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Austria RELIGION
During the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Habsburgs were the
leading political representatives of Roman Catholicism in its
conflict with the Protestantism of the Protestant Reformation in
Central Europe, and ever since then, Austria has been a
predominantly Roman Catholic country. Because of its
multinational heritage, however, the Habsburg Empire was
religiously heterodox and included the ancestors of many of
Austria's contemporary smaller denominational groups. The
empire's tradition of religious tolerance derived from the
enlightened absolutism of the late eighteenth century. Religious
freedom was later anchored in Austria-Hungary's constitution of
1867. After the eighteenth century, twelve religious communities
came to be officially recognized by the state in Austria: Roman
Catholic; Protestant (Lutheran and Calvin); Greek, Serbian,
Romanian, Russian, and Bulgarian Orthodox; Jewish; Muslim; Old
Catholic; and, more recently, Methodist and Mormon.
The presence of other communities within the empire did not
prevent the relationship between the Austrian imperial state and
the Roman Catholic Church--or the "throne and the altar"--from
being particularly close before 1918. Because of this closeness,
the representatives of secular ideologies--liberals and
socialists--sought to reduce the influence of the Roman Catholic
Church in such public areas as education.
A relatively complicated series of treaties (or concordats)
between the Republic of Austria and the Vatican defined the role
and status of the Roman Catholic Church. After 1918 the Roman
Catholic Church maintained considerable influence in public life.
For example, many members of the church hierarchy explicitly
supported the Christian Social Party (Christlichsoziale Partei--
CSP). Members of the Social Democratic Workers' Party
(Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei--SDAP) responded to this
partisanship in the interwar period by being explicitly
anticlerical. Some Roman Catholics were committed to a form of
"political Catholicism," which was anti-Liberal and anti-SDAP.
Because of these sympathies, they supported the authoritarian
regime that erected a one-party "Christian Corporate State" in
1934.
After the Anschluss in 1938, the Roman Catholic Church
initially pursued a policy of accommodation with the National
Socialist German Workers' Party (National-Sozialistische Deutsche
Arbeiterpartei--NSDAP, or Nazi Party), but by 1939 it began to
assume an oppositional stance. In the decades after World War II,
the Roman Catholic Church abstained from publicly and actively
supporting any one political party. An exception to this
restraint was the church's involvement in the controversy
surrounding the legalization of abortion in Austria in the early
1970s. For its part, the Socialist Party of Austria
(Sozialistische Partei Österreichs--SPÖ) developed more
accommodating attitudes toward the Roman Catholic Church than
were common before World War II.
According to the 1991 census, a majority of Austrians (77.9
percent) belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. This is a decline
from the 1971 figure of 87.2 percent. The number of Protestants
also declined in the same period. The number of Lutherans, or
members of the Augsburg Confession, declined from 5.7 percent in
1971 to 4.8 percent in 1991 according to the census, and
Calvinists, or members of the Helvetic Confession, declined from
0.3 percent to 0.2 percent in the same years.
In 1938 the Jewish population of Austria numbered more than
200,000, most of whom lived in Vienna. After the Anschluss, the
community was almost wiped out by emigration and the Holocaust.
By 1990 the community amounted to about 7,000 and consisted
largely of postwar immigrants instead of Austrian-born Jews.
Owing to the influx of foreign workers from Turkey and the
former Yugoslavia, the Islamic and Serbian Orthodox communities
experienced considerable growth in Austria in the 1970s and the
1980s. However, many of these foreign workers do not officially
register with their respective religious organizations, and
accurate information about the size of these communities is not
available.
The influence of the Roman Catholic Church, although still
formidable because of its historical position in Austrian society
and network of lay organizations, receded in the postwar period.
The form of nominal Roman Catholicism many Austrians practice is
called "baptismal certificate Catholicism." In other words, most
Roman Catholics observe traditional religious holidays, such as
Christmas and Easter, and rely on the church to celebrate rites
of passage, such as baptisms, confirmations, weddings, and
funerals, but do not participate actively in parish life or
follow the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church on central
issues. This trend can be seen in the low rate of regular church
attendance (less than one-third of Catholics) and the high rates
of divorce and abortion in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Within Austria there are regional patterns of religious
conviction. Generally, provinces with strong conservative and
agricultural traditions, such as Tirol and Vorarlberg, followed
by Lower Austria and Burgenland, have higher percentages of Roman
Catholics than the national average, and parish churches still
fulfill a social function in many smaller communities. Religious
affiliation is lower in urban centers, however, and Vienna has
the lowest percentage of any Austrian province.
The decline in the number of Austrians professing religious
affiliation and the increase in the number who have no religious
affiliation--4.3 percent in 1971 and 8.6 percent in 1991--may be
interpreted as an increase in the secularization of Austrian
society. Renouncing church membership and being without religious
affiliation was one of the anticlerical, historical traditions of
the SPÖ. In general, Austrians without religious affiliation tend
to be associated with the SPÖ, whereas "active" Catholics tend to
be connected to conservative parties and hold conservative
political views.
The increase in the number of Austrians without religious
affiliation should not be interpreted as an exclusively political
gesture, however. Recognized religious organizations in Austria
finance themselves by "taxing" their members directly with a socalled church tax, which amounts to approximately 1 percent of
their income. Austrians who do not actively participate in their
religious communities frequently officially withdraw from them in
order to avoid paying this tax.
Data as of December 1993
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