MAGONZA SUL RENO, Diocese of. — Diocese and capital city of the Land of Rhineland-Palatinate, opposite the mouths of the Main. On an area of 7,692 sq. km., it has 1,794,600 inhabitants, of whom 631,100
are Catholics, distributed among 284 parishes, served by 437 diocesan priests and 79 religious. It also has 14 male and 199 female religious communities; 7 educational institutions, and 100 charitable and philanthropic works (Ann. Pont., 1951, p. 260).
It was certainly merchants and soldiers of the XXII Primigenia Legion, stationed first at Lyons and later at M., who brought the Christian religion to M. According to the tradition of the medieval legendary accounts, the honors of proto-bishop and martyr of the Church of Mainz belong to Crescens, a disciple of the Apostles. His feast is celebrated on 27 June. Later martyrs of the early Christian age were Ferrucius, Albanus, Aureus, and Justina. Outside the city’s Roman walls, remains of rich Christian sepulchral monuments from the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries were found (now preserved in the Civic Museum of Antiquities). In the middle of the 6th century, Bishop Sidonius restored the city’s church and baptistery. M. owes its greatest glory to St. Boniface (d. 754), a missionary 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. Lullus, a Benedictine like Boniface, was raised to the archbishopric in 780–782. Since 965, the office of royal chancellor for Germany had been joined to the see of Mainz. From 1257, the metropolitan of M. presided over the college of prince-electors. Consequently, the archbishops of M., in view of their influential position in the royal election, were vitally involved in the struggle between Church and Empire. Famous archbishops were Rabanus Maurus, who bears the honorary title magister Germaniae (d. 1856), St. Willigis (d. 1011), builder of Mainz Cathedral, and St. Bardo (d. 1051); at Bingen, the great mystic St. Hildegard (1089–1179). Archbishop Diether of Isenburg founded the University of M. in 1477. Archbishop Albrecht of Brandenburg (1514–45), following the preaching of the indulgence by the Dominican Tetzel during his regency, gave occasion for Luther’s posting of the theses in 1518.
M., in the medieval battles of the nobility and the bourgeoisie against the archbishops, always remained an episcopal city. In the High Middle Ages, M. had 14 suffragan bishoprics. From time to time, the ecclesiastical province of M. reached the North Sea with the territories 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, and to the north, beyond the Elbe, as far as Brandenburg and Havelberg, including Hildesheim and Paderborn.
Under the archbishops Friedrich Karl Joseph von Erthal (1774–1802) and Karl Theodor von Dalberg (1802–1817), the archdiocese and the court city declined as a result 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 see of Mechelen. In the end, the new bishopric comprised only the territories on the left bank of the Rhine. In 1821, the Roman Curia made a new delimitation of the diocese of M., whose boundaries thus came to coincide with those of the region, as it then existed, of Hesse-Darmstadt. In accordance with this new division, the diocese included the three provinces of Hesse: Rheinhessen, Starkenburg, and Oberhessen. M. remained the episcopal see.
Famous bishops of the new diocese were: Joseph Ludwig Colmar of Strasbourg (1802–18), founder in M. of the seminary for priests and restorer of the Cathedral, who revived the Christian spirit in the diocese by gathering around himself representative men in the so-called “First Circle of M.” Ketteler (v.), a scholar of social problems (1850–77), founded, with Lennig, Heinrich, and Moufang, the “Second Circle of M.” The first German Catholic Day was held in M. in 1848. The “Mainz Circle” had profound importance and exerted great influence throughout Germany by affirming religious life in opposition to the State. The organ of M.’s Catholic men was the Katholik, founded in M. in 1821 by A. Rass and N. Weiss,
which acquired the greatest merits; it continued until 1918.
Bishop Albert Stohr, doctor of theology and of law honoris causa, governed until 1936. He authored the youth report to the episcopal conference of Fulda, as well as the report of the liturgical commission. This bishop played a major role in the creation and restoration of the German ritual.
After the end of the Second World War (1945), the Rhine became the boundary line between the occupying forces, so that the diocese of M. belongs, in its territory on the left bank of the Rhine, to the French zone, and in that on the right bank, to the American zone. 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, and 1238, with five naves and a double choir, essentially Romanesque, illustrates the archdiocese of M. through its funerary monuments. The flowering of art in M. occurred especially in the 10th, 13th, 15th, and 18th centuries. The inventor of printing, Gutenberg (v.), was born there. The city contains significant Gothic and Baroque churches. 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 collegiate church, formerly Gothic, of Bingen, and the Carolingian Basilica of the Ss. Marcellino and Pietro in Seligenstadt on the Main.
The Giovanni 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 mittelreistische Kirchengeschichte. Beiträge zur Mainzer Bistumgeschichte (Speyer, since 1949), are published in M.
BIBLI: Eubel, I, pp. 321–32; II, p. 184; III, p. 232; IV, p. 245; Beiträge zur Geschichte der Stadt Mainz, 10 vols., Magonza 1914–33; P. Kautzsch, Der Mainzer Dom und seine Denkmäler, 2 vols., in 1925. For further bibliography, cf. J. Schmidt, Mainz, in L’ThK, VI, cols. 802–808; Cottineau, II, cols. 1797–98. Augusto Schuchert