Oettingen

(ALTÖTTING, OETINGA)

Oettingen, during the Carlovingian period a royal palace near the confluence of the Isen and the Inn in Upper Bavaria, near which King Karlmann erected a Benedictine monastery in 876 with Werinolf as first abbot, and also built the abbey church in honour of the Apostle St. Philip. In 907 King Louis the Child gave the abbey in commendam to Bishop Burchard of Passau (903-915), probably identical with Burchard, second and last abbot. In 910 the Hungarians ransacked and burnt the church and abbey. In 1228 Duke Louis I of Bavaria rebuilt them and put them in charge of twelve Augustinian Canons and a provost. The Augustinians remained until the secularization of the Bavarian monasteries in 1803. Under their care was also the Liebfrauen-Kapelle with its miraculous image of Our Lady, dating from the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century. The pilgrims became so numerous that to aid the Augustinian Canons the Jesuits erected a house in 1591 and remained until the suppression of their order in 1773. Franciscans settled there from 1653 to 1803; from 1803 to 1844 the Capuchins and some secular priests, from 1844 to 1873 the Redemptorists had charge, and since 1872 the Capuchins. About 300,000 pilgrims come annually. Since the middle of the seventeenth century the hearts of the deceased Bavarian princes are preserved in the Liebfrauen-Kapelle.