Language Diversity: k.k. Austria and Roman Catholic Church

In dualistic Austria, Francis Joseph possessed a number of prerogatives and rights of intervention that gave him the final say over the tasks of the Roman Catholic Church. How he administered these rights through his ministerial and provincial bureaucrats and how the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church were involved has rarely been addressed in historiography. This project focuses on one aspect of the complex process of negotiation between state and church that can be described as the most striking and unavoidable for contemporaries between 1867 and 1914: the use of language in places where the population spoke more than one language. This project investigates: that the dynamic interdependencies in the way church and state authorities dealt with linguistic diversity were not uniform; that in some cases church and state authorities cooperated situationally in decisions about language use, thus circumventing their institutional counterparts; and that the place of origin of an acting authority and the role that languages played there - one and the same language often had a different local status - influenced decisions about its use. Based on the analysis of primary sources from three countries and in five languages, three main areas of analysis are addressed, which are characterized by their regularity and cross-regional occurrence. In all three cases, state authorities had a decisive say: the appointment of higher Roman Catholic church authorities, the clergy and linguistic nationalism, and Roman Catholic public events. The focus of the analysis is on five Austrian provinces, all of which recognize more than one language: Carinthia, Carniola, Littoral-Gorizia, Istria and Trieste, Styria and Tyrol. The project team will analyse to what extent already debated analytical categories such as banal nationalism, national indifference, daily life nationalism, etc. work for our case study, and if not, to argue why our space differs. It is planned to publish a volume of book chapters by collaborators dealing with similar hypotheses and research questions for the other parts of Austria-Hungary, including Bosnia-Herzegovina. The project will be based at the Institute for Biblical Studies and Historical Theology at the University of Innsbruck and will draw on the Roman Institute of the Görres Society in the Vatican as an institutional cooperation partner.