Urban Mayer

Urban Mayer OSB (* May 1575 in Altdorf, today Weingarten (Württemberg) ; † October 24, 1613 in Ochsenhausen ) was from 1605 to 1613 the 14th abbot of the imperial abbey of Ochsenhausen in what is now the Biberach district in Upper Swabia .

Life

Urban Mayer was admitted to the monastery on October 28, 1588 at the age of 13. On August 15, 1591, he took the religious vows . Eight years later on July 25, 1599, he read the first Holy Mass . The congregation unanimously elected him abbot on October 5, 1605. Before that he held the offices of cellarer , subprior and twice the office of prior within the monastery .

Dept

His first order was that there be silence during elevation . At lunchtime, the big bell should not ring, but only the normal prayer bell. He introduced a bell to strike every quarter of an hour. He had a music room set up for the musical training of his conventuals. But he also spared no expense for the scientific training of the young monks .

During his tenure, as Geisenhof noted in 1829, " death sentences of old women mistaken for witches were signed ."

On April 29, 1601 two monks drowned, the 25-year-old Arsenius Blank and the 27-year-old Michael Bommel. Both had recently graduated from the university in Dillingen an der Donau . On this day you should assist the monastery fishermen with the duck hunt.

Fruit box, market day, plague and acquisitions

Fruit box

On April 11, 1606 he laid the foundation stone for the fruit box and in October he gave Ochsenhausen permission to hold a weekly market. The fruit box was rebuilt in the same place a hundred years later under Abbot Hieronymus in a much larger form. He supported the construction of the rectory in Achstetten with 300 guilders. During his tenure, the monastery built today's Graf Dinkelmühle in Tannheim in 1610 . In 1612 the plague broke out in the area. A family had been infected in Eichbühl . He ordered a five-hour communal prayer on the feast day of Saint Sebastian , after which the plague was averted. In 1613 the monastery acquired the village of Humratsried and its residents for the purchase price of 29,500 guilders.

During his tenure, the monastery sent monks to Benedictine monasteries in Carinthia and Styria to consolidate monastic discipline there. On October 21, 1613, the abbot developed a vicious fever. Three days later, on October 24, 1613, Abbot Urban Mayer died at the age of 38 and was buried in Ochsenhausen.

literature

• Georg Geisenhof : Brief history of the former Reichsstift Ochsenhausen in Swabia. Ganser, Ottobeuren 1829 ( digitized version ).
• Volker Himmelein (ed.): Old monasteries, new masters. The secularization in the German southwest 1803. Large state exhibition Baden-Württemberg 2003. Thorbecke, Ostfildern 2003, ISBN 3-7995-0212-2 (exhibition catalog and essay volume).
• Volker Himmelein, Franz Quarthal (Ed.): Vorderösterreich, Only the tail feather of the imperial eagle? The Habsburgs in the German southwest. Süddeutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, Ulm 1999, ISBN 3-88294-277-0 (catalog of the state exhibition).
• Elmar Kuhn (Ed.): The Peasants' War in Oberschwaben. Tübingen.
• Heribert Smolinsky : Church history of the modern age. Part 1. 2008.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Georg Geisenhof: Brief history of the former imperial monastery Ochsenhausen in Swabia. Ganser, Ottobeuren 1829, p. 100

predecessor	Office	successor
Christoph Spieß	Abbot of Ochsenhausen 1605–1613	Johannes Lang