The Road to Freedom? The Conversion of Members of Religious Orders to Protestantism

duties. He published a range of non-Catholic books and fi nally 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. Th e 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. Th ese clergymen mostly later justifi ed 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. Th e actual motives for the departure and conversion of the original monastics and their actual experiences have remained, however, hidden.

Th e eff orts to consolidate, renew and reform the religious life, started within the Bohemian Dominican province in the period before the Battle of the White Mountain, continued despite various problems even aft er the defeat of the Estates' uprising in the 1620s. Th e Dominicans were given the church of St. Egidius in Prague's Old Town with the adjacent former school (1625) as a replacement for the original monastery in Klementinum and in exchange for a temporary location in the monastery of St. Agnes, as well as during the Th irty Years' War and especially aft er its end. Even at this time, however, some chronic problems (fi nancial and personnel situation, the arrival of foreigners and the resistance of the local members of the Order to them) and current problems (plague, natural elements) persisted or reappeared, and "there was a certain internal opposition to the tightening of religious life in the convents", 4 which also pointed to individual diffi culties of the members of the Order, not related only to confessional issues.
Some members of the order had a problem with the observance of the monastic rules, especially in the 1650s, and some, especially the lay brothers, but not only them, decided for a radical solution and left the order, fl ed abroad, especially to Saxony, and there they chose to convert to Lutheranism. Th e Order's rules, or rather the acts of the Order's chapters, did not address the question how to treat fugitive individuals, and even less so of those who had fallen away from the Order; the rules just demanded the return of captured fugitives to their home provinces and convents. 5 Th is is the case, for example, of Michael Mayr, who fi rst fl ed from the Convent of Augsburg and then from the Convent of Jihlava, taking with him a gold chain from the statue of the Virgin Mary, or the lay brother and tailor from the Convent of Pilsen, Christianus Aquila, who "abominably fell away on a wrong journey seduced by a Bertha" staletí. Jihlava 2012, pp. 23-29, there pp. 24-25; only a hint Zouhar, J.: Česká dominikánská provincie v raném novověku (1435-1790), pp. 94-95. and then also fl ed, taking with him 100 gold pieces belonging to the Convent of Litoměřice. "When we learned of this, " said the provincial, "we pursued him as far as the Saxon frontier, but could go no further. " In 1655, the provincial issued a warning that a certain Father Raphael Hagetius was moving about Bohemia, even carrying weapons, and ordered anyone who came across him to bring him to justice and then to the penitentiary; but this brother, too, ended up in Dresden instead. 6 Th ere are not many sources dedicated to these off enders, but the eff orts to prevent them from leaving the Order and the country in every way possible are evidenced, for example, by two isolated letters from 1668 found in the Vatican archives, 7 and similar eff orts to win back the "stray sheep" especially through higher ecclesiastical and secular offi cials, are evident elsewhere. 8 Perhaps suffi ciently well known is the case of the Dominican Georg Holyk, who fl ed abroad in September 1666 (aft er a fi rst unsuccessful attempt less than a year earlier), the refl ection on his intention to "leave the papacy" having been triggered, according to his testimony, by his reading of non-Catholic books (in addition to reading the Scriptures), memories of his childhood and perhaps of his deceased non-Catholic mother, as well as his experiences during his time with the Dominicans, especially related to the punishment of off enders, which he later recounted more than vividly in his strongly anti-Catholic books (but which at the same time raise strong doubts as to whether they were not purposely exaggerated or even entirely fabricated). However, Holyk did not renounce his spiritual work; he left the border with the idea that he would be able to work as a preacher for Bohemian exiles in Zittau. Th is did not come true, but thanks to his conversion and the support of Prince August von Sachsen-Weissenfels, he gained a position as a preacher for the Bohemian exile community in Barby and Wespen near Magdeburg, which he soon lost due to his failure to fulfi l his duties, and eventually settled in Riga and became famous as a publisher of gardening books. As one of the aforesaid punished delinquents, he recounted in his books the suff erings of one P. Dietel, who in the beginning of 1657 unsuccessfully attempted also to go to Saxony, but was detained and severely punished; 9 however, as the surviving records have shown, the reality did not correspond to Holyk's account (except that it did not correspond to Holyk's own punishment as he recounted it aft er his own failed attempt to escape), especially as regards the motives for the departure (Holyk omitted any mention of a certain "evil person named Veronika" with whom P. Dietel tried to run away), but also about the further fate of the Dominican in question, who later received a pardon (four years later he was appointed procurator for the entire Moravian province of the Order and later became prior of several Dominican convents). Another person, whose punishment G. Holyk described even more drastically, could not be traced at all. 10 Th ese facts alone suggest that sources of this kind require increased criticism and caution.
