The Pension Concubines

Living in sin is bad enough without the government's encouraging it, protested the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Vienna, and if the Church had to break the law to stop it--the Church would just have to break the law.

Ever since the war, thousands of Austrian couples have been living together without benefit of holy wedlock. Pensions, not passions, are to blame. Widows of public servants and war widows get a pension ranging from $24 for the wife of a streetcar driver to $80 for the wife of a field marshal--but the money stops if the woman marries again. The result has been a flood of what the Church calls "pension concubines." Laymen prefer such gentle euphemisms as "life companions." But however tolerant the neighbors, many Catholic concubines are unhappy about being cut off from the sacraments of the Church.

Five months ago Vienna's hard-driving Archbishop Coadjutor Franz Jachym vainly petitioned the Austrian Chancellor and Parliament to do something about it. The two most obvious solutions: 1) maintain widows' pensions in the event of remarriage; 2) amend the Nazi-instituted marriage law that makes it illegal for a priest to marry anyone without a civil ceremony first, thus permitting "marriages of conscience."

Last week angry Archbishop Jachym returned to battle with a public petition and a threat. Titled "On Behalf of Those Suffering Pangs of Conscience," the petition asked: "Shall the widow because she draws a pension of several hundrad schillings ... be obliged to forgo the primitive right of marrying again?" If the state refuses to act, wrote the Archbishop, "the bishops [will be] obliged to ... order the proper priest to perform the marriage in open contravention of the law."

A Church spokesman put it more simply. "The Church married people secretly in Nazi times [mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews, forbidden under Hitler]. We shall have to do it again."

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