Melchior Schäferhoff
Melchior Schäferhoff SOCist (partly also Schefferhoff ) (born April 11, 1747 in Westönnen , † September 6, 1821 in Mülheim (Möhne)) was under the religious name Laurentius III. from 1790 to 1804 the 50th and last abbot of the Cistercian monastery in Bredelar .
Life
Melchior Schäferhoff came from the Westönner branch of an old Westphalian large farmer family from Sieveringen (today the municipality of Ense / Soest district). He was the eldest of six children of the Westönner Küster Melchior Schäferhoff and his wife Anna Clara Maria geb. Henning was born on April 11, 1747. On April 15, 1747 he was baptized in the Catholic parish church of St. Cäcilia zu Westönnen . Like his father and grandfather Johann (also Küster zu Westönnen from 1723 to 1740) he attended the Laurentianum grammar school in Arnsberg.
Admission into the religious community
On April 19, 1766 he was accepted into the religious community of the Cistercian monks and received the religious name Laurentius. After training and taking his vows, he was ordained a priest in 1771. After that he was initially entrusted with the administration of smaller monastery offices. So he served as assistant sexton, sexton and refectory administrator of the religious order. From 1778 he took over the pastor's position at Bontkirchen , which also included the post of tithe director at Messinghausen . From 1781 he was tithe director at Korbach and from 1788 at Brilon .
Although the abbot of the Hardehausen mother monastery, as father abbot, had the right to lead the election of a new abbot in the Bredelar daughter monastery, the Archbishop of Cologne and Elector Maximilian Franz of Austria defied this right in 1790 and sent the Freusberg clergy to Bredelar to vote to lead. This had become necessary because on January 24, 1790 Abbot Joseph Kropff died in the middle of the construction work on the monastery, which was burned to the ground by a fire in March 1787. The Abbot from Hardehausen initially protested against this procedure and the interference with the rights of the Cistercians, arguing that they were not subordinate to the archbishop, but only to the Pope. However, the elector did not care about the defense and let the Bredelar brothers carry out the election on May 11, 1790. This fell to the 43-year-old friar Melchior Schäferhoff, who thus became Laurentius III. became the 50th abbot of the monastery.
Term of office as dept
One of his first official acts was certainly the continuation and completion of the construction activities in the monastery. At the same time, however, he also had to ensure that a new order from the Archbishop of Cologne was implemented, which was supposed to counteract the gradual decline of customs in the monastery. At the same time as the new abbot was elected, he wanted to give the monastery a new internal order and structure. It concerned not only the official business of the abbot, but also the redistribution of the monastic offices and their responsibilities. A monastery chapter, consisting of the abbot as ruler and the ten oldest monastery brothers, should also be established. The decision of this body should itself be able to override the decision of the abbot. As sensible as this new order was certain to be at a time of considerable political and social upheaval, it obviously could not be implemented without resistance. In 1796 there was a heated argument about this between Abbot Laurentius and the friars, who were apparently increasingly demanding their new rights against him. The abbot then sued the entire convent and successfully enforced his traditional rights with the Archbishop of Cologne. The archbishop's order of 1790 was no longer valid and was accordingly withdrawn. This decision was certainly detrimental to the unity and peace of the monastic community and it is later reported that afterwards there was increased disagreement and intrigue.
This seemingly unbridgeable gap between tradition and modernity proved difficult not only in Bredelar. Other monasteries were also affected by the upheaval and the liberal ideas of this time. Abbot Lawrence III was like that. Already in October 1790 the Elector sent him to the Cistercian convent Himmelpforten as archbishop commissioner . Here he implemented liberal reforms that had failed in a previous reform attempt, triggered by dissonances between the conventual women and the choir maiden Wilhelmina Iskenius, by the archbishop's visitor Neesen. The Himmelpfort abbess Clementine Todt and the conventuals had initially vehemently defended their traditional order against Neesen. Abbot Laurentius modified the reformed set of rules that had already been submitted by Neesen or softened it in parts, so that the nuns subsequently gave up their resistance to it. Likewise, he apparently implemented the archbishop's instruction not to accept any new conventuals and lay sisters in full.
