page_title: Eßweiler
section_title: Christianity
hierarchical_section_title: Eßweiler / Religion / Christianity
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Die evangelische Kirche in Essweiler
context_page_description: Eßweiler is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Kusel district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde Lauterecken-Wolfstein.
context_section_description: The Roman silver spoon found in 1904, mentioned above, is reckoned to bear witness to early Christianization, for the doves pecking at grapes with which the spoon is decorated were described in the literature about the find as a typically Christian emblem. It shows at least there was contact with Christianity at that time.
  In an ecclesiastical sense as well as a political one, the Eßweiler Tal was a unit. Until the Reformation, the Catholic faith predominated. The ecclesiastical hub was Hirsau. The parish church was the Hirsauer Kirche, a 12th-century church near Hundheim, and the whole Eßweiler Tal was its parish. This unity was lost in the Reformation, for in 1544, the villages of Eßweiler, Hinzweiler and Oberweiler im Tal were split away from the old parish and made into a new parish of their own based at Hinzweiler; the church in that village became the parish church, and that was also where the parish priest lived. This separation came along with the spread of Protestantism once the Waldgraves converted to Lutheranism. In 1595, the Dale passed to Palatinate-Zweibrücken, which required, under the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, that everyone convert to the Reformed faith. It was in this time that the parish of Hinzweiler, which was also responsible for Eßweiler, was headed by a pastor from Austria named Pantaleon Weiß (he called himself Candidus). He had studied in Wittenberg under Philipp Melanchthon and harboured Reformed ideas. Originally, the whole Eßweiler Tal had only one graveyard, in Hirsau. Eßweiler, however, had its own graveyard by 1590. It can be assumed that Protestantism was quite widespread at the time, as it was the lords’ belief. In 1601, Eßweiler passed to the parish of Bosenbach, which after the Thirty Years' War was united with the parish of Hinzweiler. Thereafter, the local ecclesiastical seat was once again Hinzweiler. According to the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick, all villages in the Eßweiler Tal were parochially merged with Eßweiler. The Lutheran faith had not vanished utterly: In 1709, when the Duchy of Palatinate-Zweibrücken lay under Swedish rule, the Lutheran Church established its own parish for the Eßweiler Tal villages to which, in fact, more than twenty villages belonged. The small Lutheran communities in Wolfstein and Roßbach were for a while tended by Eßweiler. In 1746, Eßweiler passed back to the parish of Bosenbach. This was not changed again until 1971, when Eßweiler passed to the parish of Rothselberg, to which it still belongs now, along with Rothselberg and Kreimbach-Kaulbach.
  From 1758 to 1763, Johann Julius Printz was the pastor in Eßweiler, and from 1810 to 1817 it was Johann Heinrich Bauer. The Catholics’ share of the population was quite small in Eßweiler. In 1836 and 1837, Eßweiler had 614 inhabitants, of whom 28 were Catholic, 525 were Protestant and 61 were Jewish. As early as 1821, the Eßweiler parish church became a branch of Bosenbach. One of the best known pastors was Christian Böhmer (1823-1877). Born in Kusel, he came to Bosenbach in 1872 and earned himself some measure of fame through his literary endeavours. The Catholics were at this time tended by Wolfstein, while the few Catholics in the Eßweiler Tal before then belonged to Lauterecken, where there was a simultaneous church as early as 1725.
caption: Eßweiler Church
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