Kappeln is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Kusel district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde Lauterecken-Wolfstein. Udo's legendary founding of the local church has already been mentioned. Long before the Reformation, Kappeln was already a parish seat in its own right, perhaps with several affiliated villages, which cannot now be identified with any certainty. The village church's beginnings are shrouded in the darkness of time. Of the old Romanesque church hardly anything is left. The oldest parts of the current church are the tower's lower floors, which themselves were built only in the Baroque era. The tower's upper floor comes from 1820. The nave is a Classicist-looking aisleless space with rectangular windows, built in 1789. Unlike almost all villages of the former Amt of Grumbach, Kappeln did not belong to the parish of Sulzbach, but rather to the Church of Meisenheim, which can be explained by noting that the Counts Palatine (Dukes) of Zweibrücken were the village's feudal lords and that the Lords Boos von Waldeck, as Zweibrücken vassals, had a one-fourth share of the village at their disposal. Whereas the Waldgraves of Grumbach generally introduced the Reformation into their domain only in 1556, the new beliefs found their way into Kappeln as early as 1537, by way of Meisenheim. That originally led to disagreements with the Rhinegraves. After they, too, came round to the Reformation, they demanded, as the local lords, to be allowed to confirm the pastor, who consequently would have to give a trial sermon in Grumbach. The pastors in Kappeln found themselves at odds with this. Only in 1618 did the Dukes of Zweibrücken and the Rhinegraves of Grumbach come to an accommodation with the Lords Boos von Waldeck about ecclesiastical organization, thus overcoming the problem. Nevertheless, the arrangements made at that time, after which both the Rhinegraves and the Counts Palatine raised claims to the church in Kappeln, led to conflicts later. When the village of Kappeln passed to the Saxe-Coburg Principality of Lichtenberg in the 19th century, the church community remained organizationally with the church community of Meisenheim. This arrangement was kept in 1834 under Prussian rule and did not change until 1973, when it was united with the one in Grumbach. This newer arrangement has lasted to this day. The former rectory has had a wing built onto ... More information...
According to PR-model, kappeln-pfalz.de is ranked 1,839,888th in multilingual Wikipedia, in particular this website is ranked 240,341st in German Wikipedia.
The website is placed before waxxlyrical.com and after uwe-dolata.eu in the BestRef global ranking of the most important sources of Wikipedia.
