STADION, CHRISTOPH. - Bishop, born in March 1478 to a noble family of Swabia at Schelklingen, died at Nuremberg on 15 April 1543.
He studied at Tübingen (1490) and Freiburg in Breisgau, earned a doctorate in law at Ferrara, and in 1507 became canon of Augsburg, later dean and bishop on 20 April 1517. He was considered one of the most learned prince-bishops of Germany. In obedience to the decrees of the Fifth Lateran Council, he set about reorganizing his diocese, convened a synod in 1517, and in 1518 ordered a visitation; in October 1520 he resolved to publish the papal bull against Luther, overcoming the doubts stirred in him by the divisions that had penetrated Augsburg. On the occasion of the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, he took part in the great Corpus Christi procession, which Emperor Charles V also attended. However, Stadion was well disposed toward an understanding with the Protestants. He moved in the circle of Erasmus of Rotterdam, whom he placed above the great theologians of antiquity and admired as a master of spiritual life.
He openly advocated granting the chalice to the laity, abolishing fasting, permitting clerical marriage, and using the German language in the liturgy, for which he was reprimanded by the papal nuncio Morone at Hagenau in June 1540; yet he promised in 1542 to undertake the reform of the diocese, though exaggerating its difficulties. Indeed, Protestantism had made deep inroads in many parts of the diocese: in the Palatinate of Neuburg, the County of Oettingen, the imperial cities of Dinkelsbühl, Memmingen, Nördlingen, and in the episcopal city itself, where it had arrived with a Zwinglian imprint. He died after having received the previous month the papal envoy Otto von Truchsess, who was to succeed him in the episcopate.