Ignaz Heinrich Karl von Wessenberg (4 November 17749 August 1860) was a German writer and scholar, and liberal Catholic churchman as well as Vicar general and administrator of the Diocese of Constance. Imbued from his early youth with Josephinistic and Febronian principles, he advocated a German National Church, somewhat loosely connected with Rome, supported by the State and protected by it against papal interference. He encouraged the use of the vernacular in liturgical texts, the hymn book and the regular Sunday sermon. Life Born at Dresden, Ignaz Heinrich Wessenberg was the son of an aristocratic Breisgau family, and destined for a career in the church. His father, Johann Philipp Karl von Wessenberg, was a tutor of the princes of the electoral House of Wettin. In 1776 his family returned to Freiburg in Further Austria. His elder brother Johann von Wessenberg later entered the diplomatic service of the Habsburg monarchy. Ignaz von Wessenberg studied theology at the Jesuit school of Augsburg and the universities of Dillingen, Würzburg and Vienna. He was influenced theologically by Johann Michael Sailer. At the age of eighteen he was already canon at Constance, Augsburg and Basel. In 1798, On behalf of Prince-Bishop Dalberg sent Wessenberg on a diplomatic mission to the newly constituted Helvetic Republic. Pope Pius VII recognized Wessenberg's work at the constitutional deliberations of the Articles of Association in autumn 1801 in Bern, in successfully securing ecclesiastical rights in the Swiss part of the diocese of Constance. In 1802, when still a subdeacon, he was appointed Vicar general for the Diocese of Constance by Prince-Bishop Karl Theodor von Dalberg. It was only in 1812 that he was ordained a priest at Fulda at age 38. Before he became vicar-general he had shown his liberal views of religion and the Catholic Church in a work entitled Der Geist des Zeitalters (Zürich, 1801). In 1802 he founded the monthly review Geistliche Monatsschrift, which he edited and used as a medium to spread his ideas of religious enlightenment. The protests against this review were such that Dalberg ordered its suspension on 25 May 1804. It was replaced by the Konstanzer Pastoralarchiv, which was less offensive and continued to be published annually in two volumes till 1827. For the realization of his pet plans of a National German Church under Primate Dalberg, Wessenberg made futile efforts at the council which Napoleon convened in Paris in 1811 and at