Demographic forces shaping the religious landscape of Vienna

Since 1970 the religious homogeneity in terms of the domination in the population of the Roman Catholic Church in Austria has been slowly fading away through two main forces: progressing secularization and immigration of those belonging to other religions. This transformation is unique in the history of religions, but common to most "modern" societies. Migrant women have a higher number of children compared to native women, which is reinforcing the increase in religious pluralism due to migration. These phenomena lead to the diversification of the religious landscape in Austria and is exacerbated in the city of Vienna where both forces of secularization and migration are stronger than in any of the other Austrian federal provinces. If the different censuses in Austria since 1951 allow for the analysis of changes in the religious landscape of the population at detailed spatial levels, the demographic forces responsible or these flows have not yet been explored although most of the data can be reconstructed. The chapter describes the reconstruction exercise of the different forces that have been shaping the religious composition of Vienna: migration (international, national), mortality, fertility, and religious conversion from 1951 to 2011