I wish to draw the attention of readers to two events included in the 2012 calendar of the Catholic Church.

The first one occurred on January 29 in Vienna, Austria, where Hildegard Burjan was beatified by Cardinal Schonborn at St Stephen’s Cathedral.

Hildegard was born to a Jewish family and converted to Catholicism as a young adult. Her husband, who was also Jewish, later also became a Catholic.

In Vienna, she became acquainted with a group of Catholics who were interested in putting Pope Leo XIII’s social encyclical Rerum Novarum into practice.

She sought above all to improve the conditions of women domestic workers and, after World War I, the conditions of women who worked in factories.

In the early 1930s, she joined the conservative Austrian Christian Social Party and won a seat in Parliament. She advocated such policies as a minimum wage and maternity protection.

Virulent anti-Semitism in her own party led her to withdraw from politics. She then devoted herself to founding Caritas Socialis, a congregation of women religious devoted to serving the poor, the sick and the elderly.

The second event is the beatification of Giuseppe Toniolo, due to take place in Rome on April 29. He was an economist and a sociologist with a social conscience.

He inspired and promoted the first social week of the Italian Catholics in 1907. He was born in Treviso in 1845 and died in Pisa in 1918.Toniolo widened the concept of democracy and emphasised the needs of those who were part of the poorer classes in society.

In the industrial field, he championed the direct representation of workers in factory councils.