Ecclesiastical province; includes the Archdiocese of Freiburg
and the suffragan Dioceses of Fulda, Mainz, Limburg, and
Rottenburg. The German Church was secularized by the Imperial
Delegates Enactment of 25 Feb., 1803, confirmed by the German
Empire on 24 March, and by the emperor on 27 April. All
bishoprics and religious foundations, abbeys, and monasteries,
immediate or mediate, were used to compensate those rulers who
had been obliged to yield their possessions on the left bank of
the Rhine to France. A part of the Archdiocese of Mainz was
preserved for the primate Karl Theodore von Dalberg and was
transferred to the cathedral church of Ratisbon. Hanover,
Brunswick, and Oldenburg also received ecclesiastical lands.
None of these thought of providing for the needs of their
Catholic subjects by establishing new dioceses. The organization
of the Confederation of the Rhine, the dissolution of the Holy
Roman Empire, and the supremacy in southern Germany of Napoleon,
who had no desire for the settlement of the e