However, departures from the Order abroad with subsequent conversion are also documented for members of other Orders from other countries, who can then be found among the authors of the so-called Revocation sermons (Revocations-Predigte, sometimes also Wiederrufs-Prediges), i. e. sermons in which their authors publicly recanted their Catholic confession and subscribed to the Protestant faith; the sermons also contain, albeit to varying degrees and extents, autobiographical elements or outright biographical details, the pur- pose of which (in addition to recounting various doubts) was to support the fi nal decision to convert. 11 Th e sermons cover the period from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the fi rst third of the eighteenth century, were most oft en delivered in Wittenberg and Leipzig, but also in other cities, and were published in print. Th eir existence refl ects both the attractiveness of the Saxon area for exiles, not only from among non-Catholics, and its interest in them, and especially in clergymen, whose attraction for the evangelical authorities undoubtedly laid in the fact that they had already received a theological education (albeit an "unsuitable" one), while at the same time their conversion took on an additional, propagandistic signifi cance and became an important part of the confessional struggles and polemics of the time. Th e sermons in question were thus delivered before large congregations (as is sometimes stated -although the fi gures are undoubtedly exaggerated), oft en contained various highly expressive expressions, and also lasted for quite a long time (the sermons are usually of considerable length, which raises doubts as to whether they were delivered in their complete form, but one of them explicitly states that it was held "Nachmittags, von 1. biss 4. Uhren", and even in February One of the earliest authors of these sermons was Gottfried (Godefridus) Rabe, a former Augustinian at St. Th omas in Prague, originally of German origin, who left his country for Würzburg. In 1582, at the age of about eighteen, he entered an Augustinian monastery, took his vows in May 1584, was ordained a priest in Freising three years later, and then celebrated his fi rst Mass in Munich. In 1593 he became a preacher and a few years later came to Prague. However, according to his own words, he recognized the fallacy of the papal doctrine through his reading of the Scriptures, and when he found that he no longer wanted to endure the fallibility of the papacy, he decided to go to the Protestants, via Dresden to Wittenberg, where he went to the Evangelicals. In the presence of many university students and townspeople, he delivered a sermon on 26 April 1601 ("Am Sontag Misericordias Domini") in which he critically attacked monastic vows, confession, the invocation of the saints, and the performance of Catholic services. In this case, as in the case of other converts, the real motives for leaving the order and converting remain hidden, but the rhetoric is repeated in subsequent sermons. Rabe's sermon -forty pages long, with a foreword by the dean and the doctors of the Wittenberg theological faculty -was published in print in Wittenberg (separately and together with another Rabe's sermon, no longer a revocation sermon, which was delivered on 18 May in the castle church there, but which also included "anti-papal" reservations), 13 13  Another of the clergymen who had left Bohemia for the frontier also delivered his sermon in Wittenberg. Th is was the former Franciscan and preacher in Pilsen Raimund(us) Rzimsky, who has recently been the subject of Prof. Václav Bok's research, 23 but we do not have much information about him either. Judging by his surname and the fact that he preached in the Týn Cathedral in 1631 (at the time of the Saxon invasion), he was probably a Bohemian, unlike G. Rabe, and he knew Czech, although he could have preached in German as well; however, he was certainly bilingual in Pilsen, which is evidenced by the quality of his German. He entered the Franciscan Order perhaps in the second decade of the seventeenth century in Jindřichův Hradec, where he also seems to have participated -at least according to his own words -in the persecution of non-Catholics. Aft er that he spent some time in Rome and probably sometime in the fi rst half of the 1620s he came to Pilsen, where he left between 1628 and 1630 from. In 1628 he apparently experienced a general visitation of the Bohemian Franciscan province, carried out by the papal commissioner Ambrosius a Galbiato, which revealed various evils, so that the Franciscans themselves protested against it, but the intervention of the monarch eventually led to an agreement; for R. Rzimsky himself, however, the conclusions of the visitation may have been the decisive impetus for his departure. His fate thereaft er was similar to that of the other escaped religious: he won the favour of one of the rulers, the Margrave of Brandenburg, Christian von Brandenburg-Kulmbach (1603-1655), and through him also of the Elector of Saxony, John George, aft er which he became an Electoral Alumnus at Wittenberg, where he studied for about a year and delivered his revocation sermon on 27 April 1631. Th is had been published in print before (with a dedication to the Elector of Saxony dated 17 April), 24 and again in 1634 and 1649. 