Preface of the Elector Frederick III to the Heidelberg Catechism
The mandate with which Frederick III, elector Palatine, sent out the Heidelberg Catechism to the pastors and schoolmasters of his territory. It gives his reasons for a single catechism and says who prepared it, without naming any author.
The preface is addressed to the superintendents, pastors, preachers and schoolmasters of the Electoral Palatinate and is dated at Heidelberg on Tuesday, 19 January 1563. Frederick writes as a prince who holds himself responsible before God for the religion of his subjects. He says that he found the young growing up either without Christian instruction or taught “without any established, certain, and clear catechism”, each teacher following his own plan, and that he had therefore had a catechism prepared in German and Latin “with the advice and cooperation of our entire theological faculty in this place”, and of all the superintendents and leading ministers.
He then commands that it be accepted, taught in schools and churches and explained from the pulpit, and that teachers no longer change their instruction at will. The document is the elector’s own statement of how and why the catechism was made. It does not mention Zacharias Ursinus or Caspar Olevianus, to whom later tradition assigned the writing.
Cited in
- 19 January 1563, firm date