2850: Why Croatian Catholics Never Used Latin Oct 9, 2024

One of the defining factors of pre-modern Europe and especially the Catholic church was the proliferation of Latin. Through into the Early Modern period, it was a lingua franca used by all people for academic and other formal writings or procedures. It was even the official language of Hungary into the 19th century.

Croatia used it as well in many of those areas, however, it was the only Catholic region permitted to not use Latin for the liturgy before the 20th century. Instead they used Church Slavonic, that in Eastern Orthodox regions held similar sway to Latin to the West.

Pope Innocent IV (AD 1195 –1254) allowed the Croatians to use Church Slavonic as written in the Glagolitic script, a combination used elsewhere exclusively by the Eastern Orthodox Church. This is especially strange given that Latin was the sole official language of much of what is now Croatia until 1847, so while it was used in legal and academic settings, religious services were conducted in Slavonic. Both were considered dead languages even at the time, but the fact that Church Slavonic was permitted as the only exception to Latin in the Catholic Church was a concession to them as a key borderland territory close to the Italian peninsula that its potential downfall posed a real risk to Rome.