Bernhard August Prestinari

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Bernhard August Prestinari Source: LA BW 231 No. 2937 (292) (excerpt)

Bernhard August Prestinari (born December 9, 1811 in Bruchsal ; † March 1, 1893 in Karlsruhe ) was a lawyer , director of the Catholic upper church council in Karlsruhe, court president in Constance and a member of the Baden parliament in both chambers.

Life

Some members of the Northern Italian Prestinari family emigrated from Sala on Lake Como to southern Germany at the beginning of the 18th century . When Bernhard August Prestinari was born in Bruchsal on December 9, 1811, the Prestinari family had arrived and integrated well in their new home. In 1819 the father Franz Prestinari found himself in Bruchsal as one of 32 electors for the election to the second chamber of the Baden state estates and was married to Anna Siegel, the daughter of a government director in Mannheim .

Bernhard August Prestinari married Luitgarde Mosthaf, the daughter of a government director from Ellwangen , in 1838 . With her he had three daughters. His daughter Sophie was married to the hydraulic engineer and later Minister of Finance of Baden, Max Honsell . In 1868 he was one of the founding members of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings .

After a long, eventful career as a civil servant in the Grand Duchy of Baden , he retired in Karlsruhe, where he died on March 1, 1893.

career

Bernhard August Prestinari was accepted into the Baden service in 1833, when he had completed a law degree in Heidelberg and successfully passed the state examination . After stints in Bruchsal, Mannheim and Rastatt , he became Ministerialrat in the Ministry of Justice at the beginning of the revolutionary year of 1848 . In the same year, the Bruchsal district elected him as a member of the second chamber of the Baden state parliament. He represented his hometown there for 20 years, six of them (1854 to 1860) as 2nd deputy chairman. The turmoil of the revolution brought him into a first conflict of loyalty in May 1849. Grand Duke Leopold had fled to Koblenz and the revolutionary leaders demanded that the remaining officials take an oath to the new revolutionary government. Prestinari, according to his own statements, did not want to "leave the entire material administration to the revolution" and decided, together with a number of other ministerial officials, to take the oath with the addition "without prejudice to my obligation under the state constitution". In fact, this decision did not lead to a slump in career after the revolution had been violently suppressed by the Prussian army and the old order was restored.

After a short stopover as Chairman of the Council at the Court Court in Bruchsal, the President of the Ministry of Justice approached him in 1852 with the request to take over the office of President of the Catholic Upper Church Council. At this point in time, the first faults between the ( evangelical ) sovereign and the diocese in Freiburg had already arisen. These problems grew from the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803, in which Baden was added to large parts of formerly Catholic areas. Prestinari was chosen because you need a man for this position

"Who has the trust of the church as well as the government [and thereby] could do a great deal to establish and maintain a peaceful relationship between state and church that is desirable for all parties."

That he was aware of the difficulties that the new office would bring with it becomes clear from the letter to the Archbishop's Ordinariate with which he announces his assumption of office:

“[..] I will sacredly respect the rights of the Church as well as of the State. If the limits of mutual rights were clear and defined, my office would be easy; it is difficult because they are at odds. "

And it was going to be a fight. It went down in the history books as the Badischer Kirchenstreit or Badischer Kulturkampf and anticipated much that was taken up again 20 years later for the entire German Empire in the Kulturkampf . Incidentally, it seems that Bismarck played a leading role in the Baden church dispute. For Prestinari, the dispute quickly had personal consequences. On November 15, 1853, Archbishop Hermann von Vicari excommunicated Prestinari and all members of the Catholic Church Council. For the believing and up to then actively practicing Catholic Christian Prestinari, this not only meant that he was excluded from worship and the celebration of the Eucharist. The excommunication also meant that officially no Catholic Christian was allowed to associate with him voluntarily without putting himself in the danger of pulling the little excommunication on himself. Christoph Schmider shows in his essay how the archbishop's ordinariate was willing to enforce these rules. In March 1854, it made the pastor of the Wiesental community aware that all Catholic dignitaries who had participated in an official banquet with the excommunicated Oberkirchenrat Meier had to be partially excommunicated. In this case, this would exceptionally be refrained from because the accused would be assumed to be ignorant. After negotiations on a convention between the Grand Duchy of Baden and the Vatican had been concluded, Bernhard August Prestinari applied for the position of President of the Constance Court, which he was awarded in 1860 and which he filled until his retirement in 1879. Ten years before his retirement, the Ministry of Justice tried to persuade him to change to the position of President of the Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, which Prestinari refused.

The Grand Duke appointed him a member of the first chamber for the Landtag in 1879/80; he had to refuse an extension of this membership for health reasons.

literature

  • Richard Schneider, article Bernhard August Prestinari, in: Badische Biographien, Part V. 1891-1901. Edited by Friedrich von Weech and Albert Krieger. Winter, Heidelberg 1906, p. 599ff ( digitized version ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The state constitutional document for the Grand Duchy of Baden: together with the documents belonging to it. Karlsruhe; 1819; P. 165. online , accessed: September 11, 2018
  2. ^ Association for the history of Lake Constance and its surroundings, statutes and list of members from December 1868: Stadtarchiv Lindau, B II / 85/4, acts of the city council, subject Bodensee-Geschichts-Verein, Tit. IV., Cap. 11, compartment 85, act 4.
  3. ^ Obituary, Karlsruher Zeitung, No. 62 of March 3, 1893, Karlsruhe, p. 4 online
  4. ^ Richard Schneider, article Bernhard August Prestinari, in: Badische Biographien, V. Teil 1891–1901, Heidelberg 1906. S. 605. online , accessed on September 11, 2018
  5. ↑ quoted from the EAF (Archbishop's Archive Freiburg) Nb 3/15 23.8.1852 after Christoph Schmider, article: Official duty or Kirchentreue, Bernhard August Prestinari (1811-1893) and the 'Baden church dispute', in: Between 'Staatsanstalt' and self-determination , Church and State in Southwest Germany from the End of the Old Empire to 1870, Stuttgart; 2000; Pp. 141-164
  6. ^ Heinrich Brück, History of the Catholic Church in Germany in the Nineteenth Century, Third Volume, Second Edition, Münster iW, 1905, pp. 135ff
  7. ↑ Christoph Schmider, essay: Official duty or church loyalty, Bernhard August Prestinari (1811-1893) and the 'Baden church dispute', in: Between 'Staatsanstalt' and self-determination, church and state in southwest Germany from the end of the Old Reich to 1870, Stuttgart; 2000; P. 147
personal data
SURNAME Prestinari, Bernhard August
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer in Baden
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1811
PLACE OF BIRTH Bruchsal
DATE OF DEATH March 1, 1893
Place of death Karlsruhe