ABSTRACT
Elector Maximilian may have dictated the pace of his Upper-Palatine reformation and significantly determined the nature of its implementation, but, as his anxiety to place the conversion of Protestant nobility in the hands of qualified clergy indicated, he was aware that the vibrancy and durability of the Catholic restoration would depend as much on ecclesiastical resources and initiative as on those of the secular dynastic state. How, then, was the local Church equipped to fulfil the demanding mission of the implantation of Catholic Christianity among a convert populace? To what extent did its bishops and priests exhibit the Tridentine zeal for clerical reform? And would they be able to avoid provoking the anticlericalism which less than a century before had helped make the region a fertile soil for Protestantism?
