| CURIA GENERALIZIA MARIANISTI Rome, November 2, 2004 Death Notice No. 29 (To all Unit Administrations) The Region of Austria/Germany recommends to our fraternal prayers our dear Brother, KARL BUCHINGER, who died in the service of the Blessed Virgin Mary on October 22, 2004, in Freistadt, Austria, in the 97th year of his age and the 79th year of his religious profession. Karl Buchinger was born on July 22, 1908 in Ried in the area of the Riedmark, Upper Austria, the third of nine children in a railway worker’s family. His brother Franz was also a Marianist. In 1920 he arrived at the Postulate at the Marianum in Freistadt. After the novitiate he made his first vows at Greisinghof on December 8, 1925 and professed perpetual vows August 8, 1929 in Freistadt. Brother Buchinger was a master cabinetmaker. His first assignments were 1927/28 at the Marien Institute in Graz, 1929/30 in Fritzlar (Germany), 1932/33 in Eisenstadt, and from 1933 to 1939 in Belfort (France). After the occupation of France by Hitler’s Germany, he was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp. Some months later he was called up into the German Army. He hardly spoke at all about the terrible time in Dachau. After his release from a prisoner of war camp in Italy he came to Graz. In 1949/50 he worked on the construction of the new General Administration building in Rome, and then returned to Graz where he took over the business management in 1952. In 1964 he was called to be the business manager of the Albertus Magnus School in Vienna. From 1971 up until the closing of the house, he was business manager in Graz. The evening of his life he spent at the Salesianum in Linz. He moved in 1998 to the home for the elderly at Pregarten where he received sympathetic care. Brother Buchinger was an extremely well informed, hard-working, and unpretentious person. He had a dietary regimen which he followed very exactly, and he was convinced that that was what kept him alive. He was a very thrifty business manager with a lot of technical expertise, planning ability, and spirit of invention. Thanks are due to him, for example, for the central heating system in our houses in Vienna and Graz. He spoke French, Italian, and English, which he learned through his own personal study. Even with all that, his becoming more and more hard of hearing bothered him greatly and was a problem for those around him as well. Every Sunday during his years in Linz he went up to the Postlingberg with “his” moped and afterwards visited the brothers in the nursing home. He was a faithful and exacting religious who loved the Society of Mary and gave himself unreservedly to its service. After a fall he was taken to the Freistadt Hospital where, strengthened
by the Holy Sacraments, he died on October 22, 2004.
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