Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T20:41:07.396Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The National and Social Origins of Parish Priests in the Archdiocese of Vienna, 1800–1870

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2009

William D. Bowman
William D. Bowman
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC 28223
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Under The Influence of Enlightenment ideals of rational administration and cameralist notions of increasing the productivity and welfare of the populace, Joseph II and his ministers embarked on an aggressive program of reform for the Habsburg monarchy in the late eighteenth century. Their view as to what needed change was wide-ranging, but among their chief concerns was the desire to restructure the relationship between the Catholic church and Austrian society. As the largest and most powerful religious denomination in the Habsburg monarchy, the Catholic church possessed immense human and material resources, which could possibly be exploited to benefit the Austrian people and state. For Joseph II, the process whereby Catholicism could best be put to use in Austrian society necessarily involved seizing partial administrative control over the Catholic church. The Catholic church, he believed, did not distribute material and moral benefit to the Austrian people evenly, and changing this situation required the active intervention of the Austrian government.

Type
Articles
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 24 , January 1993 , pp. 17 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The classic biography on Joseph II remains Mitronov, Paul von, Joseph II, 2 vols., trans. von Demelic, Viktor (Vienna, 1910)Google Scholar. See also Benedikt, Ernst, Kaiser Joseph II. (Vienna, 1936)Google Scholar; Bibl, Viktor, Kaiser Joseph II. (Vienna, 1944)Google Scholar. On the Enlightenment and Joseph II see Blanning, T. C. W., Joseph II and Enlightened Despotism (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; and O'Brien, Charles H., Ideas of Religious Toleration at the Time of Joseph II: A Study of the Enlightenment among Catholics in Austria (Philadelphia, 1969)Google Scholar. On the Josephinist reform movement see Maass, Ferdinand, Der Josephinismus, 5 vols. (Vienna, 1951–1961)Google Scholar; Valjavec, Fritz, Der Josephinismus. Zur geistigen Entwicklung Österreichs im achtzehnten und neunzehnten Jahrhundert, 2d ed. (Munich, 1945)Google Scholar; Winter, Eduard, Der Josefinismus und seine Geschichte. Beiträge zur Ceistesgeschichte Österreichs 1740–1848 (Brno, Munich, and Vienna, 1943)Google Scholar; Kovács, Elisabeth, ed., Josephinismus. Reformkatholizismus oder Staatskirchentum? (Vienna, 1983)Google Scholar. Historians since the time of Maass, Valjavec, and Winter have recognized that the Austrian reform movement of the eighteenth century, which bears the name of the Emperor Joseph II (Josephinismus), originated under his predecessor and mother, Maria Theresa. Joseph II, however, was more firmly committed than his mother was to the ideas of reform.

2 In 1869, the first year for which there are official census figures for the Habsburg monarchy, 80.3 percent (16,248,776) of the population of Cisleithanien Austria (the western or non-Hungarian half of the monarchy) was Roman Catholic. Another 11.5 percent (2,330,421) was Greek Uniat Catholic. Leisching, Peter, “Die Römisch-Katholische Kirche in Cisleithanien,” in Wandruszka, Adam and Urbanitsch, Peter, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848–1918, vol. 4, Die Konfessionen (Vienna, 1985), Table 3Google Scholar. Kann, Robert places the percentage of Catholics (Roman and Greek Uniat) in Cisleithania at 91 percent for 1910, in The Multinational Empire (New York, 1950), 2:308Google Scholar.

3 Kovács, Elisabeth, “Die Diözesanregulierung unter Joseph II. 1782–1789,” in Österreich zur Zeit Kaiser Josephs II. (Vienna, 1980), 176–80Google Scholar.

4 Krückel, Herbert, “Studien zur Geschichte der Pfarrerrichtungen Josephs II im Gebiet der Diözese St. Pölten,” Ph.D. dissertation (Vienna, 1969)Google Scholar; Weiβensteiner, Johann, “Erzdiōzese Wien,” in Gatz, Erwin, ed., Pfarr-und Gemeindeorganisation. Studien zu ihrer Entwicklung in Deutsch-land, Österreich und der Schweiz seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Paderborn, 1987), 27–44Google Scholar.

