The Roman Catholic parish church St. Ulrich in Memmingen's district Amendingen is a baroque church of the 18th century. Its patron saint is Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg, whose patronal festival is celebrated on July 4. The aisleless church, completed in 1755, stands in the north of the district, in the so-called Altdorf, on a hill of the Memminger Achtal and is a stop on the Upper Swabian Baroque Route.
Location and surroundings
The church stands in the northern part of the district Amendingen in the so-called Altdorf on a hill of the Memminger Achtal. It is surrounded by a retaining wall, which merges into a churchyard wall to the west and south. Within this churchyard wall, to the west of the church, stands the old mortuary, which has been converted into a chapel and contains a statue of the flagellated Savior. To the north and northeast, outside the churchyard wall, are the parish house and the rectory. Of the old buildings, only an Upper Swabian farm has survived to the east. The loose development in the west with other farms below the church was condensed in the 1980s in favor of a new development area with residential buildings. To the north is the cemetery with a funeral hall.
History
Predecessor buildings
In Frankish times, around the year 800, the first church was built in Amendingen, presumably as a simple wooden building. The parish was first mentioned in a document in 1341, when Heinrich III von Schönegg, Bishop of Augsburg, incorporated it into the Rot an der Rot abbey, which belonged to the diocese of Constance, with the approval of the antipope Nicholas V. The church was then incorporated into the diocese of Augsburg. This meant that the Rot abbey owned half of the major tithe associated with the right of patronage. In 1422, Bishop Anselm von Nenningen imposed an interdict on the parish, which was lifted at the request of the Duke of Teck at the feast of Pentecost. In 1477, the Buxheim Charterhouse bought the other half of the major tithe and thus half of the patronage right. St. Ulrich was first mentioned as patron of the church in 1484. A visitation report of 1575 describes that the high altar had sculptures of Ulrich, Theotokos, and St. Catherine.
During the Reformation, many citizens of Amending changed to the Protestant denomination. The members of the Sättelin patrician family, as owners of the Eisenburg lordship and thus of Amendingen, had become Protestants as citizens of Memmingen. The Neubronn family, as their successors, had also accepted the new doctrine as citizens of Ulm. The church records show that 150 of the 600 subjects in the dominion remained Catholic. Although the dominion was Protestant, the superior Advocatus remained Catholic. The resulting differences were settled by a treaty in 1586, thirty years after the Peace of Augsburg. This stipulated that the lords of Eisenburg belonged to the Protestant confession, while the subjects belonged to the Catholic confession. Provided that the subjects had accepted the new denomination, they were allowed to practice it for another eight years. After that they had to return to Catholicism under threat of punishment. The Amendingen priest Gallus Möslin did particularly well in persuading most of them to convert before the eight years were up.
Towards the end of the Thirty Years' War, on July 16, 1642, the Rot an der Rot abbey sold its part of the right of patronage with the tithe to the Charterhouse of Buxheim for 9000 guilder, which thus exercised the full patronage right. There it remained until the secularization in 1803. The tower of the church collapsed in 1655 and destroyed large parts of the nave. A makeshift building was consecrated in 1661. Sources on the building history of the present church are very scanty. The Amendingen archives were moved to Augsburg during World War II, where most of them have disappeared. What is certain is that in 1740 the canonical visitation of the Buxheim Charterhouse reviewed the financial strength of the community for a new building, since the makeshift structure was found to be "old, unworthy, and too small." The decision to build a new church was not made until ten years later. The decision to build was not taken until ten years later.