The Road to Freedom?
The Road to Freedom?

The Conversion of Members of Religious Orders to Protestantism

Summary/Abstract: The contribution draws attention to members of ecclesiastical orders who left the Bohemian Lands after White Mountain and consequently underwent conversion. The situation of ecclesiastical orders in general was closely linked with this phenomenon, which did not in the end achieve too widespread expansion. Many monastic institutions in the Bohemian Lands met with difficult developments in the Hussite and post-Hussite period and consequently experienced a deep crisis in the Early Modern Period. This also concerned the Order of Preachers, in other words, the Dominicans. One of the renegade members of this order was Jiří Holík, who fled over the border in September of the year 1666, and even obtained the position of preacher to the Bohemian exile community, which he, however, quickly lost due to failure to meet his duties. He published a range of non-Catholic books and finally settled in Riga and achieved fame as the author of books dedicated to gardening. Departures across the border from Church orders, with consequent conversion, are also attested to for members of other orders, who can later be found among the authors of so-called revocation preaching (Revocations-Predigte, sometimes also Wiederrufs-Predigte), in other words, preaching in which the authors publicly renounced their Catholic faith and declared their conversion to the Evangelical confession. The study presents three of them: the former Prague Augustinian Gottfried (Godefridus) Rabe, the Franciscan and preacher in Plzeň Raimund(us) Rzimsky and the Český Krumlov functioning Franciscan Walther Busch. These clergymen mostly later justified their departure to the Protestant regions and the related abandonment of their relevant order and conversion by objections to the Catholic confession. A role could have undoubtedly been played, however, by attempts to avoid the rules of the order, understood as being of a binding nature. Conversion to Protestantism could therefore be not only a liberation from ‘incorrect’ confessions, but also a personal liberation, which of course had its limits under the new conditions. The actual motives for the departure and conversion of the original monastics and their actual experiences have remained, however, hidden.

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