25 Th anks to these and other prints, at least some additional information is available in this case: aft er the departure of the Saxon troops, R. Rzimsky was in Dresden in 1639 (where he published another writing), and from 1646 he was a preacher in the infantry regiment of the Swedish general Johann Christoph Königsmark, although he probably did not go to Prague with him, but stayed in northern Germany, where his trace ends precisely in connection with the third edition of his 1649 sermon in Rinteln. Th e sermon of Rzimski also shows typical features of the genre: it contains criticism of the Catholic interpretation of the Bible, the violation of the commandments by monks (with special emphasis on the sixth commandment), the veneration of the Virgin Mary and the saints, the veneration of their images, the popes, etc., it is critical of various religious issues, and it supplements the text with a considerable number of quotations from Scripture and various literature. Th ere were, of course, no polemical reactions to Rimsky's sermons (this was no longer common in later times), but even this time the text raises doubts about the credibility of the information presented, or -as the preface by the Wittenberg theologian Johann Hülsemann suggests -it did raise them at the time of its composition, even on the Protestant side.
Th e third monk who worked in the Bohemian lands before his departure, namely in Český Krumlov and Kladsko/Glatz, was Walther Busch, a Franciscan monk, "der H[eiligen] Schrifft Doctor und gewesener Lector", who, however, came from Münster and is therefore again evidence of the international composition of religious orders. He delivered his evocation sermon on 28 May 1649 in Leipzig, speaking of Lazarus and justifying the poverty of those who had chosen the true faith, so that they had to take on material deprivation as part of this. 26 Th e reference to poverty was not accidental: Busch also referred to the situation of would-be converts and converts in Saxony, who had to give up their possessions and depend largely on Saxon care for the poor, or it was their demand for alms that he wanted to justify their emigration and conversion. 27 In their sermons, the above-mentioned monks mostly justifi ed their departure to Protestant areas and the associated abandonment of their orders and subsequent conversion mainly by their reservations towards the Catholic confession. Eff orts to break away from the rules of the order, which were perceived as binding, undoubtedly played a role, and it was not uncommon to hear reservations about celibacy (and the perversity thereof) in revocation sermons, and early marriage was not an exception (although some stressed that the reason for their conversion was not the desire to marry, or strongly objected to such accusations). Conversion to Protestantism could thus be not only a liberation from the "wrong" denomination, but also a personal liberation, which, however, had its limits even in the new conditions. However, the real motives for the departure and conversion of the original religious, and even more so their experience of it, remain hidden. Most of the time, the further fate of the converts is not well known, nor is it known how they were integrated into their new environment or how they were accepted by it, etc. However, despite their specifi city, the revocation sermons are one of the few sources from which information can be obtained about the more detailed circumstances surrounding the change of religion, or about the personal reasons that led to it or contributed to it, or at least how they were declared. 28 The Road to Freedom? The Conversion of Members of Religious Orders to Protestantism However, even in this case, or even more so, it is true that "one must allow for (auto)biographical stylization in the personal testimonies of converts", and it must be remembered that "the sum total of the real motives for changing religion … were rarely identical to those that were consciously captured or applied" (T. Winkelbauer). 29 In addition to the already mentioned propaganda function of the revocation sermons, it is necessary to take into account not only the individual diff erences of the converts (and the diff erent degrees of acceptance of the new denomination and, in particular, the diff erent degrees of detachment from the original denomination), but also their diffi cult personal situation, leading to emergency action or directly to the application of a form of "survival strategy".

The Road to Freedom? The Conversion of Members of Religious Orders to Protestantism
Th e contribution draws attention to members of ecclesiastical orders who left the Bohemian Lands aft er White Mountain and consequently underwent conversion. Th e 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 diffi cult developments in the Hussite and post-Hussite period and consequently experienced a deep crisis in the Early Modern Period. Th is also concerned the Order of Preachers, in other words, the Dominicans. One of the renegade members of this order was Jiří Holík, who fl ed 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 fi nally 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. Th e 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. Th ese clergymen mostly later justifi ed 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. Th e actual motives for the departure and conversion of the original monastics and their actual experiences have remained, however, hidden.