Who Gets to Pick the Priest? Bregenz Remembers Its Church

Sometimes an archival document tells you about the period when it was written.

Sometimes it tells you about the period it remembers.

And sometimes it rummages through two and a half centuries of church history because somebody in 1658 is annoyed about those over-reaching monks over at Mehrerau.

This is one of those latter documents.

I was working through material connected with the parish church of St Gall in Bregenz when I came across a memorandum recorded at the Rathaus on 18 February 1658. (Thank you, Florian Guggenberger, for the ready access to the Stadtarchiv materials on VERY short notice earlier this summer!)

This document is, on first encounter, a list of priests: Joß Laimbthebler in 1401; Simon Amma[n] in 1475; Peter “Noth” in 1483 and 1490; Hans Berlinger in 1509, 1519, and 1527; Claus Arger in 1541; Michael Geiger in 1575; Ferdinand von der Tannen in 1585; and then a rather messier succession of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century clergy.

Lists! I like lists. I have, in fact, spent a slightly alarming amount of time reconstructing the chaplains, prebendaries, priests, and pastors who served medieval Bregenz. (Stay tuned, that article on Bregenz Chaplains is coming soon to a Florilegium issue near you!)

But this document is not really a list.

It is an argument.

And the argument is really about who gets to control a parish.

STAGE ONE: Ecclesiastical Spaghetti

The medieval parish church of St Gall had accumulated a complicated set of institutional relationships.

The parish church of St Gall stood within a complex web of monastic patronage and ecclesiastical rights, including important connections to the Benedictine abbey of Mehrerau. The parish was served by a succession of Leutpriester or Pfarrer, while the high-altar Pfründner – the benefice holder who was functionally the parish's “Number Two” priest – was under the patronage of the Premonstratensian abbey of Weißenau (Minderau). It’s like if Picard and Riker had different bosses. Weird, hunh?

To emphasize that reality: the pastor of the parish was historically a secular priest (with a few exceptions), not simply a monk sent over from the abbey. Mehrerau had important rights in relation to the parish, but – as we are about to see – exactly what those rights entitled the monastery to do was still being argued about in the seventeenth century.

His “second,” on the other hand, was another important clerical position at St Gall, the high-altar prebend or Pfründe. This role belonged to an entirely different monastic orbit. Its patronage rights lay with the Premonstratensian abbey of Weißenau, also called “Minderau” in the local sources. My reconstruction of the Bregenz clergy follows Weißenau canons through that benefice for generations. Moreover, the monastery not only presented candidates; its own members repeatedly served as Bregenz Pfründner.

So, very roughly, our characters so far are:

Bregenz: parish community with a long history of secular parish priests.

Mehrerau: important rights over the parish.

Weißenau: rights over the separate high-altar Pfründe.

Everyone clear?

Excellent.

Now let us spend two centuries arguing about it.

The arrangement was old enough that in 1390 Jakob vom Tor, then Bregenz Pfründner, was already fighting with Weißenau about whether the monastery had to provide firewood for a room associated with his benefice.

Never let it be said that medieval ecclesiastical jurisdiction was all theology and canon law. Sometimes it is also: who owes me firewood?

STAGE 2: We enter the seventeenth century

By the later sixteenth century, these old divisions of authority were being reformulated.

In 1581, the abbots of Mehrerau and Weißenau made formal arrangements concerning their respective Bregenz rights. Then, in 1610, Mehrerau purchased Weißenau's right to place clerics in the high-altar Pfründe outright.

That transaction matters.

But it did not automatically give Mehrerau the right to put one of its own monks into the separate office of parish priest.

And that distinction is precisely where our 1658 document gets interesting.

The memorandum opens by insisting that the Bregenz pastors had historically been weltliche Priester, that is, secular priests, also known as Leutpriester. (A secular priest is a Catholic priest who serves in the ordinary life of a diocese or parish rather than belonging to a monastic or religious order such as the Benedictines or Franciscans.) The document’s compiler says this can be demonstrated authentically from numerous sealed parchment charters and open instruments, and then starts producing his receipts from the past.

In 1401: Joß Laimbthebler.

In 1475: Magister Simon Amma[n].

In 1483 and 1490: Magister Peter “Noth”—almost certainly Peter Rott, whose surname the seventeenth-century reader has misread.

In 1509, 1519, and 1527: Johannes Berlinger.

In 1541: Claus Arger.

In 1575: Michael Geiger.

The compiler is not collecting a list of priests just because priests are interesting (though they can be).

He is establishing custom.

For generations, he argues, the people exercising the cure of souls at Bregenz were secular clergy.

Plus, he supplements his claims with reference to an alphabet soup of documents. Joß Laimbthebler “accepted the obligation for the Metzger anniversary. (Ref. J).” Simon Amman served in 1475 “(according to document B).” And so on. When I say he brought his receipts, well, he sure did reference them. Though as is the way of such things, the appendices have gone missing from the record. But his allusions to external documents sure SOUND like proof is being provided.