5 Winner, Gerhard, Die Klosteraufhebungen in Niederösterreich und Wien (Vienna, 1967)Google Scholar.

6 In addition to the literature cited in note 1, see Elisabeth Kováacs, “Was ist Josephinismus?” in Österreich zur Zeit Kaiser Josephs 11., 24–30; Kovács, , Ultramontanismus und Staatskirchentum im Theresianisch-Josephinischen Staat (Vienna, 1975), especially 7–55Google Scholar; Kovács, “Giuseppinismo,” in Guerrino Pelliccia and Giancarlo Rocca, eds., Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione, 4:1357–67, which includes a helpful bibliography; Maass, Ferdinand, Der Frühjosephinismus (Vienna, 1969)Google Scholar; O'Brien, Charles H., “Jansenists and Josephinism: ‘Nouvelles ecclésiastiques’ and Reform of the Church in Late Eighteenth Century Austria,” in Mitteilungen des österrekhischen Staatsarchivs 32 (1979): 143–64Google Scholar; Reinalter, Helmut, “Reformkatholizismus oder Staatskirchentum? Zur Bewertung des Josephinismus in der neueren Literatur,” in Römische Historische Mitteilungen 18 (1976): 283–307Google Scholar; Vocelka, Karl, “Der Josephinismus. Neuere Forschungen und Problemstellungen,” in Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für die Geschichte des Protestantismus in Osterreich 95 (1979): 53–68Google Scholar.

7 There are few examples of research on the social history of religion in the Vormärz. Among the best is Sauer, Walter, Katholisches Vereinswesen in Wien. Zur Geschichte des christlichsozial-konservativen Lagers vor 1914 (Salzburg, 1980), 22–40Google Scholar. Edith Saurer is currently working on several studies of the Catholic religion and Austrian women in the nineteenth century. She was kind enough to show me one of her unpublished papers, “Versprechen und Verbote. Katholische Gebetsbiicher fur Frauen im friihen 19. Jahrhundert.” Hosp, Eduard, the church historian, has included a small section on social conditions in his study of the Vormärz, Kirche Österreichs im Vormärz, 1815–50 (Vienna and Munich, 1971), 343–48Google Scholar.

8 Bruckmüller, Ernst, Sozialgeschichte Österreichs (Vienna and Munich, 1985), 363–97Google Scholar.

9 Johann Weiβensteiner, “Erzdiözese Wien,” 30–31. The goal of 700 parishioners per parish was later raised to 1,000 parishioners for the inner city of Vienna and its suburbs.

10 Gutkas, Karl, Geschichte Niederösterreichs (Vienna, 1984), 191Google Scholar.

11 Wien, Diözesanarchiv (hereafter abbreviated as DAW), Personalstände der Erzdiözese Wien for 1815 and 1866Google Scholar.

12 The only exception to the rule of demographic growth was the present-day first district of the city of Vienna. This core area was already densely populated by 1815, and the drop in population from 62,656 to 53,828 in 1866 may have been caused by the redrawing of certain parish boundaries, which placed some of the inner city's parishioners in suburban parishes. See DAW, Personalstand der Erzdiözese Wien for 1866Google Scholar.

13 The figure of 600 additional priests assumes that every urban parish would have had an ideal parishioner-to-priest ratio of 1,000 to 1, whereas every “rural,” i.e., non-Viennese, parish would have had an ideal parishioner-to-priest ratio of 700 to 1. Given these assumptions, Vienna in 1866 with 463, 482 people needed approximately 463 priests, and the rest of the archdiocese with 734,353 parishioners needed approximately 1,049 priests. The total need for priests would therefore have been approximately 1,512, which is 603 more priests than the actual number on hand in 1866.

14 Till, Rudolf, “Zur Herkunft der Wiener Bevölkerung im 19. Jahrhundert,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 34 (1941): 33–37Google Scholar; Koukolik, Sylvia Erna, “Die Bedeutung der Einwanderung aus den Ländern der Böhmischen Krone für die Geschichte Wiens in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur 17 (1973): 154–67Google Scholar.

15 Lichtenberger, Elisabeth, “Von der mittelalterlichen Bürgerstadt zur City,” in Helczmanovski, Heimold, ed., Beiträge zur Bevölkerungs-und Sozialgeschichte Österreichs (Vienna, 1973), 304–15, especially 320Google Scholar.

16 On the social composition of the Archdiocese of Vienna in the nineteenth century, see Bowman, William D., “Priests, Parish, and Religious Practice: A Social History of Catholicism in the Archdiocese of Vienna, 1800–1870,” Ph.D. dissertation (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University, 1989), 35–52Google Scholar.

