In the 1500s, the Protestant Reformation began. Luther tacked his 95 theses to the door of the church at Wittenburg, Germany, in 1517. In 1521 he was ordered before Emporer Charles V at the Diet of Worms to explain his teachings and ordered to recant them. He did not, and his stand marked the beginning of the Protestant Reformation followed by the religious wars of Europe.
Beginning with the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 the religion of an area-Catholic or Lutheran- was determined by the ruler of the province or kingdom where one lived. However, the wars over religion did not end until the Peace of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. Most of Germany had been left devastated.
Many families left their homes to settle in other parts of Germany and elsewhere in order to escape religious persecution. Some of the early German immigration to this country was by dissenting sects and non conformists. However, the majority of the immigrants were Lutheran. The first group of German settlers arrived in Pennsylvania in 1683 and that immigration continued until the Napoleonic wars.
Most of northern Germany became Protestant after the Reformation. Once again most of the Saxon people were separated from the Catholic Church in Rome, as they had been before Charlemagne, but this time within the framework of the Christian beliefs. However, those parts of northern Germany which were then under control of the Bishop of Muenster remained Catholic.
The reason the Bishop of Muenster remained Catholic goes back to 1534-35. Religious extremists gained control of the city at that time. In the words of the historian S. Baring-Gould, "Muenster became the theatre of those wild orgies which ever attend mysticism unrestrained, when spiritual exaltation winds up with horrible licentiousness and abominable cruelities."
On Midsummer Eve, 452 years ago, the city was finally attacked and liberated. According to Baring-Gould, "Catholicism was re-established without a dissentient voice within the city". "The inhabitants who survived the catastrophe, even those who had once been zealous partisans of the the Reformation, became staunch in their adherence to the ancient Church, and nothing afterwards could induce them to lend an ear to Proestantism of any sort".
Thus although Wildeshausen, Heiligenfelde, Engter and Venne were Protestant, many communities only a few miles away in the Damme vicinity, which became part of the lands under the Bishop of Muenster, remained Catholic. Many of the German Catholic immigrants to the Batesville-Oldenburg area came from the Damme vicinity. Their Catholic heritage can be traced back to those events in the Reformation. Almost all other German Catholics in this area such as those around St. Nicholas and New Alsace trace their history back to Baden, Alsace, and Bavaria in southern Germany>
It is also interesting to note that while the parishioners at Oldenburg, Indiana were primarily north Germans, some of their religious teachers, the priests and nuns, came from southern Germany and Austria. Mother Theresa Hackelmeier came from Vienna, Austria to establish the Convent at Oldenburg in 1851, and the Franciscan Fathers at the Oldenburg Friary came from their
German Protestants did not find as much Missionary zeal by the Protestant states back in Germany. There was also an insistence among some German Protestants that services be conducted only in German. Such clauses were frequent in their Church constitutions. St. Paul's Lutheran Church at Crossroads was established in 1851 by Pastor Franke from the Church at Spades. Many families at Crossroads were related to those at Huntersville. Prior to 1920, all sermons at St. Paul's were given in German. English did not become the predominant language until 1927.