STAGE THREE: When parchment gives out, ask the old people

Eventually, of course, the documentary trail becomes patchier.

And this is where the memorandum proves delightful.

Its compiler turns to people who remembered the priests.

One witness, Georg Hüglin, was 94 years old.

His recollections are not always chronologically precise, and the compiler knows it. He remarks that people remembered these priests and had known them personally but could no longer recall the exact years reliably enough to write them down:

Doch bis dato die eigentliche Zeit und Jahr noch nicht erkundiget werden mögen, denn die Leute, so dessen zwar wohl gedachten und sie gekannt, können sich jedoch der Zeit nicht so gewiss [erinnern], dass man's schreiben könne.

But up to the present the precise times and years have not been ascertained, for although the people remembered them well and had known them, they could not remember the dates with sufficient certainty for them to be written down.

That distinction – we know the man was here; we don't know exactly when – is rather sophisticated historical practice for 1658.

Hüglin remembers, for instance, the earliest Bregenz pastor he could recall, a man associated somehow with Bildstein and “den man genent Lörman” – “whom they called Lörman.” Alas, I have not yet identified him.

Others of his remembered (secular) priests appear under uncertain names: one looks tantalizingly like Uli Egg; another is the already independently documented Moises Hagen/Haag.

These are precisely the sorts of clerics who fall through institutional lists. And that matters to me; I have worked hard in that Florilegium article to reconstructs the much larger clerical world surrounding St Gall: chaplains, prebendaries, altar priests, assistants, and other men whose relationship to the parish was more complicated than a tidy succession of pastors.

To my eye, this new document effectively catches seventeenth-century Bregenz trying to do some of the same prosopographical work.

But for completely different reasons.

STAGE FOUR: Apparently Kaspar Schmidt's sermons were not a hit

And then, on the next page, we get to the gossip.

Or, more fairly, to the oral historical testimony, some of it reinforced by a secondary witness.

Kaspar Schmidt became Bregenz pastor in 1589. A surviving description of the parish income, written by Schmidt himself on 22 July 1594, says that he was then in his fifth-going-on-sixth year and intended to leave.

The 1658 testimony, however, tells us why some people remembered him leaving:

der Schmid im praedigen nit angenemb gewesen

Schmidt had been “not pleasing/acceptable in preaching.”

His sermons, apparently, were not to Bregenz parishoners’ taste.

As a result, our document explains, the prelate moved Schmidt to Grünenbach, and Andreas Krafft came to Bregenz.

This is a tiny piece of evidence, but I love it because it restores something that institutional histories often flatten out. Parishioners actually listened to sermons. They evaluated. They had expectations.

And apparently they could make their dissatisfaction consequential enough that somebody rearranged the clergy appointments!

The timing makes the story especially intriguing. Schmidt was preparing to leave in 1594, precisely when Catholic institutions around Bregenz were undergoing intensified post-Tridentine reform. At nearby Thalbach, for instance, a visitation in 1594 was followed in 1595 by substantial reforms of the sisters' liturgical practice.

To be honest, I do not know what Bregenz disliked about Schmidt's preaching. Perhaps he was insufficiently reformist. Perhaps he was too reformist. Perhaps he was doctrinally tedious. Perhaps he had all the charisma of damp wool.

The document doesn't tell us.

But it does tell us that preaching mattered enough to be remembered more than sixty years later as the reason for replacing a priest. And that’s an interesting historical factoid all its own!

STAGE FIVE: And then everything gets more complicated

Righto. So, one of the curiosities of our unfolding saga is that Krafft was not another secular priest.

He was a conventual of Mehrerau.

The memorandum documents him serving the Bregenz parish in 1602. Later, after the secular priest Ulrich Stueff had served and then gone to Wasserburg, another Mehrerau conventual, Michael Boner, apparently came onto the parish.

So if the old Bregenz custom was secular Leutpriester, what were Mehrerau monks doing there?

Temporary permissions, apparently. Or, as my administratively inclined self would say: “waivers.”

The memorandum cites a letter of 31 January 1619 from the episcopal authorities at Constance. From it, the writer says, it appears that Mehrerau sought to have prolonged for several years an indult allowing the abbey to have the Bregenz parish served by one of its conventuals.

And at this point our 1658 writer positively pounces on this simple but telling detail, switching from German into Latin. (You can almost hear his excitement!)

Ergo ex propria confessione.

By your own admission.

The logic here is deliciously straightforward:

If staffing Bregenz with Mehrerau monks was your ancient and permanent right, why were you asking the bishop in 1619 to extend your permission to do it?

STAGE FIVE-AND-A-HALF: Buying one job does not get you the other one

This becomes even more pointed when placed beside the Pfründe.

