Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, president of the Austrian Bishops’ Conference, made an appeal for reconciliation in Vienna in recent days, on the occasion of a solemn mass for the 60th anniversary of the first massacre of Germans in Vojvodina, on Tito’s orders. Some 60,000 German-speaking civilians were the victims of mass executions or deportation to Tito’s concentration camps between 1944 and 1948. Some 130,000 Germans found a new home in post-war Austria. Schönborn, who comes from a family of refugees himself, affirmed that the events of sixty years ago are still “present” to everyone, but urged that “guidance be drawn from the words of Holy Scripture for the future”: “the Christian faith according to which Christ expiated the guilt of murderers” he said “is a difficult but also powerful message”. The archbishop of Vienna also expressed thanks to the refugees and their descendents for “their courage, their fidelity to their faith, their love for the Church, and their contribution to the reconstruction of the Church and society”.
