The period between the 16th and the 19th centuries witnessed faith-based migration not only on the part of Protestants: Catholics were also moved to leave their homes for reasons of conscience. In contrast to the popular waves of migrations exhibited by the former, Catholic migration was predominantly a clerical phenomenon, involving bishops, priests, theologians, male and female members of the different religious orders and students of theology. Some Catholic women who fled later became nuns in exile. Moving from non-Catholic ruled regions to Catholic territories, they left their homes for a variety of reasons, both voluntary and forced, but always in response to a situation of persecution. This predominantly Catholic phenomenon of clerical emigration manifested itself in England, Scotland and Ireland (both the Gaelic and Anglo-Irish regions); the exile of the Jansenists from France; the Jesuits being banished from revolutionary France and Germany of the 1870s.
Introduction
Consulting the most important reference works on the subject of religious migration, the attentive reader would be forgiven the assumption that early modern religious migrants in Europe were either Protestants or Protestant dissenters; few accounts give any indication that Catholics were also forced to leave their homes on grounds of their faith. The article Flucht/Flüchtlingsfürsorge (migration/the relief of migrants) for the Early Modern period, 16-18th centuries in the Theologische Realenzyklopädie (1983 edition) lists Protestants or Protestant dissenters, emigrants, exiles , refugees or migrants – Anabaptists, the Austrian Protestant nobility in the German imperial cities, the Dutch Reformed and Dutch reformed exile communities in Wesel on the lower Rhine, Emden in East Friesland, Cologne or Frankfurt,1 Dutch Remonstrant or Armenians, Socinians or Polish anti-Trinitarians , French Huguenots , the Salzburg Lutherans or East Prussian Mennonites as examples for this phenomenon, but makes little mention of Catholics.2 Only in the context of the French Revolution does the article write of "a large number of the clergy forced into emigration by the deportation decree of 26.8.1792".3 This is the only indication of Catholic confessional migration in what represents a significant article. Moreover, the reference remains oblique, as there is no mention of the fact that the decree applied only to the Catholic clergy. The article does not mention any individual Catholic confessional migrants and provides no information as to the existence of this phenomenon in the 19th century.
Explanation:
