Charles I of Austria, the last Holy Roman Emperor

Apainful, surrounded by a hundred occasions of evil, he stood out for his purity and generosity.

Extremely intelligent, among his classmates at the high school in Vienna, he was loved for his goodness. Many thought they were having fun; he, Carlo, had only one passion: Eucharistic adoration in front of the Tabernacle and daily Communion. He was a young man hungry for God.

source — Domenico Bonvegna

Let’s start from the end of Mario Carotenuto’s book, Charles I of Austria and the sabotaged peace, published by Fede & Cultura of Verona (www.fedecultura.com). What the author writes, “If Charles’ peace offer had been accepted in the spring of 1917, numerous human lives would have been saved and probably a solid ‘barrier against Bolshevism’, and National Socialism, not only it would not have spread to Europe, but it could hardly have developed in Germany. The history of Europe would have been different.” This alone would be enough, and it is no small thing, to maintain that the defeat and therefore the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian empire of Emperor Charles I was a disaster for Europe, even for the non-Christian one.

Charles opposed the German plan to facilitate Lenin’s 1917 return to Russia. He understood the danger of the Bolsheviks. But Charles of Austria was always aware of the danger of ending up in the hands of the Germans and would never have supported Hitler. What the Austrian historian Erik Maria von Kuhnelt-Leddihn highlighted is interesting, what the end of the Habsburgs means, “the ancient dynasty was finally succeeded by a common man, a modest former house painter of Austrian origin, who dragged the world into a sea of tears and blood.”

Charles, son of Archduke Otto of Austria and Archduchess Maria Josepha of Saxony, was crowned Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary on 21 November 1916 in the midst of the World War. A series of previous tragic events favored his rise, such as the suicide of Franz Joseph’s son Rudolf and then the death of Archduke Maximilian in Mexico.

Thus at the age of twenty-nine Charles inherited the imperial title, succeeding Franz Joseph, a man who had already become legendary in his lifetime. The following day Charles issued a very significant proclamation addressed to the people of the empire, two passages of the text are very important, one on internal politics, the other on foreign policy: I intend to be an equitable and well-liked sovereign for my people. I will keep their constitutional freedoms intact and defend their equality before the law. It will be my tireless concern to promote the moral and spiritual good of my peoples, safeguard freedom and order in my territories and ensure the fruits of honest work for all active members of society.

I will do everything to put an end as soon as possible to the horrors and sacrifices of war, to restore to my peoples the so seriously damaged good of peace, without prejudice to safeguarding the honor of arms, the vital needs of my peoples and the faithful allies and as soon as the arrogance of our enemies allows.”

The central part of Carotenuto’s book is dedicated to the emperor’s continuous attempts to reach peace, but the negotiations run aground in back and forth and in the end the emperor is abandoned to himself by those who were supposed to protect him such as his foreign minister , Count Czernin. In fact, a gigantic defamatory campaign was implemented against the sovereigns, coming from both German and pan-German Austrian circles. But not only authoritative historians maintain that it was Freemasonry that boycotted ‘his overly pro-pacifist projects’. Especially French Freemasonry which wanted the republicanisation of Europe; destroying Austria-Hungary meant terminating the intentions of the Revolution of 1789, that is, striking the heart of Catholicism, since the Habsburg empire, heir of the Holy Roman Empire, ’embodied the very principle of the Christian empire’.

All those politicians, ministers, English, French, Italian, protagonists of the book, were not interested in the peace that poor Emperor Charles offered, their intent, and they said it publicly, was to destroy the main obstacle to their plans to republicanize the ‘Europe, that is, the empire. The Franco-Hungarian intellectual historian Francois Fejto claims that every attempt at peace was sabotaged, precisely because the transition from classical war to ideological war against the Church and the Habsburg Empire. Therefore a “militant Catholic” like Charles I had to be fought by every means and destroyed.

Even today, current historiography considers the Emperor of Austria to be a “politically incorrect” figure, but as the greatest living Catholic historian, Vittorio Messori, recalled, “The Church has not forgotten him, it prays to him on the altars and offers him as an example to rulers”, which is why on 3 October 2004, John Paul II declared him blessed.

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