After the parish was established in 1777, worship services were organ- ized in all the three languages due to the multilingual composition of the population – Italian, Slovenian, and German. The first parish priest, Filip Frölich, regulated pastoral activities in his instructions from 1785 and emphasized the need for priests who were proficient in the Carn- iolan (Slovenian) language. Two newly discovered documents from the Trieste diocesan archives – a prayer form in Slovenian and a Latin list of priestly duties – testify that Slovenian was a living part of the religious and everyday life of the parishioners. The text of the prayer, written in Bohorič alphabet, contains distinct Carniolan dialect features. The article thus reveals that the use of Slovenian in a church context was self-evident in the 18th century, although it was forcibly removed from the use in church in the 20th century and only returned there after the end of World War II.
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