The Pastoral Letter recently issued by the Roman Catholic Bishops'
Conference in Vienna — condemning Protestant proselytism on religious and patriotic grounds—has pro- voked an indignant rejoinder from the Vienna Evan- gelical Alliance. The interesting feature of the contro- versy, as the Vienna correspondent of the Times points out in Tuesday's issue, is the insistence of the Pro- testants on " conversions from conviction " as opposed to the wholesale conversions which sometimes accompany Pan-Germanic propaganda. The "Los von Rom" move- ment, in the view of the Austrian Bishops, is exclusively' political. Whether that be the case or not, the Times corre- spondent is convinced that there is a proselytising movement independent of the " Los von Rom " agitation, and wholly void of political aim. He estimates that over twenty thousand persons have left the Roman Catholic Church during the last three years. But many of those who joined the " Los von Rom" movement on political grounds did not turn Protestant. About five thousand joined the Old Catholic Church, others embraced no new faith at all. In Vienna itself the leading Evangelical clergyman has during the period in question received over eleven hundred converts into the Pro- testant Church whose conversion was effected from ex- clusively religious motives. Statistics of the motives of con- version cannot be regarded with the same confidence as figures relating to exports and imports. Still, it is significant to be told by so well-informed an authority that as the result of this movement, Anti-Semitism having for the moment gone out of fashion, Protestantism is regarded as the danger in exalted ecclesiastical circles.
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