We have opened a new center in the Western most part of Austria

Peter and Gertrud Koch
December 2, 1970
Wien, Austria

Austrian Family's Children's Day 1970 celebration

Beloved Parents,

We would like to express to you our thankfulness that Hilde and Rosi could take part in the blessing of the 777 couples. At the Essen conference we saw a film which vividly showed us their experiences during the trip through Japan and Korea. This way we could even "attend" the wedding party Thank you very much for your gift of the most beautiful picture and the English translation of the new Divine Principles book. The anti-Communist book, too, will be translated as quickly as possible because we really need it for the university work.

Because of the Essen conference we had to postpone the Children's Day celebration by one week. All members of the Austrian family assembled in Vienna.

They were all very inspired by Hilde's and Rosi's reports on the activities of the families in Japan and Korea. Everybody renewed his determination to work even harder to establish God's kingdom.

In November we have opened a new center in the westernmost part of Austria. We have already won a new member there. This new girl had already been contacted when our construction crew worked there during summertime.

The most significant event in this month's activities of the Austrian family has been a radical change of policy regarding our university work. Our limitation to the religious approach and our ignorance in political matters had adverse effects on our appeal to greater to numbers of students. The left wing groups had been quite active here and have turned out to be quite a pest to the university. However, nobody could do anything against them. When we talk about Christianity, we only too often find out they are either fed up with Christianity or in this almost all-Catholic country they just pick up the phone to call the Catholic Church and listen to their counter propaganda which is working with a lot of lies.

The solution to our problems came when we had to find a new general topic for our lecture series. It was decided to use the title "The New Center", implying that man has lost his own true center and that he has to regain it in order to live a reasonable life. However, at the same time the new title had a political implication.

It sounded like a counter weights against the "New Left" groups. To our great bewilderment we found out that this new title found a response among the students which was way beyond anything we could possibly have dreamed of. As a result a new movement was born which will be a combination of CARP and the anti-Communist movement. All the other students' movements here have the weakness of more or less fighting against the university professors. The leaders of the student movements obviously feel that this is the cheapest way to gain political capital.

However, even the students start realizing the shortsightedness of this policy. So our idea of attaining a constructive give-and-take relation-ship between professors and students has met a very good response even among students. Furthermore this way we could make friends with professors who would not be open to an approach by the "World Christians" (as we are called here). Although our work with this movement is at the very beginning of the formation stage, it looks like a bright new future is unfolding before us. In all my nine years of D.P. work I have never been so optimistic about the future as I am now.

One of our members overheard a conversation of two students in the student dining hall. First student: "What happened to the World Christians? Are they not active anymore? It look they have died out at the university." Second student: "On the contrary: Now they are even more active: Don't you know they are the people behind the 'New Center' movement?" -- As a symbol for this movement we will use the same one as CARP does. Hilde's and Rosi's reports on the CARP movement have given us good idea for the New Center" movement.

The symbol implies that man is the center of thought and action. This should have a great appeal on young, energetic people who are really inwardly craving for a worthwhile cause to which they could commit their lives. Our next project will be to find a suitable training center in which we can have conferences of the New Center" movement as well as teach the Divine Principles to the more promising people contacted by the "New Center" movement.

The future looks bright, and we are very confident.

With Love to our Heavenly Father
Peter and Gertrud Koch