44 DYNASTIC EMPIRE, ,.1765 1867
Traditional Catholics had most cause for resentment. Direct contact of Austrian bishops with the Curia was prohibited, as was the publication of Papal acts without permission. Some 530 out of 1188 monasteries in the Austro-Slav lands, and a further 117 in Hungary, were dissolved and their properly of 60 million florins taken over by the state on the grounds that they were merely 'contemplative1 institutions lacking educational or welfare functions. Their libraries were distributed to teaching bodies or pulped; their raiment ended up in a depot in Vienna. The expropriation of monasteries in the eighteenth century was the equivalent for would-be progressives of the nationalisation of private enterprise in the twentieth, justified by the argument that their wealth resulted from past gifts made for public cultural and religious purposes, and had in this sense always been national. Accordingly, resources taken over by the state were used; to form a Religious Fund from which about 1700 new parishes were created, as well as numerous welfare institutions. In Vienna the; lying-in hospital for expectant mothers, the Deaf and Dumb Institute, and the vast General Hospital, with its two thousand beds; i: date from this time. Moreover, the expanded clergy were tpihel trained in six newly instituted 'General Seminaries', rather than-irtil monastic centres or the diocesan seminars favoured by the Council! of Trent. The Marriage Patent of 1783 treated marriage essentially as a civil contract. i| Yet that these changes were not just the diktat of an unsympathetic state can be seen from the readiness with which scholarly Reform : Catholics participated in them, like the father of Czech studies^ Josef Dobrovsky, who headed the General Seminary in Moraxia. or Abbot Rautenstrauch, who took on the overhaul of theological! studies. The cataloguing of confiscated monastic books was carrierig out by a Josephinist-minded priest who believed 'superstitious(aM$H childish things' were best destroyed.i In Rautenstrauch's ^prri gramme, authorised for the Monarchy as a whole, scholastic theoJ«| ogy was down-graded in favour of moral and pastoral studie^a! traditional Protestant emphasis. The relative importance qffpetef gious dogmas could only be judged, wrote the pastoral theolcM gian Giftschittz in 1787, in terms of their effect on Cliriifiaiij action and on man's improvement and happiness.4 The alliumt between Enlightenment and Catholic Reform could hardly. blSw; clearly stated. % ..
Not all the clergy, of course, embraced these ideas. Archbishop Migazzi of Vienna had ended his flirtation with reform trends whei*
JOSEPH II AND HIS LEGACY 45 :!;!;, 'he rejected Febronius's critique of the Papal power in 1763. Embroiled by the 1780s in disputes with radical priests in his diocese, he argued that calls for a purported renewal of the Church did not gjlUtftrengthen its appeal but emboldened its enemies. Here Joseph's relaxation of censorship in 1781 was of crucial importance. It abolished provincial censorship organs and allowed free circulation of any material which did not systematically attack the Catholic, faith. ::KiThe result was a huge pamphlet literature in Vienna in which an ilitinsbphisticated public indulged a new-found taste for satire and irre-vt: ranee at the expense of obvious authority symbols like the Church. Whilcjoscph drew the line at a German-language edition of the anticlerical Voltaire, the new guidelines passed materia) like Ignaz liliBprn-s classification of religious orders in terms of insects and Eybel's IllliiSs'tile What is the Pope? There, is evidence that in the increasingly tur-hulem atmosphere of Josephinian Austria Jansenist and Reform iiiliiiiStholib ideas were indeed yielding to anti-clericalism and scepti-lliiim'iamong certain radical artisans in the larger towns. Genuine iflfft'xie ties' about the fate of the Church as well as a struggle over power fuelled the conflict of Pope and Emperor in the 1780s, the ll^fficjst dramatic aspect of which was Pius VPs visit to Vienna to : remonstrate with Joseph in 1782.
IJiJptph wrote sarcastically to Catherine of Russia about this Igsiensibly fruitless visit, on the long daily conversations he and the iffepe had had, 'talking nonsense about theology ... in words which IliMh&ldf us understood'/1 In fact, the forces of state reform and jjllpfcb tradition were more evenly matched than Joseph implied. !*BSIht:sides: had powerful weapons. Vienna could threaten Rome ll|hj|thei?vvithholding of bishops' temporal possessions, even, in extrt-i||||IM;rfr the summons of a council of Austrian bishops independent lifRome along Febronian lines. Rome could hint that Joseph was Ipllowihg: Ltuher's road. Twice a point of confrontation came, illfejerji^he ipope compared Joseph to Martin Luther the Emperor lllffiMlfyi returned the letter to Rome, only to follow it himself in Bpsit of conciliation (1783). Again, when Pius demanded that the fsiSegihimst Bishop of Ljubljana should recant his praise of the Ijlyi implicitly heretical    Toleration Edict, a direct clash was ilfMed by the bishop's timely death (1787). Ultimately, Joseph iSlllpBilhat as a Catholic sovereign he could not push matters to IBfjen split.
l||f§illwih restraint guided his policy towards his domestic opponents. Ifefeprovinces of the monarchy constitute a single whole,' he wrote