Official parish (Hochstift Hildesheim)
Official parish was a term used in the Hildesheim Monastery after the Thirty Years' War for Catholic country parishes with seat in prince-bishop's castles, the official seats, and field monasteries. Their territories included entire administrative districts , but the majority of the population and the historic village churches in these parts of the country were Lutheran .
This situation was a consequence of the Hildesheim collegiate feud , which shortly before the Reformation had led to the reduction of the Hildesheim collegiate area by around three quarters, and the restitution of the bishopric to almost the same extent in 1643. The regained areas were not allowed to be recatholicized ; The normal year 1624 was used for denominational ownership in the empire . With the official parishes, the sovereign created a parallel Catholic structure in the areas of his territory that had become Lutheran. In order to increase the Catholic population, he promoted the settlement of people from the "small monastery" that remained Catholic, as well as from Westphalia, the Rhineland and the Dutch province of Limburg. However, their number remained comparatively small.
Seat of an official parish were
- the episcopal castles and official seats
literature
- Franz Kaufmann: The establishment of the official parishes in Hildesheim in 1667 , in: Die Diözese Hildesheim 3, 1929, pp. 78–88