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Today the Cyrillic script is used by the East Slavs, such as the Russians and the Bulgarians, but the West Slavs (e.g. the Czechs, the Poles) and some South Slavs (e.g. the Croats, the Slovenes) use the Latin script.

I know that the Croats, for example, used to use the Cyrillic script, but I'm wondering whether all the Slavic people used the Cyrillic script at some point in their history? Is the reason why some of them displaced the Cyrillic script the fact that the it was connected to Orthodox Christianity while they were/are mostly Catholics?

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    If you look at the religious preferences as compared with alphabetic preferences, you see a lot of evidence for a Catholic/Orthodox ~ Latin/Cyrillic parallelism. No doubt it's more complex than that; but the distinction has persisted for centuries.
    – jlawler
    Jul 27, 2019 at 16:19
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    Another important data point: Romanian (Orthodox but not Slavic) used Cyrillic for a time.
    – Adam Bittlingmayer
    Jul 29, 2019 at 21:40
  • @AdamBittlingmayer: That's because Romanians, who possessed no writing system of their own, were surrounded by Slavs.
    – Lucian
    Aug 2, 2019 at 14:03

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It is worth noting, that before the Cyrillic script there was the Glagolitic script used to write Old Church Slavonic. This is the script devised by Cyrill and Method, the Cyrillic script is a reform of the Glagolitic script. The Glagolitic script survived longest in Croatia where it was used for liturgical purposes.

Whether there was a pre-Christian writing system for some Slavic languages or not, and how it might have worked is unclear and left to further research.

In summary:

The first wide-spread writing system for Old Church Slavonic was Glagolitic. In the orthodox parts, it was replaced by Cyrillic, in Croatia it continued until it was rather lately replaced by Latin writing. Other Slavic speaking areas were converted to Christianity by catholic missionaries and had Latin writing from the beginning.

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    The Cyrillic script is basically the Greek alphabet, with a a few extra letters for non-Greek (distinctly Slavic) sounds; hardly a reform of the Glagolitic script.
    – Lucian
    Aug 2, 2019 at 14:00
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    I think the purpose of the reform was aligning the letter shapes with Greek ones, the order of the alphabet is mainly untouched compared to Glagolitic.
    – Sir Cornflakes
    Aug 2, 2019 at 14:16
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    Thanks for clarifying. Though, given that the Glagolitic script bears no meaningful resemblance to any other, alignment seems almost like a euphemism.
    – Lucian
    Aug 2, 2019 at 14:21
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but I'm wondering whether all the Slavic people used the Cyrillic script at some point in their history?

Even if we include the Early Cyrillic alphabet, which according to Wikipedia was commissioned in the 9th century AD, then the Slavic language family predates the alphabet by around two thousand years.

The secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE

This means that many languages/dialects/etc would have been spoken without ever having been written down in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Take for example Czech: It's earliest records are from around the 12th century. The earliest forms are written in a Latin orthography (though very different from today's). The Latin alphabet also took hold in neighbouring Poland, having been brought there by Christians, or by them that translated early Latin texts, as the first way to record the Polish language.

So the answer to your question is no, not all Slavic people used the Cyrillic alphabet.

Is the reason why some of them displaced the Cyrillic script the fact that the it was connected to Orthodox Christianity while they were/are mostly Catholics?

Not (quite) so. At least in the Lechitic, Bohemian, Moravian areas, Catholicism did not displace Orthodoxy, it displaced some kind of Paganism. Catholicism, having Latin as a liturgical language, of course brought with it the Latin alphabet.

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