Roman Catholic Diocese of Lavant

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The Diocese of Lavant (also Lavanttal, Latin: Lavantina) was a suffragan bishopric of the Archdiocese of Salzburg, established in 1228 in the Lavant Valley of Carinthia.

In 1859 the episcopal see was re-assigned to Maribor (Marburg an der Drau) in present-day Slovenia, while the Carinthian parishes passed to the Diocese of Gurk. The diocese became the Diocese of Maribor (Marburg, in Slovenia), separated from the Salzburg ecclesiastical province, and became a suffragan of the Archbishop of Ljubljana on 5 March 1962. The Bishop of Maribor kept the additional title of Bishop of Lavant. On 7 April 2006 the Diocese of Maribor was elevated to an archdiocese.

While the bishops of Lavant bore the title of prince-bishops (German: Fürstbischof), this was purely honorary and they never became full-fledged prince-bishops with secular power over a self-ruling prince-bishopric (Hochstift), unlike the majority of the bishops in the Holy Roman Empire. They only exercised pastoral authority over their diocese like other ordinary bishops and for that reason, they did not have seat and vote in the Imperial Diet.