In March 1792 Laurentius traveled to his hometown Westönnen , because on March 24th, the Westönner church book reported the acceptance of his sponsorship at the baptism of Melchior Adam Böckmann, the son of his sister Clara Angela and his brother-in-law Heinrich Böckmann called Luigsmöller.
retirement
When, on October 17, 1803, Landgrave Ludwig X of Hessen-Darmstadt, as the new sovereign of the Duchy of Westphalia, ordered the abolition of all monasteries, Bredelar was also affected. After the secularization, Abbot Laurentius received a pension salary of 1,600 florins a year. This would have been 400 florins higher according to the legal ordinances of the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss . However, Laurentius had initially refused to draw up the legal and property status as well as the library directory in the transition period of the dissolution of the monastery. It was only when he was threatened with fixing his pension at only 500 florins if he continued to refuse that he provided the records.
At the beginning of 1804 Bredelar's last abbot left the monastery and moved to Mülheim / Möhne to join the order of the German order . There he died of old age on September 6, 1821 at the age of 74. He was buried on September 8th in the crypt of the knights in the Catholic parish church of St. Margaretha in Mülheim by Franz Drepper , the Mülheim pastor and later bishop of Paderborn.
Afterlife
During church renovations in 1938 (heating installation), the remains of the seven knights resting here and the abbot were reburied and reburied in the immediate vicinity of the church in the old cemetery in Mülheim. The memory of this has been recorded in an inscription on the back of the old cemetery cross. It is:
“The last abbot of the Cisterz rests here. Bredelar Monastery Prelate ( Prelate ) Laurentius Schäferhoff + 9/6/1821 With the dead of this sacred area, d future resurrection of German knights who were first buried in the parish church's former death cellar. Rip ( Requiescat in pace ) "
The Abtsstab with artistic crookedness , which was bought by his predecessor Joseph Kropff and he has taken apparently, is now in the Hessian State Museum in Darmstadt . A note in the Arnsberg-Wedinghausen Propsteiarchiv provides further information about the pectoral cross ( pectoral ) . There it says on April 3, 1822: "The government informs the pastor (Friedrich Adolf) Sauer that the king has approved the sale of the pectoral cross of Abbot Schäferhoff von Bredelar in favor of the parish church".
swell
- State Archives Münster, Foreign Archives, Hessen III (files and documents of the monastery)
- Möhrichen, Petrus: Catalogus nomina reverendissimorum patrum ac fratrum continens qui from anno 1600 in libero ac exempto monasterio beatae Mariae virginis de Bredelaria S. Cisterciensis ordinis professi sunt, State Archives Münster, Mscr. VII 5742
- Archive of the municipality of Ense: visitation protocols of the Himmelpforten monastery in 1790
- Finding aid Propsteiarchiv Arnsberg-Wedinghausen
literature
- Seibertz, Johann Suibert: History of the Bredelar Abbey ; In: Historical - geographical - statistical - literary yearbook for Westphalia and the Lower Rhine I. Coesfeld 1817, pages 82–165
- Josef Hennecke: The history of the monastery Bredelar (printing and publishing house Heinrich Boxberger), Niedermarsberg 1937
- Bernd Follmann: Laurentius Schefferhoff - the last abbot of the Bredelar monastery; In: Journal of the Sauerländer Heimatbund, Issue 3 / September 2003
- Christian Loefke / Guido Schäferhoff: The parish priest family von Steinen; In: Contributions to Westphalian family research, vol. 55, page 146 ff, Münster 1997
- Guido Schäferhoff: Brief history of the Schäferhoff family; In: Communications from the Werler Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Familienforschung, 1997
- Schoppmeier, Heinrich: The history of the parish and coming Mülheim ; In: The history of the communities Sichtigvor, Mülheim, Waldhausen - Balve 1968
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Schäferhoff, Melchior |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Abbot of the Bredelar Monastery |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 11, 1747 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Westönnen |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 6, 1821 |
| Place of death | Muhlheim |