Piffl, Friedrich Gustav

PIFFL, FRIEDRICH GUSTAV. - Cardinal, b. 15 Oct. 1864 at Landskron (diocese of Königgrätz, in Bohemia), d. 21 Apr. 1932 at Vienna. In 1883 he had entered the Canons Regular of the Lateran at Klosterneuburg. Ordained a priest in 1888, he carried out his pastoral activity in Vienna, and in 1892 he returned to Klosterneuburg, to teach moral theology there. Elected provost of his monastery in 1907, in May 1913 he was appointed Archbishop of Vienna. On 25 May 1914 Pius X created him cardinal of the title of St. Mark.

At the end of the First World War Cardinal P. was the guide of the Austrian episcopate in the question of the education of youth. He opposed the establishment of the secular school in Burgenland, a region that had previously belonged to Hungary and of which P. had been appointed apostolic administrator in 1922. He was also opposed to the educational movement, of socialist and anti-Catholic inspiration, of the Kinderfreunde, defined in the collective pastoral letter of the Austrian episcopate of 26 Feb. 1922 as a "youth organization revolutionarily socialist and communist" that was "not only entirely incompatible with Christianity" but in fact tended "toward the dissolution of all existing social orders." The condemnation of the Kinderfreunde and of the Rote Falken, another youth association opposed to the Catholic Scouts, was reaffirmed in other pastoral letters of 1925 and 1928. In order to strengthen Catholicism against the attacks of organizations professing openly anti-Christian doctrines, in 1927 P. unified the various associations in the diocese into Catholic Action. Tireless in promoting works of beneficence and charity, he favored the founding of new Catholic newspapers.

Silvio Furlani