17 To my knowledge, there is no precise analysis of the relationship of religious allegiance, ethnic identity, and social class for Vienna or for Lower Austria in the nineteenth century. Peter Urbanitsch does provide an important overview of confessional and ethnic identity for the German-speaking areas of the monarchy, Habsburg, including Vienna and Lower Austria, in “Die Deutschen,” in Die Völker des Reiches, vol. 3, part 1 of Wandruszka, Adam and Urbanitsch, Peter, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848–1918 (Vienna, 1980), 56–72Google Scholar.

18 Lichtenberger, Elisabeth, “Die sozialökologische Gliederung Wiens–Aspekte eines Stufenmodells,” Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur 17 (1973): 25–49Google Scholar.

19 For an example of an ethnic conflict in the Archdiocese of Vienna, see Bowman, “Priests, Parish, and Religious Practice,” 321–23.

20 The most comprehensive work on Austria's social history is Bruckmüller's Sozialgeschichte Österreichs. Bruckmüller's achievement is considerable and does allow for an understanding of the structural development of society in the various lands of the Habsburg Empire; nevertheless, it is not a social framework that would allow exact comparisons between social classes from various regions of the monarchy. Under the editorship of Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch the Austrian Academy of Sciences has published several volumes of a monumental study of the monarchy, Habsburg in the second half of the nineteenth century, Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848–1918 (Vienna, 1973–1985)Google Scholar. The planned ninth volume in the series, to be entitled Soziale Strukturen, may provide a comparative social framework for the whole of the Habsburg lands in the nineteenth century.

21 The tables in this article, unless otherwise noted, are based on the Principal Books (Hauptbücher) of the seminary in Vienna (Priesterseminar Wien, hereafter abbreviated PSW). The seminary records are incomplete for the nineteenth century; the records for 1816 through 1821 are missing. For detailed information on the Hauptbücher, see the statistical appendix to this article.

22 On the Diocese of St. Pölten, see Herbert Krückel, “Studien zur Geschichte der Pfarrerrichtungen Kaiser Josephs II im Gebiet der Diözese St. Pölten.”

23 It is difficult to be precise about the percentage of Lower Austrian priests who were born in the St. Pölten Diocese; some entries in the Hauptbücher give only the land of birth and not the town. In such cases, it is impossible to know whether these Lower Austrians were from the western or eastern half of the province.

24 On theological training in Austria, see Zschokke, Hermann, Die theologischen Studien und Anstalten der katholischen Kirche in Österreich (Vienna, 1894), passimGoogle Scholar.

25 Koukolik, “Die Bedeutung der Einwanderung,” 154–67. After surveying all the relevant literature on the migration of peoples from Bohemia and Moravia into Vienna, Koukolik concludes that all of the statistical evidence is problematic. Nevertheless, following Josef Pilnacek, she estimates that 50 percent of the migrants into Vienna by the midnineteenth century were Czech. See Pilnacek, Josef, Z dějin videnské československé menšiny až do roku 1860 (Vienna, 1932), 19Google Scholar.

26 On the need for Czech-speaking priests, see Gordon, Bertram M., “The Challenge of Industrialization: The Catholic Church and the Working Class of Vienna,” Austrian History Yearbook 9/10 (1973–1974): 134Google Scholar. Eduard Hosp has also noted the language problems German-speaking priests encountered with Slavic workers; see Kirche Österreichs im Vormärz, 347.

27 Cohen, Gary B., The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton, 1981), 19–26Google Scholar.

28 See Moritz Csáky, “Die Römisch-Katholische Kirche in Ungarn,” in Wandruszka and Urbanitsch, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie, 4:323–24; and Hermann Zschokke, Die theologischen Studien und Anstalten, 558–70. From 1623, the year of its founding, until the end of the nineteenth century, the Pazmaneum produced nearly seventy bishops for the Catholic church in Hungary.

29 Matis, Herbert, Österreichs Wirtschaft 1848–1913: Konjunkturelle Dynamik und gesellschaftlicher Wandel im Zeitalter Franz Josephs I. (Berlin, 1971), 22–30Google Scholar.

