PIFFL, FRIEDRICH GUSTAV. — Cardinal, born on 15 October 1864 at Landskron (diocese of Königgrätz, in Bohemia), died on 21 April 1932 in Vienna. In 1883 he 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 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 S. Marco.
At the end of the First World War, Cardinal P. led the Austrian episcopate in the question of the education of youth. He opposed the establishment of the secular school in Burgenland, a region formerly belonging to Hungary and of which P. had been appointed apostolic administrator in 1922. He was also opposed to the socialist and anti-Catholic educational movement of the Kinderfreunde, defined in the collective pastoral letter of the Austrian episcopate of 26 February 1922 as a “revolutionarily socialist and communist youth organization” that was “not only entirely incompatible with Christianity” but in fact tended “toward the dissolution of all existing social institutions.” The condemnation of the Kinderfreunde and the Rote Falken, another youth association opposed to the Catholic Scouts, was reaffirmed in other pastoral letters of 1925 and 1928. 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 charity and benevolence, he encouraged the founding of new Catholic newspapers.