The Role of Religion
About 73.6% of all Austrians are Roman Catholic. The church abstains from political activity; however, lay Catholic organizations are aligned with the conservative People's Party. The Social Democratic Party long ago shed its anticlerical stance. Small Lutheran minorities are located mainly in Vienna, Carinthia, and Burgenland. An estimated 15,000 Jews or adherents of Judaism live in Austria, primarily in Vienna – a remnant of the post-World War II community after the Nazi Holocaust. Immigration during the last decades has increased the percentage of Muslims to 4.2%.
- Roman Catholic 73.6%, Protestant 4.7%, Muslim 4.2%, other 3.5%, unspecified 2%, none 12% (2001 census)
- Roman Catholicism in Austria
- Buddhism in Austria
- Hinduism in Austria
- Islam in Austria
- History of the Jews in Austria
- Paganism in the Eastern Alps
Read more about this topic: Demographics Of Austria
Famous quotes containing the words role and/or religion:
“The trouble is that the expression ‘material thing’ is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for ‘sense-datum’; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he ‘perceives.’”
—J.L. (John Langshaw)
“In the latter part of the seventeenth century, according to the historian of Dunstable, “Towns were directed to erect ‘a cage’ near the meeting-house, and in this all offenders against the sanctity of the Sabbath were confined.” Society has relaxed a little from its strictness, one would say, but I presume that there is not less religion than formerly. If the ligature is found to be loosened in one part, it is only drawn the tighter in another.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)