Hurter

The von Hurter family belonged to the Swiss nobility; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries three of them were known for their conversions to Roman Catholicism, their ecclesiastical careers in Austria and their theological writings.

Friedrich Emmanuel von Hurter (born at Schaffhausen, 19 March 1787; died at Graz, 27 August 1865) was a Swiss Protestant cleric and historian who converted to Roman Catholicism.

From 1804 to 1806 he attended the University of Göttingen, and in 1808 was appointed to a country parish. The appearance in 1834 of the first volume of the life of Pope Innocent III, on which he had been working for twenty years, caused a profound sensation in both Catholic and Protestant circles, and was soon translated into French, English, Italian, and Spanish. Hurter was chosen in 1835 antistes of the clergy in the Canton of Schaffhausen, and later president of the school board, in which capacities he laboured with great zeal.

During many years his manifest sympathy and intimacy with the Catholic clergy, including the Archbishop of Freiburg and the papal nuncios to Switzerland, and his disinterested efforts to assist Catholics roused the antagonism of his colleagues who took the first pretext to let loose a storm of abuse against Hurter. As a result, he resigned his dignities in 1841, lived in retirement for three years, and in 1844 went to Rome, where on 16 June he made his profession of faith before Gregory XVI, his conversion being the signal for renewed attacks. In 1846 he was appointed imperial counsellor and historiographer at the Court of Vienna, and took up the task assigned him, the life of Emperor Ferdinand II, which, however, was withheld from the press by the court censors, but appeared later at Schaffhausen.

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