Clerical Child Abuse and Public Justice in Eighteenth-Century Germany

In 1747, Johann Conrad Arbogast Gauch, a parish priest in the diocese of Constance, was executed for serial child abuse – a unique outcome among known clerical cases in the eighteenth-century Holy Roman Empire. Drawing on extensive inquisition records, this article examines how Church and State authorities negotiated jurisdiction, reputation and punishment when clerical crime threatened moral and social order, exposing tensions between justice, discipline and institutional self-preservation.