30 Baltzarek, Franz, “Zum Stellenwert Niederösterreichs innerhalb der frühen Industrieregionen Europas. Mit einem Exkurs: Die niederösterreichische Industrie und Ungarn im Zeitalter des Merkantilismus,” in Feigl, Helmuth and Kusternig, Andreas, eds., Die Anfänge der Industrialisierung Niederösterreichs (Vienna, 1982), 71–76Google Scholar.

31 Without firm evidence to the contrary, I have assumed that all candidates for the priesthood who listed Silesia (Schlesien) as their place of birth were referring to Austrian and not Prussian Silesia.

32 I am not aware of legislation that would have prevented the movement of priest-candidates within the Habsburg Hereditary Lands. Perhaps there was a general shortage of priests in the Hereditary Lands, which persuaded church officials to keep every possible candidate in his home diocese. This would reinforce the argument that demographic growth along with ethnic stress was largely responsible for the large number of Bohemian and Moravian candidates in Vienna.

33 PSW, Personal-Protokoll über die Alumnen des Wiener Fürsterzbischöflichen Seminariums 1845–1865. The seminary records are not totally clear on this matter, but several of the candidates from Hesse claimed to have been invited to Vienna by Rauscher.

34 To complete the national profile, there were six priests ordained in the Archdiocese of Vienna whose place of birth does not appear in the records of the seminary. In addition, a young Neapolitan nobleman from the House of Gallenberg came to Vienna to study for the priesthood and was ordained there in 1827. Finally, there is the case of Heinrich Huzter, who was born in Schatthausen in Switzerland, converted to Catholicism in Bavaria, and studied theology at the Collegium Germanicum in Rome. Shortly thereafter he entered the seminary in Vienna, where he stayed for only a year before being placed in a parish in the Archdiocese of Vienna. His father, Friedrich Huzter, was an imperial official and a historian of the Austrian Empire.

35 Loidl, Franz, Geschichte des Erzbistums Wien (Vienna and Munich, 1983), 251–52Google Scholar. Loidl maintains that after 1867, as a consequence of the war between Austria and Prussia, Austrians and Germans no longer participated jointly in Katholikentage.

36 The extrapolated figure for Lower Austria would be eighty-six ordained priests who entered the Vienna seminary between 1860–69. The same extrapolation for Vienna would yield, however, only thirty-one ordained priests.

37 The figures for the remaining lands, Upper Austria, Tyrol, Silesia, and Galicia, are too small to draw any conclusions about change over time.

38 The Augustinians of Klosterneuburg formed the single largest group of regular clergy employed in the parishes of the archdiocese of Vienna. They also had more parishes under their patronage than any other religious foundation in the archdiocese. For these reasons I have used Klosterneuburg to compare regular and secular clergy. For the history of the Klosterneuburg monastery, see Cernik, Berthold, Das Augustiner-Chorherrenstift Klosterneuburg (Vienna, 1958)Google Scholar.

39 On Moravian priests in the archdiocese in general, see Theologisch-Praktische Quartalschrift (1855): 158–59Google Scholar.

40 The number of priests at Klosterneuburg does not warrant plotting their place of birth along a chronological axis; the number is too small to reach firm conclusions about change over time.

41 These tables are also based on the Principal Books (Hauptbücher) of the seminary in Vienna. It is important to recall that the seminary records are incomplete for the nineteenth century, i.e., the years 1816 to 1821 are missing. Also, the social analysis extends only to 1865.

42 Certain lands, such as Upper Austria, Tyrol, Galicia, and Croatia, are excluded from this profile because the number of priests from those lands does not allow one to reach conclusions about social origins and religious vocations. Only those lands that had a statistically significant number of ordained priests in Vienna are included in this social profile. The total number of ordained priests from Lower Austria, Vienna, Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary is 952. The total number of priests in Table 10 is 947 because both the entry date and father's occupation of five priests are unknown. Whereas these five priests can be included in Table 9 as unidentified, they cannot be listed in any of the chronological categories of Table 10.

43 Peter Leisching, “Die Römisch-Katholische Kirche in Cisleithanien,” 132.

44 See Bowman, “Priests, Parish, and Religious Practice,” 306–12.

45 The post-1848 clubs were clearly the successors to the confraternities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but they encouraged contact with like-minded clubs in other parishes and at the diocesan level, which the confraternities had not done. The Catholic clubs therefore became an important instrument for mass political action in the 1880s and 1890s. See Leisching, “Die Römisch-Katholische Kirche in Cisleithanien,” 132; and especially Sauer, Katholisches Vereinswesen in Wien, 40–51.

