Austria

Austria

POPULATION 8.2 million
ROMAN CATHOLIC 73.6 percent
PROTESTANT 4.7 percent
MUSLIM 4.2 percent
JEWISH 0.1 percent
NONRELIGIOUS 12.0 percent
NOT INDICATED 2.0 percent
OTHER 3.4 percent

Country Overview

Introduction

Austria covers a total area of 32,368 square miles and shares borders with the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Liechtenstein, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Switzerland. In the west and south it is mountainous, and the eastern and northern margins are mostly flat.

With roughly 6 million Roman Catholics, Austria is a Catholic stronghold in the center of Europe. Reduced from a powerful (Austro-Hungarian) empire before World War I to a small republic by the end of World War II, the permanently neutral country has a religious landscape that has developed alongside those of other European countries in the postwar period. While the Catholic Church continues to play a formidable role in political and social affairs, the general trend of secularization, prominent even among Catholics, has eroded the church's influence in Austria. Further, not-withstanding the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the multinational heritage and religious heterogeneity of this same Habsburg Empire has determined the country's traditional secular climate of religious tolerance, a national characteristic that developed in the late eighteenth century and has been observed for the most part ever since.

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