Vienna, die Kirchen

Vienna’s church game is wild. I flew out and stayed for a few weeks and it ended up largely being a tour of the Catholic church and its presence in town. The history is complicated and messy but the Habsburgs (and thus Vienna) was a Catholic stronghold for something like 600 years. It absolutely shows.

The Catholic thinking and theology around the church is…complicated. As the continuation of Christ’s presence on earth it is the “primordial sacrament”, the physical and theological reality in which the seven sacraments operate. The building isn’t a building - it’s a consecrated space that makes visible and inhabitable the heaveanly presence of God.

In that context, these buildings make sense. And there’s a progression: a single unified story that all of these different churches tell. The entryway vestibule, the baptism font immediately to your right, the pews for the faithful, the altar, the tabernacle. The building tells the story of a person’s journey into faith in God, a God who is truly present in the room when they enter. There’s a physicality to it that I’ve grown to really appreciate. The Protestant view that the church is the body of believers means that Protestant churches are, by and large, plain beige boxes devoid of meaningful symbolism. It’s a conference room with a lectern.

I’m kind of with the Catholics on this one? Kind of. If this really is Christ’s continued body on earth then yeah, we should absoultely send it and the Catholics do. But I also get why Luther and Calvin and all these guys took issue with it. It’s a lot, and it’s easy to see why they felt that the church and its images and icons get worshipped instead of God. Maybe both can be right and it depends on the person or context.

So, Kirchen in Wien. Each row of photos is a different church. It felt like Vienna - at least Innere Stadt - could give the midwest a run for it’s money re: churches per capita. A significant portion (all but one?) of these churches are still active; they still do mass every week, have confessional booths, minister to the flock. I wonder if the congregations feel the weight of history on their shoulders when they sit in the pews. I would.