"You Are the Salt of the Earth and the Light of the World": Regulars, Seculars, and the Pastoral Care of New Catholics in the Upper Palatinate During the Thirty Years' War

Abstract

Vos estis sal terro, et lux mundi. So, citing Matthew 5,13 and 14, did the bishop of the south-east German see of Regensburg, Cardinal Franz Wilhelm von Wartenberg, address his diocesan clergy in a vis itation decree of 1658.' For the cardinal, the exemplary, apostolic lives of his parish priests were a precondition for an effective exercise of pastoral ministry. Attainment of this noble ideal might have seemed to him especially urgent, since many of the parishes under the juris diction of the Regensburg ordinary lay in the Upper Palatinate, a territory only recently converted to the Roman Church during the Thirty Years' War. Following an eighty-year period of serial con fessionalisation, embracing both Lutheran and Calvinist reformations, the territory was annexed by the Bavarian Duke Maximilian I in 1621 and, upon imperial confirmation of his possession in 1628, forcibly recatholicised. Superficially, the reconciliation to Rome was a smooth affair, meeting no armed reaction, but rather widespread, if grudging, compliance, save only the passive resistance of a num ber of Protestant burgher and noble families who favoured emigra tion over conversion.2 Nonetheless, there remained a population