Religion and Politics in Austria

Extract

A Few weeks ago I heard an Austrian historian—a thinker and a practising Catholic—describe Austria as ‘perhaps the most corrupt country in Europe’. Similar judgments are made by Englishmen in Austria on the strength of the Black Market and the power of the cigarette as a means of getting things done. But in the mouth of an Austrian it has a very different value and significance. Not only does it embody the mood of searching self-criticism which is prevalent among thinking Catholics in Austria; it also recognizes and points to a sickness in the Austrian nation far deeper-seated than the Black Market—which will, here as elsewhere, disappear only when there is a sufficiency of food and cigarettes, but which is relatively a superficial ill. Objective love and inside knowledge are the pre-requisites of a true diagnosis, and these are hard to come by for a foreigner, who may be fascinated or repelled by irrelevant details—the peasant's Grüss Gott, or the incurable unpunctuality of Austrians in keeping appointments. This article is therefore not a statement of personal opinion but a synthesis of the views of one or two Austrian Catholics, whose interpretation seems to fit the facts as they now-appear and in whom self-criticism and an earnest truth-seeking guarantee a certain degree of objectivity.

That Austria was physically incapacitated by the collapse and dismemberment of the old Austrian empire is generally known, though Englishmen are apt to underrate the effects both of economic distress and of the psychological shock of becoming, suddenly, a small nation in turning the minds of Austrians towards union with Germany as a cure for their ills.