Preachers or Teachers? Parish Priests and their Sermons in the Late Enlightenment Habsburg Empire

Abstract

This article explores the role parish priests were expected to play in educating the populace of the Habsburg empire at the end of the eighteenth century, and especially how this was manifested in the form and content of their sermons. Emperor Joseph II took a keen interest in the education of future priests and expected them to be good shepherds (pastores boni) and educators to their parishioners. To this end, together with his mother, he carried out several reforms in their education (such as changing theology faculty curricula, introducing pastoral theology as a new subject and establishing general seminaries) and even issued a special decree on 4 February 1783, providing detailed instructions for preachers. The article outlines how future priests were taught to educate their parishioners through their sermons, concentrating on how they followed these instructions in their homiletic practice, which changed the form and content of sermons radically. It is based on archival material concerning the education of future priests (such as court decrees, governmental orders and university curricula), pastoral theology textbooks used at the Prague faculty of theology, and selected printed sermons.