Austria

Austria is historically and still predominantly Catholic, though the Catholic share has fallen substantially in recent decades to around 55 percent, with religiously unaffiliated residents now forming the second largest group at roughly a quarter of the population, alongside Muslim and Protestant minorities each in the low single digits, per estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020.

Austria sat at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire and later the Habsburg monarchy, whose rulers styled themselves defenders of Catholicism through the Counter-Reformation, suppressing Protestant communities that had gained ground during the sixteenth-century Reformation and making Vienna a major center of Baroque Catholic art and architecture, exemplified by St Stephen's Cathedral and the Melk Abbey.

Vienna also hosted one of pre-Holocaust Europe's largest and most culturally significant Jewish communities, numbering around 200,000 before 1938, nearly all of whom were murdered, forced to emigrate or otherwise displaced following Austria's annexation by Nazi Germany that year, a community that never recovered its former scale or influence. Postwar Austria maintains a formal church-state partnership through concordat arrangements with the Catholic Church alongside a system recognizing other religious societies.

Austria's 1874 Recognition Act, still in force with amendments, establishes a formal legal category of state-recognized religious society, granting recognized bodies rights including religious education in public schools, tax collection privileges and corporate legal status, a framework the Catholic Church holds automatically under a 1934 concordat while other communities, including Austria's small but growing Muslim population, mostly of Turkish and Bosnian descent from postwar labor migration, gained recognition later, Islam specifically under a distinct 1912 Islam Law originally passed to govern Bosnian Muslim soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian army. A controversial 2015 revision of that Islam Law banned foreign funding of Muslim organizations and mosques, a measure the government justified as countering foreign political influence and critics characterized as discriminatory relative to other recognized religions not subject to equivalent restriction.

Austria's Jehovah's Witnesses and Scientology have both sought and been denied full recognized-society status, remaining instead in a lesser legal category, and the country's small Jewish community, represented by the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, receives state security funding following antisemitic attacks in recent decades.