceptional acts serve the good of those governed rather than merely the convenience of governors. Obedience is not strengthened by opacity. It is weakened when those expected to obey cannot discover the rational relationship between the reason publicly offered and the burden actually imposed.

The Holy See could therefore clarify the Heiligenkreuz situation without publishing confidential testimony or exposing individual monks. It need only answer the institutional questions its own intervention has created.

What, precisely, are the grave reasons requiring an administrator rather than an abbot?

What is the administrator expected to accomplish during those three years?

Which recommendations of the apostolic visitation require an extraordinary rather than ordinary form of government?

What objective criteria will establish that the community is again ready for an abbatial election?

And if electoral inexperience is genuinely a decisive factor, how are younger solemnly professed monks supposed to acquire the experience of electing an abbot while being prevented from electing one?

Those are not insolent questions. They are questions demanded by the very principles of subsidiarity and responsible government which the contemporary Church repeatedly invokes.

There is one final paradox. Rome’s own visitation identified challenges created by Heiligenkreuz’s rapid growth. Rome’s own communication praised Heim for helping produce a “remarkable flourishing”. Pius Maurer now speaks of him handing over a “living community that radiates beyond Austria.” The prior speaks of a **“young and growing community.”**² ⁹

One would normally expect such language in an announcement preparing the way for the community confidently to choose its next father.

Instead, the flourishing has been followed by tutelage.

Heiligenkreuz has survived almost nine hundred years because monastic life possesses something modern institutions repeatedly underestimate: memory. It remembers that structures are means rather than ends, that authority exists for a purpose beyond itself, that reform does not require perpetual revolution, and that communities ordinarily mature by exercising responsibility rather than by having responsibility withheld from them.

This September, more than eighty solemnly professed Cistercians will gather to choose a man whom they judge capable of governing them.

Rome says they may choose him as administrator.

Rome says they may not choose him as abbot.

Perhaps there are grave reasons. If there are, the Holy See should state them as clearly as justice permits. But the reason presently in the public domain — that more than one third of the electors have never previously participated in an abbatial election — does not explain the severity of the measure.

A Church which speaks continually of walking together should hesitate before telling monks who have walked together for years that they cannot yet be trusted to choose their father. A Church which teaches subsidiarity should be exceptionally careful when higher authority supplants a responsibility ordinarily belonging to an autonomous community. And a Church which insists that synodality is a way of life rather than a programme of ecclesiastical management must be prepared to practise participation precisely where participation has consequences.

The monks of Heiligenkreuz do not need another symposium on co-responsibility.

They need either their abbatial election — or a compelling account of the grave reasons why Rome has taken it from them.

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¹ Rule of St Benedict, Chapter 64, traditional daily reading appointed for 20 August: the superior is chosen by the community, while external intervention is envisaged where the community conspires to choose unworthily. (archive.osb.org)
² Institut Österreichischer Orden, “Stift Heiligenkreuz: Abt Maximilian Heim kündigt Rücktritt an”, 20 August 2026; Kathpress, “Stift Heiligenkreuz: Abt Maximilian Heim tritt zurück”, 20 August 2026. The official announcement states that more than eighty solemnly professed monks will elect a three-year administrator and records Abbot President Pius Maurer’s explanation concerning first-time participants in an abbatial election. (ordensgemeinschaften.at)
³ Stift Heiligenkreuz, official history of the abbey: foundation on 11 September 1133 by St Leopold III at the instigation of Otto; filiation from Morimond; Babenberg connections; daughter houses; relic of the True Cross; modern foundations. (stift-heiligenkreuz.org)
⁴ Benedict XVI, Address at Heiligenkreuz Abbey, 9 September 2007; the Pope described Heiligenkreuz as the oldest continuously active Cistercian monastery in the world and emphasised the priority of the Divine Office and the relationship between theology, prayer and monastic life. (vatican.va)
⁵ ORF Religion, report on the conclusion of the apostolic visitation, 8 April 2026: approximately one hundred monks, around three hundred students at the theological university and about forty seminarians at the Leopoldinum; Hochschule Heiligenkreuz, Leopoldinum profile. (religion.orf.at)
⁶ Joseph Ratzinger–Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation, Ratzinger Prize 2011: Maximilian Heim, his academic work on Joseph Ratzinger and his receipt of the inaugural prize. (fondazioneratzinger.va)
⁷ Stift Heiligenkreuz, Chant – Music for Paradise; Official Charts Company, UK chart record, peak position No. 7. (stift-heiligenkreuz.org)
⁸ ORF Religion, “Dekret: Details zu Visitation von Stift Heiligenkreuz”, 17 June 2025; reporting the decree of 5 June 2025 and its stated examination of governance, handling of allegations of abuse or other grave misconduct, vocational discernment and formation. (religion.orf.at)
⁹ Stift Heiligenkreuz, “Apostolische Visitation im Stift Heiligenkreuz abgeschlossen”, 8 April 2026: interviews with ninety monks and numerous external persons; directions concerning communication, strategy, theological and spiritual orientation, formation and institutional identity; explicit recognition of Heim’s contribution to the abbey’s “remarkable flourishing”. (stift-heiligenkreuz.org)
¹⁰ Ordo Cisterciensis, Constitutions of the Cistercian Order (2022), arts 20–25, 52, 84 and 86: monasteries sui iuris; normal governance of an abbey by an abbot elected by the conventual chapter; provision for administrators for grave reasons; legitimate autonomy; functions of higher Cistercian authority. (ocist.org)
¹¹ Code of Canon Law, cann. 623–626, concerning the constitution of religious superiors, canonical election and observance of universal and proper law. (press.vatican.va)
¹² Silere non possum, “Heiligenkreuz: Heim steps down as Rome bars monks from electing new abbot”, 20 August 2026. The assertions concerning the personal influence and motives of Abbot General Mauro-Giuseppe Lepori and the alleged disposition of other Cistercian superiors remain allegations of the publication rather than independently established facts. (silerenonpossum.com)
¹³ Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 15 May 2026, nn. 68–70, 86–87: subsidiarity, decision-making close to those affected, the application of social-doctrinal principles within the Church’s own structures, and genuine participation in ecclesiastical governance. (vatican.va)

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