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Bridge between Western and Eastern Europe, Austria has also felt a European vocation open to other cultures and religions. The Christian roots have found fertile terrain in this country and have spread beyond its geographical and political frontiers. Austrian history itself is fused with that of Europe, thanks to the witness of Catholics, many of whom paid with their own life by their fidelity to the Gospel during the Nazi period. Austria happily having left the headlines it hit on the occasion of the formation of the centre-right government in 2000 is this year celebrating a triple jubilee: the 60th anniversary of the proclamation of the Second Republic, the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of State by which Austria regained full freedom after ten years of allied occupation, and the 10th anniversary of entry into the European Union. Austria cradle and “remnant” of the Habsburg Empire experienced an extraordinary history of economic and social success after the Second World War. In the world league table Austria is now in sixth place among the most affluent countries. No one in 1945 could have imagined this extraordinary revival of a country half destroyed, not only at the material level. The decisive role of the Catholic Church cannot be underestimated in this context. Today, even in peaceful Austria an ill wind of militant secularism is blowing; the episcopal nominations after the retirement of Franz König (the great cardinal who ruled the archdiocese of Vienna from 1956 to 1985) had opened a period of “turbulence” in the Austrian Church. This period was finally closed with the retirement of the controversial bishop of St. Pölten, Kurt Krenn, in autumn 2004. Thanks to the efforts of Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, who now rules the archdiocese once filled by Cardinal König, the Catholic Church in Austria has regained much of the strength of the period before 1985. Unfortunately the “turbulence” of the years from 1986 to 2004 has darkened the image of the Austrian Church. The result is that many have “forgotten” the extraordinary contribution of the Church and of Catholics to the “Austrian renaissance” after 1945. From this point of view, the fact that the first great event of the “jubilee year” in the seat of the Austrian Parliament in Vienna was dedicated to the resistance against Nazism was significant: it underlined the importance of the Catholic resistance. Of course, the bishops of the time were very “prudent”, some would say too “prudent”. But despite that, martyrs of the highest Christian and human value did emerge from the Catholic community. They included Sister Restituta Kafka, beatified by the Pope in Vienna in 1998, and the two Tyrolean priests Otto Neururer and Fr. Jakob Gapp, beatified in Rome in 1996. Austrian Catholics still wait with impatience for the beatification of Franz Jägerstätter, humble peasant and sacristan who out of his Christian conviction refused to participate in the ill-fated wars of the crazy Hitler regime. Soon after the end of the war a very fortunate book spoke of the “reconstruction in the resistance”. But Catholics also contributed a great deal to the “history of the Austrian success” after 1945. Of great importance was the pastoral letter on social questions issued by the Austrian bishops in 1956. It opened the way to the “social compromise”, the so-called “Sozialpartnerschaft” (partnership between the social forces, between trades unions and industrialists), which for decades spared Austria from labour unrest.
