Catholic League (German)

Catholic League (German)

The German Catholic League (German: Katholische Liga) was initially a loose confederation of Roman Catholic German states formed on July 10, 1609 to counteract the Protestant Union (formed 1608), whereby the participating states concluded an alliance "for the defence of the Catholic religion and peace within the Empire." Modelled loosely on the more intransigent ultra-Catholic French Catholic League (1576), the German Catholic league initially acted politically to negotiate issues with the slightly older Protestant Union.

Nevertheless, the league's founding, as had the founding of the Protestant Union, further exacerbated long standing tensions between the Protestant reformers and the members of the Catholic Church which thereafter began to get worse with ever more frequent episodes of civil disobedience, repression, and retaliations that would eventually ignite into the first phase of the Thirty Years' War roughly a decade later with the act of rebellion and calculated insult known as the Second Defenestration of Prague on 23 May 1618. Both the Protestant Union and the Catholic League were symptomatic of the increasingly intolerant behaviour towards others' personal religious/political beliefs of that era.