1961: First African students at Catholic faculties

It is no longer unusual to see Catholic clerics from Africa working as priests, chaplains or curates in Austrian parishes. When the growing lack of priests becoming increasingly noticeable, bishops turned to less secularised regions of the world in their search for religious personnel. While for Austria this was initially Nigeria and India, today Catholic dioceses recruit priests from a relatively broad range of countries in the Global South.

This development started in 1961 when African students came to Vienna and Innsbruck to study Catholic theology. Their studies were funded by private donations and the Catholic Women’s Movement. Most came from the Ibgo ethnic group in Nigeria but because of the civil war (1967 to 1970) caused by the secession of the oil-rich province of Biafra, they were not able to return to Nigeria as planned. In the interim they were assigned to Viennese and Lower Austrian parishes. In general they appear to have been well integrated and especially Aaron Ekwu, who died in Nigeria in 1989, continues to be remembered in Church circles to this day. 

The Austrian state has been and continues to be generous in meeting the needs of churches when it comes to residency rights. Clerics from non-EU states are exempt from the terms of the Foreign Labour Act and, as “special cases of paid employment”, their residence status is not subject to quotas. On the Church side, posting priests abroad from “mission areas” is regulated by an Instruction from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelisation of the Peoples. One of the main aims of this is to facilitate post-graduate studies.

During the 2021/22 academic year, forty Catholic and Ethiopian Orthodox priests from Africa completed a masters or doctoral degree under this programme in the archdiocese of Vienna alone, during which time they also worked as chaplains. The largest group was from Tanzania (9), followed by Nigeria (7), Ghana, Kenya and Zambia (4 each), Ethiopia (3), Benin, Cameroon and Uganda (2 each), as well as Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Eritrea, DR Congo and Rwanda (1 each). Many other clerics and nuns held church offices without being linked to a university, and they were spread across every diocese in Austria.

 Most African priests are not assigned to migrant communities but work in traditional parishes, ministering therefore to members of the majority society. In contrast to most African immigrants, they hold positions of authority and enjoy considerable social prestige, particularly in rural areas. At the same time, the interaction with them is often described as a confrontation between two milieus in which religion occupies a different status. Conflicts around issues that have long been controversial in the Catholic Church regularly rise to the surface within local communities. Debates about celibacy in the priesthood, the position of women in the Church, contraception, and lay participation by committed believers are often experienced as a form of intercultural tension.