From Wurzburg 1848 to Fulda 1867

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Catholic Church in Germany is organized nationally through the German Bishops' Conference, the Deutsche Bischofskonferenz, whose own institutional history traces back to the first joint assembly of German bishops at Wurzburg in 1848, a gathering held amid the revolutionary upheavals sweeping Europe that year. It took lasting form nineteen years later as the Fulda Bishops' Conference in 1867, meeting each autumn beside the tomb of Saint Boniface, the eighth century missionary bishop remembered as the apostle to the Germans, a deliberate choice of meeting place linking the modern conference to the earliest roots of German Catholicism itself.

The conference adopted its present name and statutes in 1966, in the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council, formalizing under a new constitution the same national body of German dioceses that had been meeting continuously, in one form or another, for well over a century by that point, a continuity of national organization few other European bishops' conferences can claim across so many changes of German state and constitution.