Weißenau's association with that benefice remained active surprisingly late. Sebastian Reck, a Weißenau monk, was formally invested in half the Bregenz Pfründe in 1563 and was still Pfründpriester in 1570. Thomas Lachmair, another Weißenau monk, appears as Pfründpriester zu Bregenz in 1573. Mathias Bildstein, a Bregenz-born Premonstratensian associated with Weißenau, is the next documented holder in 1591.

Then came the 1610 purchase.

Mehrerau acquired Weißenau's presentation rights to the high-altar prebend.

Fine.

But, importantly, the Pfründner was not the Pfarrer.

Nine years after buying one permanent appointment right, Mehrerau was apparently still asking Constance to prolong a temporary permission concerning the other.

That, I think, is the constitutional distinction around which the 1658 memorandum revolves.

Or, put less constitutionally:

Congratulations on buying the Pfründe. The town would like to remind you that this does not mean you own all the priests.

TAKE-AWAY #1: Why remember 1401 in 1658?

Because institutional memory is power.

By 1658, the town was not simply interested in antiquarian trivia about Joß Laimbthebler, Simon Amma[n], Peter Rott, or Johannes Berlinger.

It needed them. It needed their history.

Each dead priest became evidence.

The parchment charter from 1401 mattered because it demonstrated what Bregenz believed its church had once been. So did the documents from 1475, 1483, 1490, 1509, 1519, 1527, 1541, and 1575.

When the parchment evidence thinned, the memories of elderly townspeople extended the chain.

And when Mehrerau's own paperwork supplied the word indultum, the town turned the monastery's archive against it.

This is church history being made into legal argument.

TAKE-AWAY #2: Reform is not a straight line

It is tempting to describe post-Tridentine Catholic reform as a movement toward centralized authority: standardized liturgy, disciplined clergy, regulated religious communities, stronger institutional oversight.

There is plenty of that here.

At Thalbach, the sisters themselves experienced reform directly in 1595, when they took on the Roman Breviary. Their later institutional culture remained deeply attentive to proper worship. Maria Euphrosina Vöglin, Maisterin from 1683 to 1713, was praised precisely because she ensured that divine service was performed properly, attending particularly to music and chant; she also navigated the financial and political relationships necessary to keep the community functioning.

But the Bregenz parish dispute reminds us that “reform” did not simply mean authority flowing downward from Rome to bishop to monastery to obedient local Christians.

Authority was being renegotiated sideways.

Between town and abbey.

Between Mehrerau and Weißenau.

Between secular priests and religious clergy.

Between parishioners and the men preaching at them.

Between episcopal privilege and local custom.

Even between documentary memory and living memory.

And the institutional rearrangement unfolded gradually. In 1581, Mehrerau and Weißenau formalized the division of rights. In 1610, Mehrerau bought Weißenau's Pfründner rights. In 1619, it still sought episcopal extension of permission to place a conventual in the parish office. In 1639, its privileges were confirmed. And in 1658, Bregenz was still arguing about what all of that actually meant.

That is not a clean transition.

It is negotiation.

TAKE-AWAY #3: The priests behind the list

There is another reason this document arrived at a particularly good moment for me.

I have just finished page proofs for an article reconstructing Bregenz's chaplains and ecclesiastical benefices. That project began from the problem that a parish church was never just its parish priest. St Gall supported an extraordinary ecology of clerics attached to altars, chapels, charitable foundations, and subsidiary benefices.

The surviving evidence makes those men visible unevenly.

And now, too late to sneak into the article – because of course this is when archives produce the really juicy document – I have found Bregenz itself attempting a reconstruction of its clergy.

But the town's question is different from mine.

I asked:

Who served this church, and what did they do?

The compiler of 1658 asked:

Who served this church, and how do their identities prove who has the right to control it?

Same priests.

Same archive.

Different stakes.

And that difference is useful.

My forthcoming article reconstructs the ecclesiastical machinery of medieval and early modern Bregenz from the surviving traces of the people who operated it. The 1658 memorandum, on the other hand, shows what happened when that machinery itself became historical evidence.

Two hundred and fifty years of priests were summoned into a seventeenth-century argument.

Even the one whose sermons nobody liked.

And somewhere behind the whole dispute I can still hear Jakob vom Tor, back in 1390, asking Weißenau to send firewood for the cold, cold winters.

Over the years, the questions have changed. The institutional arrangements have changed. Even the uses of the past have changed. But those arguments left traces – and, fortunately for us, Bregenz kept the receipts. 

---

WORKS CONSULTED:

Bregenz, Stadtarchiv Historische Akten 516 (In Bregenz tätig oder ansässig gewesene katholische Priester, 1491-1926), Document 5: “Protocoll vnd bericht die succession der pfarrherren zu Bregenz betr. de 18. febri 1658 beschreiben.” [Record and report describing the succession of parish priests in Bregenz, dated 18 February 1658.]

Cynthia J. Cyrus, “Bregenz Chaplains, 1387–1587,” Florilegium 39 (2026): forthcoming.

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