PRIEST AND PREMIER.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 182, 3 August 1932, Page 7

PRIEST AND PREMIER.

Noted European Politician's

Death.

DR. SEIPEL OF AUSTRIA.

(Received 10.30 a.m.)

VIENNA, August 2.

The death is announced of Dr. Ignaz Seipel, aged 56, the Austrian priest who became Chancellor of his country after 6ix years in politics.

Ignaz Seipel, who became a Roman Catholic priest in 1599, began his political career in 1918, when he entered the shortlived Lammasch Cabinet. Next year he was elected for Vienna, and within two years was leader of the powerful Christian Socialist; party. Pqr the next year he controlled the Chancellors, Mayr and Schober, who were merely his puppets, until they failed to eave the Austrian currency. Then he became Chancellor himself, taking the post which had not been held by a priest for 600 years. Ho at once made hia famous tour of the European capitals, and persuaded the League of Nations to advance the necessary loan to rebuild Austrian currency, in return for a measure of foreign control. After two years he resigned owing to railway strikes and personal ill-health. Hβ then toured abroad, attending the Chicago Eucharietic Congress in 1926. His life was once attempted at a Vienna station by a factory hand, but the nuns of his convent nursed him back to health.

He came back into power In 1926 after Dr. Ramek's reej"3iation, but owing to his merciless treatnwjt of those involved in the great Vienna riot of 1927, he was etrongly attacked from all sides, and within a year 100,000 people deserted the Roman Catholic Church. Dr. Seipel resigned again in April, 1929, due to attacks because he would not pass modern marriage and divorce laws, because he would not put down the revolutionary Heimwehr, and because he showed no enthusiasm for the proposed union with Germany. He was declared to be aiming at a restoration of the Habeburg monarchy. He was really a man of the type of the great French cardinals Richelieu and Marazin.