Mainz on the Rhine, Diocese of

MAINZ ON THE RHINE, Diocese of. - Diocese and capital city of the Land of Rhineland-Palatinate, opposite the mouth of the Main. Over an area of 7692 sq. km., it has 1,794,600 inhabitants, of whom 631,100

Catholics, distributed in 284 parishes, served by 437 diocesan priests and 79 religious. It also has 14 male religious communities and 199 female ones; 7 educational institutes, 100 works of charity and welfare (Ann. Pont., 1951, p. 260).

It was certainly merchants and soldiers of the XXII Legio primigenia, stationed first at Lyon, then at M., who brought the Christian religion to M. The honors of proto-bishop and martyr of the Church of Mainz belong, according to the tradition of medieval legends, to Crescens, a disciple of the Apostles. His feast is on June 27. Subsequent martyrs of the early Christian age are Ferrucius, Alban, Aureus and Justina. Outside the Roman walls of the city were found remains of rich Christian sepulchral monuments of the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th centuries (now preserved in the municipal Museum of Antiquities). In the middle of the 6th century the bishop Sidonius restored the church and the baptistery of the city. M. owes its greatest glory to St. Boniface (d. 754), a missionary coming from the Anglo-Saxons, who passed into history as the "Apostle of Germany." Although of archiepiscopal rank, he was only bishop of M. His successor as bishop of M., St. Lull, a Benedictine like Boniface, was raised to the archbishopric in 780-782. Joined to the see of Mainz from as early as 965 was the office of royal chancellor for Germany. From 1257 the metropolitan of M. held the presidency of the college of prince-electors. Consequently the archbishops of M., in view of their influential position for the royal election, were vitally interested in the struggle between the Church and the Empire. Famous archbishops were Rabanus Maurus, who bears the honorary appellation of magister Germaniae (d. 1856), St. Willigis (d. 1011), builder of the Mainz Cathedral, and St. Bardo (d. 1051); at Bingen the great mystic St. Hildegard (1089-1179). The archbishop Diether of Isenburg founded the University of M. in 1477. The archbishop Albrecht of Brandenburg (1514-45), following the preaching of the indulgence carried out by the Dominican Tetzel during his regency, gave occasion for the posting of Luther's theses in 1518.

M., in the medieval battles of the nobility and the bourgeoisie against the archbishops, always remained an episcopal city. In the early Middle Ages M. had 14 suffragan bishoprics. From time to time the ecclesiastical province of M. reached the North Sea with the territory of the present-day Dutch and Belgian provinces, to the south it extended as far as Chur (Switzerland), to the east as far as Prague and Olmütz, to the north beyond the Elbe as far as Brandenburg and Havelberg, there including Hildesheim and Paderborn.

Under the archbishops Frederick Charles Joseph of Erthal (1774-1802) and Charles Theodore of Dolberg (1802-1817) the archdiocese and the court city declined in the wake of the spiritual and military events of the French Revolution. From 1797 to 1814 M. was French, and under Napoleon, in 1802, it became a bishopric and suffragan of Mecheln. The new bishopric comprised, in the end, only the territories on the left bank of the Rhine. In 1821 the Roman Curia provided for a new circumscription of the diocese of M., whose boundaries thus came to be identified with those of the region, as it then was, of Hessen-Darmstadt. In accordance with this new division the diocese comprised the three provinces of Hessen: Rheinhessen, Starkenburg and Oberhessen. The episcopal see remained M.

Famous bishops of the new diocese were: Joseph Louis Colmar of Strasbourg (1802-18), founder in M. of the Seminary for priests and restorer of the Cathedral, who caused the Christian spirit to flourish again in the diocese by gathering around himself representative men in the so-called "First circle of M." The bishop William Emmanuel von Ketteler (v.), a student of social problems (1850-77), founded with Lennig, Heinrich and Moufang the "Second circle of M." The first German Catholic day was at M. in 1848. The "Mainz Circle" had profound importance and exercised great influence over all of Germany with its affirmation of religious life as opposed to the State. The organ of the Catholic men of M. was the Katholik founded at M. in 1821 by A. Rass and N. Weiss, which acquired the greatest merits; it lasted until 1918.

The bishop Albert Stohr, doctor in theology and in law "honoris causa," governed until 1936. His was the youth report to the episcopal conference of Fulda, and also the report of the liturgical commission. This bishop had a great part in the creation and the restoration of the German ritual.

After the end of the Second World War (1945) the Rhine became the boundary line of the occupying forces, so that the diocese of M. belongs, for the territory on the left bank of the Rhine, to the French zone, and for that on the right, to the American one. Following the new organization of the German Länder, Rheinhessen has belonged since the end of 1946 to the Land of Rhineland-Palatinate, while the former provinces of Starkenburg and Oberhessen belong to the newly formed Land of Gross-Hessen. The external boundaries of the diocese remained unchanged.

MONUMENTS

In the episcopal city of M. the Cathedral, dedicated to St. Martin, built in the years 975-1009, 1137, 1238, with five naves and a double choir, substantially Romanesque, illustrates with its sepulchral monuments the archdiocese of M. The flowering of art in M. occurred above all in the 10th, 13th, 15th and 18th centuries. The inventor of printing, Johann Gutenberg (v.), was born there. In the city, Gothic and Baroque churches are significant. Many works of art were damaged or destroyed by aerial bombardments (1939-45). The following churches of the diocese of M. have the rank of papal "Basilica Minor": the cathedral of Worms, the former Gothic collegiate church of Bingen, and the Carolingian Basilica of Sts. Marcellinus and Peter in Seligenstadt on the Main.

The Johann Gutenberg University, reopened in 1947, has a Catholic theological faculty.

For the study of the history of the diocese, the Jahrbuch für das Bistum Mainz, edited by A. Schuchert (since 1946), and the Archiv für mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte. Beiträge zur Mainzer Bistumgeschichte (Speyer, since 1949) are published in M.

Augusto Schuchert