About Der Sonntag

Der Sonntag

Der Sonntag is the German-language Catholic weekly newspaper of the Archdiocese of Vienna, published in Vienna by the Wiener Dom-Verlag. It is the archdiocese's own newspaper, serving Catholic parishes, institutions and readers across Vienna and the eastern part of Lower Austria that belongs to the archdiocese. The title, which means The Sunday in English, was adopted on 28 November 2004, when the paper was renamed from Wiener Kirchenzeitung. That renaming was the latest in a long line of titles carried by a Viennese Catholic church newspaper tradition that its publishers trace back through the Wiener Kirchenblatt of 1919 and the Wiener Kirchenzeitung founded in the revolutionary year of 1848. As one of Austria's nine diocesan church weeklies, Der Sonntag occupies a distinct place in the country's press landscape: it is neither a commercial daily nor a general news magazine, but a church-owned weekly whose task is to report on the life of the archdiocese, explain Catholic teaching and comment on social and cultural questions from a Catholic perspective for a largely parish-based readership.

Origins in the Viennese church press

The institutional ancestry claimed for Der Sonntag begins well before the present title existed. An early Wienerische Kirchenzeitung appeared between 1784 and 1789, edited by Marcus Anton Wittola, the parish priest of Probstdorf, who used it to defend the state-church ideas of Emperor Joseph II. The more direct line begins on 15 April 1848, when Sebastian Brunner founded the Wiener Kirchenzeitung für Glauben, Wissen, Freiheit und Gesetz in der katholischen Kirche in the midst of the 1848 revolution. Brunner, who remained its chief editor until 1865, defended the rights of the Catholic Church against Josephinism and against a hostile liberal press. Historical accounts also record plainly that Brunner established the paper as a platform for antisemitism in Vienna, a dark part of its nineteenth-century record that belongs in any honest history of the title. Brunner was succeeded by Albert Wiesinger, chief editor until 1874, who supported Cardinal Joseph Othmar von Rauscher in his conflict with liberalism. The paper ceased in 1874, leaving a gap in Vienna's Catholic weekly press until after the First World War.

Revival, suppression and post-war return

In 1919 Johann Mörzinger refounded the paper under the name Wiener Kirchenblatt, presenting it as the successor to the Kirchenzeitung discontinued in 1874. The revived church paper accompanied Viennese Catholic life through the First Republic and the authoritarian years of the 1930s. After the National Socialists took power, publication had to be stopped in 1941, and the paper could only reappear in October 1945, in the first months after the Second World War. That pattern of suppression and return shaped its identity: it was a paper that had been silenced by the Nazi regime for its church allegiance and that resumed as part of the reconstruction of Catholic institutional life in Austria. In 1964 the title reverted to Wiener Kirchenzeitung, the name it carried for the next four decades, before the second renaming of the modern era brought the present, shorter and more accessible title at the end of November 2004.

Publisher: the Wiener Dom-Verlag

The media owner of Der Sonntag is the Wiener Dom-Verlag Gesellschaft m.b.H., a Christian publishing house based at Stephansplatz in Vienna, beside St Stephen's Cathedral. The Dom-Verlag was founded in 1947 and is a subsidiary of the St.-Paulus-Medienstiftung, the media foundation of the Archdiocese of Vienna. Alongside the weekly newspaper, the house publishes fiction and non-fiction books, and for a period between 2009 and 2014 it also published children's and young people's literature before that programme passed to the Tyrolia publishing house in Innsbruck. Works published by the Dom-Verlag have repeatedly received the children's and youth book prize of the City of Vienna. Authors associated with the house have included Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the long-serving Archbishop of Vienna, alongside theologians, historians and writers. This ownership structure matters for understanding the newspaper: Der Sonntag is produced inside the archdiocese's own media foundation, so its editorial mission is set by the church institution it serves rather than by the advertising and circulation market alone.

Place among Austria's church newspapers

Austria's Catholic press is organised largely by diocese, and Der Sonntag belongs to a family of nine diocesan weeklies. Its counterparts include Kirche bunt in St. Pölten, the KirchenZeitung of the Diocese of Linz, martinus in Eisenstadt, the Rupertusblatt in Salzburg, the Carinthian church paper Sonntag in the Diocese of Gurk, the Sonntagsblatt für Steiermark in Graz-Seckau, the Tiroler Sonntag in Innsbruck and the Vorarlberger KirchenBlatt in Feldkirch, with the Slovenian-language Nedelja in Klagenfurt and the Croatian-language Glasnik in Eisenstadt serving minority-language Catholics. Within that system, the Viennese paper serves the country's largest and politically most prominent archdiocese, covering the capital city where the federal government, the national media and the central institutions of Austrian Catholicism are concentrated. German Wikipedia's infobox for the paper lists Sophie Lauringer as chief editor and Roman Gerner as publisher and managing director; such personnel details change over time and are recorded here only as they stood in the reference sources consulted.