46 Leisching, “Die Römisch-Katholische Kirche in Cisleithanien,” 131.

47 Fürst, Ingeborg, “Die Gestalt des katholischen Pfarrers in der deutschen Literatur vom Realismus bis zur Gegenwart,” Ph.D. dissertation (Vienna, 1953), passimGoogle Scholar.

48 Melton, James Van Horn, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (Cambridge, England, 1988), 214–20Google Scholar. Attendance in the elementary schools was not universal; in 1779 only 34 percent of the eligible children in Lower Austria attended schools.

49 Pfleger, Severin, Der Priester in seinem Amte (Vienna, 1831), 34Google Scholar.

50 See Boyer, John W., Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848–1897 (Chicago and London, 1981), 137Google Scholar. See also Bowman, “Priests, Parish, and Religious Practice,” 347–48.

51 Leisching, “Die Römisch-Katholische Kirche in Cisleithanien,” 130–31.

52 Ibid., 128–31.

53 Bérenger, Jean, “The Austrian Church,” in Higgs, David and Callahan, William J., eds., Church and Society in Catholic Europe of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, England, 1979), 90Google Scholar.

54 In Vienna, for instance, there were no noble archbishops after 1831. Eduard Milde, arch bishop of Vienna from 1832–53, was the son of a master artisan. Joseph Othmar Rauscher (1853–75) was the son of an official who only many years after his son's birth was ennobled. The rest of the Viennese archbishops before the First World War were sons of either peasants or artisans. See Preradovich, Nikolaus, “Die soziale Herkunft der österreichischen Kirchenfiirsten (1648–1918),” in Mezler-Andelberg, Helmut J., ed., Festschrift Karl Ederzum siebzigsten Geburtstag (Innsbruck, 1959), 223–43Google Scholar.

55 On the difficulties factory children faced in attending elementary schools in Lower Austria, see Gordon, “The Challenge of Industrialization,” 124–27.

56 Ibid., 123–42.

57 On the relationship between the working class and Austrian priests in general, see Weinzierl, Erika, “Österreichs Klerus und die Arbeiterschaft,” Ecdesia Semper Reformanda (Vienna and Salzburg, 1985), 99–106Google Scholar.

58 It is possible that nobles and other members of the social elite came into Klosterneuburg not through the regular monastery school, but through other ecclesiastical institutions of education, such as the Frintaneum. I do not have the documentation to follow such developments.

59 Although the bourgeoisie and the officials were underrepresented among the parish priests of Vienna, they were not an insignificant source for religious vocations, especially to the regular clergy.

60 Leisching, “Die Römisch-Katholische Kirche in Cisleithanien,” 47–62; Boyer, Political Radicalism, 137.

61 In the 1850s and 1860s more sons from such groups as rural cottagers or nonmaster artisans were entering the seminary in Vienna. This slight opening-up of the priestly profession never reached the lowest or poorest levels of rural and urban society—the day laborers. The pattern of priest recruitment might have been different in other parts of the Habsburg monarchy from that for the Archdiocese of Vienna. John Boyer suggests that in the neighboring Diocese of St. Pölten the predominant social background of priests prior to the 1860s was Bürger families. If this is taken to mean primarily nonartisanal or non-lower-middle class families, the recruitment pattern for St. Pölten in the nineteenth century differed markedly from that for Vienna. See Boyer, Political Radicalism, 137. Much more research into the social dimensions of Austrian Catholicism is obviously needed.

62 On the Catholic church and the Revolution of 1848, see Folkert, Oskar, “Das Sturmjahr 1848 und die Kirche in Österreich,” in Wissenschaft und Weltbild 1 (1948): 165–74Google Scholar; and Otruba, Gustav, “Katholischer Klerus und Kirche im Spiegel der Flugschriftenliteratur des Revolutions jahres 1848,” in Flieder, Viktor, ed., Festschrift Franz Loidl, 2 (Vienna, 1970), 265–313Google Scholar. On the continuing conflict between Catholic clericals and liberals in Austria, see Boyer, Political Radicalism, 122–84, 316–411. On the opposition of political Catholicism and the working-class movement in Austria after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, see Rabinbach, Anson, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927–1934 (Chicago and London, 1983), 11–26Google Scholar; and Gruber, Helmut, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919–1934 (New York and Oxford, 1991), 27–29, 196–97Google Scholar.