CLERICALISM AND COMMUNALISM

On April 16, 1764 the neighboring communes of Langenschemmern and Aufhofen in Upper Swabia wrote a long letter to the Bishop of Constance. The community leaders protested an episcopal ordinance that forbade church services in Langenschemmern on Easter Sunday and on a number of other high feast days of the Catholic calendar. The decree ordered that the villagers attend these services in the church in the neighboring village of Schemmerberg. But these peasants wanted to hear Mass and receive communion in their own village church on the most important day of the Christian calendar.

The residents of Langenschemmern and Aufhofen, like many other peasants in Southwest Germany, lived in a so-called filial parish. By the mid-eighteenth century there was a priest living in Langenschemmern, but he was only a chaplain (Kaplan), and the legally recognized parish priest resided in Schemmerberg, about fifteen kilometers away. This priest and the patron of the parish, the Cistercian monastery of Salem, asserted the ancient rights of the “mother church.”