Content and editorial mission

As a diocesan weekly, Der Sonntag combines several kinds of journalism in a single issue. It reports news from the Archdiocese of Vienna: parish life, appointments, church building and renovation, schools, charitable work through Caritas and the activities of religious orders and Catholic associations. It carries religious content proper, including commentary on the Sunday readings, feast days, prayer and questions of faith addressed to ordinary readers rather than theologians. It also addresses society, politics, culture and family life from an explicitly Catholic standpoint, interviewing public figures and reviewing cultural events in Vienna. This mixture distinguishes it from both the secular quality press and from purely devotional publications. The renaming from Wiener Kirchenzeitung to Der Sonntag in 2004 was itself an editorial statement: the shorter title and a more magazine-like presentation were intended to make the paper approachable to readers who might not pick up a publication that announced itself so formally as a church gazette, while the content remained that of the archdiocese's weekly.

Readership and distribution

Church weeklies in Austria are distributed predominantly by subscription, very often through parishes, and Der Sonntag follows that model for the Archdiocese of Vienna. Its natural readership is the practising and church-connected Catholic population of Vienna and the archdiocese's Lower Austrian territory, a readership that is loyal but, in line with the falling numbers of church members recorded across Austria, structurally shrinking. No audited circulation figure for the paper is asserted in this profile, because a verified, current figure could not be established from the sources consulted for this article, and older figures that circulate in reference works should not be presented as current. What can be said with confidence is the structural point: like every Austrian diocesan paper, Der Sonntag operates in a market where its core audience is defined by church affiliation rather than by newsstand competition, and where the long-term decline in Catholic practice in Vienna is the central commercial and pastoral challenge facing its publisher.

The archdiocese it serves

The Archdiocese of Vienna, for which Der Sonntag speaks in print, was established as a diocese on 18 January 1469 and raised to an archdiocese on 1 June 1722. It is the metropolitan see of the ecclesiastical province of Vienna, with the dioceses of Eisenstadt, Linz and St. Pölten as its suffragans, and its cathedral is St Stephen's in Vienna. Reference data for the archdiocese record roughly 600 parishes and just over one million Catholics among a total population of close to three million in its territory, which underlines both the scale of the institution the paper serves and the fact that Catholics are now a minority of the population even in historically Catholic Vienna. Reporting for such an archdiocese means covering everything from cathedral liturgy and the archbishop's public interventions in national debates to the everyday life of small parishes, and it places the paper at the intersection of church journalism and capital-city journalism.

Funding questions and an uncertain environment

At the end of 2023 the owner announced that from the end of 2024 it would no longer be able to provide further subsidies for the archdiocesan media Der Sonntag and Radio klassik Stephansdom. That announcement, recorded in the German-language reference literature on the paper, illustrates the financial pressure on church media in Austria: diocesan newspapers have historically depended on institutional support from their dioceses, because subscription and advertising income alone rarely covers the cost of a weekly editorial operation. Readers should treat any statement about the paper's arrangements after that announcement with care, since the public record consulted for this profile establishes the announcement itself but does not document in comparable detail how the archdiocese subsequently reorganised support for its media. The episode is nevertheless an important part of the paper's recent history, because it showed that even the newspaper of Austria's most prominent archdiocese is not insulated from the economics that have closed or shrunk church publications across the German-speaking world.

Historical significance

The significance of Der Sonntag lies less in market power than in continuity. Few Austrian publications can plausibly connect their institutional lineage to a church newspaper founded in the revolutionary spring of 1848, suppressed under National Socialism, revived in the ruins of 1945 and carried, under successive names, into the twenty-first century. Along that line the paper documented, and participated in, the transformation of Austrian Catholicism: from the defensive, politically combative church press of the nineteenth century, through the reconstruction era after 1945, to a period in which a diocesan weekly must explain and commend the faith to a society in which the church no longer commands automatic allegiance. Its record also includes the shadows of its era, notably the antisemitism propagated in its nineteenth-century predecessor under Sebastian Brunner, which modern accounts of the paper's history should state openly rather than pass over. A church newspaper that has been, at different times, a combat paper, a suppressed paper and a parish weekly is a compact archive of the changing place of Catholicism in Viennese public life.

Der Sonntag today

Today Der Sonntag continues as the Catholic weekly of the Archdiocese of Vienna, published by the Wiener Dom-Verlag at Stephansplatz and appearing under the title it adopted on 28 November 2004. It remains part of the coordinated landscape of Austrian diocesan weeklies, distinct from the German-language secular press of the capital — Der Standard, Die Presse, the Kronen Zeitung and the Kurier — because its primary loyalty and primary readership are ecclesial. Its website operates under the dersonntag.at name recorded in reference sources. For researchers, the paper and its predecessors form a useful primary source for Viennese Catholic history, parish life and the public positions of the archdiocese across more than a century of upheaval. For its subscribers, it performs a simpler function: a weekly account, in German, of the life of their church in their city, connecting local parishes to the wider Catholic world. In a media market dominated by national tabloids and digital platforms, that modest, institutionally anchored role is precisely what has allowed the title, through all its changes of name, to endure.