Our People

Homily for the 1st Anniversary of the Beatification of Blessed Karl of Austria

St Dominic’s Church, Flemington

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
2 October 2005

The recent publications of the Latham diaries will have confirmed, in many people’s minds, a rather bleak picture of our political masters.  Although many of us will have dismissed much of the text as bile and defamation, we will also have wondered whether there was not a good deal of truth in it.  After all, politicians are no saints!

Yet strangely tonight we celebrate a political leader who was just that: a saint. Karl of Austria grew up in a Saxon royal family, a pious family who ensured he had a good Catholic education and a serious prayer life. Although he was deeply devoted to affairs of state and to his own family, Karl’s top priority was his relationship with God, shown especially in a deep devotion to the Eucharist and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which continued even through his heady days as Emperor.

Mother Teresa was once approached by a priest-bureaucrat for advice on how to improve.  She suggested, to start with, that he set aside two hours a day for prayer. But, the young man explained, he was terribly busy with all sorts of important ecclesiastical and secular business.  Many people depended on him and he had to get it all done and on time.  To which she responded: sorry, she hadn’t understood just how busy he was and how important his work was.  In that case he should pray not two hours a day but four! The secret of Karl’s courage, integrity and humility was that he was a man not just of clear principles but also of prayer.  Whatever his present tasks, he was in Paul’s words “always contemplating Christ’s word in his heart”.

This challenges us, amongst all the buzz and the busyness, adrenalin and exhaustion, responsibilities and deadlines, amongst all the good doings we do, to ask ourselves: What are my priorities?  Am I giving the time and energy I should, not just to my work, but also to my family, my soul, my God?  Am I making space for what will really nourish me, so that I have something worthwhile to offer in my life as politician, professional, parent or wherever I am?

In 1911, aged 24, Karl proposed to Princess Zita before the Blessed Sacrament.  The couple were blessed with eight children and lived an exemplary married life.  Karl again declared to Zita on his deathbed “I will love you forever”.  So central to his vocation and his sanctity was his marriage, that the Pope made Karl’s wedding day, 21 October, rather than day of his death, his Feast Day.

The assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914 had two immediate effects. One was it catalysed the disastrous First World War. The other was that it made Karl, unexpectedly, the heir to the throne. Within two years he was Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary.

There has been a long debate in Catholic theology about whether politics is a fitting place for a would-be saint.  Aquinas thought it was, partly because one of his best mates was Saint Louis, King of France, but mostly because he thought earthly kings could share in the graces of Christ’s divine kingship and that the common good, even among the saints, requires someone to inspire, direct and coordinate affairs. Saint Augustine, on the other hand, thought earthly government was at best, a necessary evil.  Necessary, no doubt, since men after the Fall are so vicious they must be tamed; but evil nonetheless, since government constrains out God-given freedom and were we not so inclined to sin we would need no such external constraints.

In his book Utopia, Saint Tomas More’s interlocutor rejects politics as a game of rank hypocrisy and flattery. But More the statesman disagrees, arguing for the nobility of politics, the scope it offers for demonstrating real virtue and vision, an opportunity for the greatest to serve the least. More was convinced that one of noblest ways of serving God is leading others well. Yet his exact contemporary, Niccolo Machiavelli, offered a rather bleaker and more pragmatic view.  In The Prince he proposed that leaders can and should use any means to maintain power.

I suspect the Augustine-Machiavellian pessimism about politics has been more influential in the modern world than the Thomist-Morean view.  Yet Karl of Austria envisaged his office as a way to follow Christ.  As Bailiff Grand Cross of the Order of Malta he called the poor his ‘Lords’ and he did more than pay lip-service to them.  Inspired by Catholic social teaching reinvigorated in his life-time by Pope Leo XIII, he established the first national social security system.  He appointed officers to oversee rent control, child and youth protection, family rights and social insurance, industrial law and employee welfare—all new dimensions to social politics which Austria continues to enjoy today.

Amidst the cataclysmic battle between the great powers of Europe, Karl saw his sacred duty as that of peace-maker and refused to condone that Total War which was to mark the terrible twentieth century. He forbade his troops to plunder, to engage in wanton destruction, or to use mustard gas. Karl was, in fact, the only one of Europe’s political leaders to support Pope Benedict XV’s peace efforts.  The writer Anatole France wrote that “the Emperor Karl has offered to make peace; he is the only decent man who has appeared in the course of this war, but they won’t listen to him… He sincerely wants peace, so everyone detests him.”

Having right people detest you is a sure sign that you are imitating Christ, but imitating Christ means those very people will often try to humiliate you. The tragedy of Karl’s life was that he refused to abdicate his sacred duties and join other ex-monarchs living as playboys or businessmen. Despite the efforts of the Pope and some in Christian Europe to have Karl’s authority re established in Hungary, especially as a bulwark against moves towards Soviet-style communism, Karl was exiled to the island of Madeira, reduced to poverty, and left to die, aged only 34.  Yet even this he offered to God as a sacrifice for the peace and unity of his peoples.

When he died in 1922 with his eyes turned toward the Blessed Sacrament, whispering pious ejaculations such as “Jesus for You I live, for You I die” he could honestly say that he had always striven to understand and follow the will of God. Karl received the last sacraments and died in a most holy way.

One of Pope John Paul II’s greatest gifts to the Church was the identification and beatification of so many. He gave Karl to us as a beatus only one year ago and only a few months before his death. At that time Pope John Paul II reminded us that sanctity is possible in politics as it is everywhere.  When Vatican II emphasized the universal call to holiness it was not calling all the laity into sanctuary ministries as pretend clergy, but rather to take Christ out into the world, into those places the clergy could never be present or never so fruitfully.  The corridors of earthly power are surely high amongst those very opportunities for lay sanctification of the world.

Recently our media has graced us not only with sad vitriol of a retired Opposition Leader but also the equally nasty remarks of the retired editor of ‘OnLine Catholics’.  In a fantasy piece in the Sydney Morning Herald she lambasted some Catholics for the crime of daring to bring their consciences to work with them in law and politics.  Her view is apparently that faith and ethics should be checked in at the cloakroom before entering the halls of parliament or the courts.

The wisdom of age is no doubt that politics should be value-free and secular, which is code for intolerant of religion and free of truth, beauty and goodness. The cynicism of the age is that politics is also inevitably corrupt, which is a self-fulfilling pressimism. One can only pray that we will have many political leaders like Blessed Karl, with a different wisdom and a higher faith in God and humanity, true disciples of Christ.