Letter from Vienna Hugh O'ShaughnessyA new feast day was proclaimed in Vienna this week - urbi et orbi, as they would say in the Vatican. But it's not a religious feast day, and the circumstances of its proclamation cast a light on this capital and on Austrian society.
Though not all readers may have noticed, that strictly secular body, the United Nations, has named December 9th as International Anti-Corruption Day. By doing so it seeks to promote virtue by concentrating minds on the vast poverty, misery and waste - particularly in poor countries - caused by the illicit pocketing of government and private cash.
The extent of global corruption is staggering, a fact underlined by the neat UN slogan for the exercise, "Everyone Pays". According to the World Bank, every year the equivalent of €750 billion slips from one set of hands to another.
That figure may be just a World Bank public relations flight of fancy. But the UN itself says one African country alone, oil-rich Nigeria, has lost €75 billion in recent years to dirty bank accounts in the rich countries (a sum roughly equivalent to Ireland's annual Gross Domestic Product).
Meanwhile most Nigerians live in the most indecent poverty.
International Anti-Corruption Day follows UN International Aids Day, observed last week, and will itself doubtless be followed by other proclamations to alert the world to other problems.
The new feast day is of particular importance here because it is subtly modifying the image of Vienna. This city is home to 825 staff of the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime, one of the many branches of the organisation to be sited in a city which, after Geneva and New York, has the greatest concentration of UN brain power.
In the middle of the Cold War the wily Austrian chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, encouraged international organisations to come here, reckoning that the presence of large numbers of civil servants from abroad would discourage potentially hostile neighbours from launching invasions and putsches.
The city built the UN an enormous HQ building, sadly seen by many inside and outside as something of a ghetto, on the Danube opposite the city.
Kreisky's political strategy certainly worked. After the UN came the world headquarters of everything from the International Atomic Energy Authority and the oil exporters of OPEC to Four Paws International, where 10 brave souls seek to minimise humans' cruelty to animals, or at least to quadrupeds.
Indeed there are so many non-governmental lobbying organisations here that the lobbyists set up their own lobby. The Conference of NGOs in Consultative Status with the United Nations - unfortunately abbreviated to CONGO - has a staff of one.
Not unnaturally many Viennese are indifferent to international affairs. As practitioners of the art of wine, women and song, a majority are surely keener on Mozart and Johann Strauss than Kofi Annan. Nevertheless Vienna has become an increasingly important international pulpit for the UN and the rest.
Coincidentally this has come about at a bad time for the traditionally powerful and influential Catholic Church in Austria. Last century Vienna produced archbishops of great influence - for ill and good. In 1932 the memorably named Cardinal Piffl was succeeded by Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, a strong supporter of Adolf Hitler, who welcomed Nazism and brought shame on the Austrian church.
He gave way to Cardinal Franz Koenig, a reformer admired worldwide. In his turn Koenig was followed by Cardinal Groer, an arch-conservative who has thrown Catholic Austria into uproar and confusion.
Now, as in Ireland, years of ecclesiastical tolerance of pederasty is causing more scandal. Since July this has centred on the seminary at St Pölten. It was once seen by many in Austria and the Vatican as a model for the production of large numbers of priests - until, that is, the press got proof of misconduct and its large stocks of child pornography.
The local bishop, Kurt Krenn, another arch-conservative, had got a name for productivity by accepting students, many of them foreigners, whom no other seminary would take: thereafter he did nothing to clean the Augean stables.
He was sacked but continues to enjoy a splendid salary and lodgings, a car and a chauffeur.
Speaking on November 28th, Krenn's successor declared that the scandals had left many Catholics "shattered" and estranged from the church. "The situation is frightful", remarked Christa Pongratz-Lippitt, a leading Catholic journalist.
Some Austrian Catholics are now in revolt against the hierarchy. Many see the hand of ultra-conservatives in the Vatican's decision in October to put Karl, the last emperor of Austria and an architect of the first World War, on the road to sainthood.
It is little wonder that the stock of the UN is rising here as that of Catholic hierarchy falls.