SANKT PÖLTEN (Saint Hippolytus), Diocese of. - City and diocese in western Lower Austria, suffragan of Vienna.
The diocese has an area of 10,450 sq. km. with 630,600 inhabitants, of whom only about 25,000 are non-Catholics; 411 parishes distributed among 26 deaneries, with numerous regular clergy, one major seminary and three minor ones. All the most important orders are represented in the diocese; worthy of note is the mother house of the English Ladies of Sankt Pölten, founded in 1706 in a noble Baroque palace, which through its 13 houses exercises a profound educational influence.
S. I. is the Roman "Aelium Cetium" that survived in the town of Theissa (from the nearby river) of 799, which then took its present name from the monastery of St. Hippolytus, founded in 748 and rebuilt after the Magyar devastations in 955. With city rights in 1159 and 1338, S. I. had its greatest cultural flowering in the 18th century, as the birthplace of great artists such as the architects G. Prandtauer and Mungenst and the painters D. Gran and B. Altomonte, who left their mark there in countless ecclesiastical and secular works. In 1081 the monastery of S. I. passed to the Canons Regular of St. Augustine, who remained there until the time of Joseph II. The latter, continuing his ecclesiastical administrative reconstruction, transferred there in 1774 the seat of the diocese of Wiener-Neustadt; the church of the suppressed monastery became the cathedral (Mary Assumed); the vast convent buildings became the episcopal palace. Pius VI, by bull of 28 Jan. 1774, sanctioned the imperial measure, by which the jurisdiction of Passau ceased in Austrian territory.
The cathedral dates back to 1150, but was rebuilt with Gothic elements after 1267 and reduced to grandiose Baroque forms by Prandtauer, with frescoes by Gran and Altomonte. Beneath the Gothic side chapel of the Rosary a grandiose Roman structure has recently been discovered.
Among the 8 great abbeys in the diocese, mention should be made of Melk, Göttweig, Seitenstetten (Benedictines), Lilienfeld, and Zwettl (Cistercians); among the most notable monuments are the former Charterhouse of Gaming, the former abbey church of the Canons Regular at Dürnstein, some churches of the ancient town of Krems, the Shrine of Maria Taferl on the Danube. - See plate CXX.
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Giuseppe Löw