In 1763, Johann Nicolaus von Hontheim, auxiliary bishop of Trier, under the pseudonym Justinus Febronius, wrote about Gallicanism in De statu ecclesiae et legitima potestate Romani Pontificis.
As early as 1769, representatives of von Erthal, Maximilian Franz, and Clemens Wenceslaus met in Koblenz and wrote a list of thirty-one articles mostly directed against the Roman Curia.
[1] Pius VI erected this nunciature on the request of Charles Theodore, who was loath to have parts of his territory under the spiritual jurisdiction of bishops who, being electors like himself, were his equals than his subordinates.
Relying on the support which Joseph II had promised, the three elector-archbishops and the Archbishop of Salzburg planned concerted action against Rome and sent their representatives to Ems to hold a congress.
[a] The Punctation maintains that all prerogatives and reservations which were not actually connected with the primacy during the first three centuries owe their origin to the pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, universally acknowledged as false, and, hence, that the bishops must look upon all interference of the Roman Curia with the exercise of their episcopal functions in their own dioceses as encroachments on their rights.
In November 1786, Joseph II made his support dependent on the condition that the archbishops gain the consent of their suffragan bishops,[2] the superiors of the exempt monasteries, and the imperial estates into whose territories their spiritual jurisdiction extends.
The Elector of Bavaria likewise remained a defender of the pope and his nuncio at Munich, and even the Protestant King Frederick II of Prussia was an opponent of the Punctation and favoured Pacca.
For this reason they wrote to the Holy See, in December 1788, asking the pope to withdraw the faculties from both nuncios and send legates to the imperial estates with authorized to negotiate an agreement with the archbishops.