Religion: Outward Testimony

At the funeral of the Austrian Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, murdered by Nazi conspirators in 1934, hollow-eyed, handsome Theodor Cardinal Innitzer, Archbishop of Vienna, delivered a eulogy. Cardinal Innitzer described the killing as the “crime of a heathenish political group,” flatly declared that “those who after these events are still supporting the Nazis are excluding themselves from civilization.” When, four years later, Nazi conquerors rolled into Vienna, His Eminence allowed the swastika to fly over St. Stephen’s Cathedral, signed a pastoral letter urging Austrian Catholics to vote Nazi in the subsequent plebiscite.

Although reproved by the Vatican for his “political Catholicism,” Cardinal Innitzer for a time maintained a policy of conciliation toward the Nazis’. Lately, however, he has condemned Nazi marriage laws and the abolition of confessional schools as violations of the old Austrian concordat with the Holy See.

Last week, His Eminence, born a Sudeten Austrian, preached a plain-spoken anti-Nazi sermon at a youth service at St. Stephen’s, exhorted 10,000 worshipers to “give outward testimony” of their faith. The “outward testimony” soon took the form of Catholic demonstrations before Nazi sympathizers. The next evening Nazi groups struck back. Storming the archiepiscopal palace adjoining the Cathedral, they hurled stones through the windows, pushed past a gateman, entered the palace itself and indulged in a little looting. Cardinal Innitzer, praying in his private chapel throughout the tumult, was reported to have been slightly injured by crashing glass from a broken window. Later, the crowd made a bonfire in St. Stephen’s Square, burned a small crucifix, a painting of the Virgin Mary and a portrait of the Cardinal, scrawled on the walls of the palace: “Away with the priests! To Dachau* with Innitzer!” From the second story of a nearby canons’ residence, brown-shirts threw a priest out of a win dow, injuring him seriously.

On Sunday, the Cardinal, reported in “protective custody,” celebrated Mass while Storm Troopers and police guarded the Cathedral and palace. At night the Nazis, who blamed the rioting on “irresponsibleelements” and “Communists,” permitted hundreds of Hitler Youth to mill in the square, beat drums and sing while Catholics attended evening service.

* Best-known concentration camp for political prisoners, in Bavaria.