Here and there, throughout the month of August, I shall showcase the condition of the Church among the various countries of Europe.
The facts are quite disturbing.
In this post, we shall report on the status of the Church in Austria.
The Archdiocese of Vienna, which is one of the largest in Europe (extending from the Czech border to the southern Alps) will undergo radical parish reforms, reducing its 660 parishes to 150 over the course of the next decade.
Cardinal Christoph Schonborn has stated that the main reasons for these measures were the increasing shortage of priests and the steady decline in the number of Catholics, especially of those who regularly attended Mass and were involved in their local parishes.
“I am fully aware that these reforms denote a far-reaching change of perspective,” the Cardinal said. “We must take leave of the traditional concept that the church is only present where there is a priest. That is a restricted view that has developed over time but which must now be corrected. Church is community, and leading offices in the church should in principle be carried out collaboratively, even if the Pastor has the final responsibility according to canon law.”
The condition of the Church in the rest of the country is even worse. It is estimated that 75% of all Catholic parishes in Austria will close within the next 10 years.
Research undertaken by the Episcopal Conference of Austrian Bishops that in 30 years the proportion of Muslim to Catholic population will almost double to 21 percent.
One reason why the number of Muslims and Orthodox Christians is expected to rise in future is that they are seen as relatively “young” religions - with Muslim youth the most religious of their age group. The population of Orthodox Christians is expected to grow from 9 to 11 percent. The population of Catholics is predicted to sink to 33 percent.
Future birth rates play a role in the expansion of religions which are largely inherited. Muslim and Orthodox Christian women tend on average to have more children.
The Austrian church is in a state of collapse, there is no doubt about this.
And yet, the Austrian Bishops appear to act as though there are no problems.
Truly, as the Living Word of God cautions, “there are none so blind as those who will not see.”
Denying reality is not a strategy. One of two things happens. Either the Church (in the person of the Bishops) continue to do nothing or it engages in vainglorious and failed attempt to move toward an accommodation with prevailing attitudes and sentiments. The latter is the strategy Cardinal Schonborn and his brother-Bishops appear to have adopted.
They have failed and continue to lead the Church in Austria toward an irreversible pathway to ruin.
One would have thought that the Bishops in Austria (the first influential group in Europe to laud the annexation of their country by the Third Reich) would have learned a valuable lesson about the failure of accommodation. Compromising the evangelical counsels and wisdom of the Sacred Scriptures and the moral and doctrinal teachings of the Church is a sure sign of a willful resignation to the forces of darkness and moral corruption.
Rather than inspiring the Catholic faithful of Austria to re-discover the truths of the Faith and the spiritual necessity of the Sacraments, the Austrian Bishops have been eager to resign themselves and their people to a future in which the light of Christ will be dimmer and less revealing of humanity’s wounds and failures.
And so, the lessons of history go unheeded, and the future will be a repetition of the past.
Generations of Catholics hence will look back upon this moment in the life of the Austrian Church and condemn both the Bishops and their flocks for their timid and lukewarm defense of Catholic doctrine.
It’s a story which, as we will see in future posts, is being repeated throughout the Continent and the Americas as well.
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