To view the church-state problem from Vienna in 1900 is to view it from the capital of an ancient Catholic state in a multiethnic cultural arena, a world in which Catholicism strove, at least officially, to be supranational, and in which, although there was no Catholic nation, there was a preeminent and distinguished Catholic dynasty. This was a world in which large numbers of Austrians—many of them in rural areas—continued to affirm popular religious affections and loyalties throughout the century—values and practices that if not always consonant with official Catholic doctrine, at least afforded the hierarchical church and sympathetic aristocratic and bourgeois elites the ready opportunity to claim Catholicism as not only a historic and true but also a public and mass religion. At the same time, the long-term heritage of Josephinist state control of the church had powerful negative effects on active religiosity and religious identity, especially among the emergent Bürgertum and urban inhabitants of the monarchy. The Concordat of 1855—coming after the failed revolution of 1848–49 and on the heels of the imposition of neoabsolutist rule—was an imprudent decision precisely because it alienated both the Josephinist state and incipient bürgerlich society.