KULTURKAMPF
707
KULTURKAMPF
tion to tlio ofTopt that "in the future he would obey in
their entirety the laws of the State". He refused to
make the tlcclaniliun, whereupon his salary Wiis with-
held. A .similar treatment befell the Catholic Head
Cliaplaiii {Felilpropxt) of the Prussian Army, to whom
pertained the administration of public worship for the
t'atholie soldiers. At Cologne the church of the Cath-
olic military chaplain had been turned over by the
Government to the Old Catholics, whereupon the
Head-Chaplain of the troops forbade his subordinate
to hold there the usual Catholic services. The Co-
logne chaplain was then brought before the Minister
of War and suspended as guilty of " resisting the ad-
ministrative ordinances of his superiors".
The close relation of Bismarck's anti-Catholic atti- tude in Germany with his foreign policy was soon shown in his famous papal election dispatch (14 May, 1872), in which he invited the European governments to agree on the conditions under which they would recog- nize the next papal election. The dispatch was inef- fe<tive, equally so Bismarck's attempt to compel the pope to accept, as the German Empire's first ambassa- dor to the Vatican, Cardinal Hohenlohe, brother of the above-mentioned Prince Chlodwig Hohenlohe whose close relations to both National Liberals and Old Catholics were well-known. On this occasion Bismarck uttered the celebrated words: "Nach Ca- no.ssa gehen wir nicht" (We shall not go to Canossa), i. e., he foretold the real issue of the conflict before it had yet fairly begun. Nevertheless he was now fully determined to carry it on to the end. He found a ready instnunent in the person of Herr Falk, ap- pointed Minister of Worship in January, 1872, a clever and ])ers(in[dly well-meaning man, but a jurist of a very fiinnalist type and an extreme partisan. The (■ha'iicclliir had already, 7 Feb., 1872, urged the Min- ister of the Interior to undertake the solution of the Polish question "on a basis of principle, actively, and aggressively"; he now engaged Falk to walk in the same course. He was "to make known with all due clearness and in every sense the relations of the State to the various religious societies". On the side of the Church her defenders began now to seek the open. The Pru.ssian hierarchy, assembled at Fulda for its an- nual meeting, issued (20 Sept., 1872) a memorial to all the German States in which the recent anti-ecclesias- tical measures were treated in their entirety, exhibited for the judgment of public opinion, and proof supplied that rights of the Church hitherto acknowledged both by international and national law had been seriously violated. Pius IX, moreover, lifted his voice twice in |)rotest. On the first occasion (24 June, 1872) he said to the German Catholics in Rome that Bismarck had |ilacc'd himself at the head of the persecutors of the Church. "Who knows, however, but that soon the little stone will fall from the mountain and strike the feet of the colossus and shatter it?" Another time (Christmas Consistory, 1872) he spoke reprovingly of " men who not only do not belong to our holy religion, but do not even know it, yet arrogate to themselves authority to decide concerning the doctrines and the rights of the C'atholic Church". The popular agita- tion grew from day to day. The Association of Ger- man Catholics (Maimer Verein), founded under the presidency of Baron Felix von Loe, soon counted 200,- 000 members, and took a much bolder attitude than the Centre, whose leader, Windthorst, observed at all times much moderation.
In the meantime Falk aimed to make the Catholic bishops independent of Rome, the clergy independent of the bishops, and both dependent on the State. The following means were in his mind destined to ac- complish these aims. The education of the clergy was to depend entirely, or nearly so, on the State, and to be carried out in the spirit of the average German Liberalistic education. Next, all ecclesiastical officee were to be filled only after approval by the highest
civil authority in each province. In the future all
ecclesiastical courts outside Germany shoidd no longer
e.\ercise any disciplinary power over the Prussian
clergy. From all German ecclesiastical courts there
was to lie, in the future, an appeal nc^t unly on thepartof
the accused, but also of the( hicf President (on grounds
of public interest), to a court compo.sed of civil officials
and to be known as the " Royal Court of Justice for
Ecclesiastical Affairs ". Falk sought also to restrict con-
siderably the exercise of the Church's punitive and dis-
ciplinary authority, in other words to facilitate apos-
tasy so that priests and laymen who chose to side with
the State might suffer no inconvenience. It was evi-
dent from these measures that Falk had no idea of the
close and indivisible solidarity of German Catholicism
whereby bishop and clergy on one side, and the bishop
and Rome on the other, were intimately bound to one
another. He erred most grievously, however, when
he made it a criminal offence for any priest to exercise
his ministry without due authorization from the civil
power, and "silenced" every bishop who refused to
comply with the new legislation. In case the German
clergy remained loyal to the Church these measures
meant the withdrawal of the sacraments from the
Catholic people, i. e., the most grievous spiritual suffer-
ing. The plans of Falk were formulated in four
bills. The first was laid before the Landtag in No-
vember, 1872, the other three in January, 1873,
though the royal consent was obtained with difficulty
and only after insistence on the severity of the afore-
said papal allocution at Christmas of 1872. It was
during the discussion of these Falk Bills that the word
Kullurkampf was first used. The Laiiilt.ag (Prus-
sian Assembly) Commission to which the Falk Bills
were referred expressed grave doubts as to their con-
stitutionality, seeing that the Prussian Constitution
guaranteed to the Catholic Church an independent ad-
ministration of her own affairs. The Connnission did
not, therefore, advise the rejection of the Kalk Bills,
but rather proposed an amendment to the Constitu-
tion to the effect that in all her administration the
Church was subject to the laws of the State and the
juridically authorized supervision of the same.
B. 1S72-7S. — This amendment and the four bills were adopted in May, 1873, hence the term May Laws (M aigeselze). To hasten their execution the Pru.ssian Ministry at once enabled the Old Catholics to estab- lish themselves as a Church, and contributed large sums for that purpose. It also encouraged the public adhesion of so-called State Catholics, i. e. Roman Catholics who protested formally their willingness to obey the new laws. Nevertheless, both Old Catho- lics and State Catholics remained few in niunber. On the other hand the unexpected happened in the .shape of a remarkable development of ecclesiastical loyalty on the part of the Catholics. The bishops of Prussia had protested beforehand (30 January, 1873) against the forthcoming legislation. On 2 May they issued a common pastoral letter in which they maile known to the faithful the reasons why all must offer to these laws a passive but unanimous resistance. On 20 May they declared to the Prussian Ministry that they would not co-operate for the execution of the Falk Laws. Almost without exception the clergy obeyed the mandate of the bishops. Thereupon the punish- ments prescribed by the laws for their violation were at once applicable; in hundreds of cases fines were soon imposed on the clergy for the execution of their ecclesiastical ministry. As none of the condemned ecclesiastics would voluntarily pay the imposed fines, these were forcibly collected, to thegreat irritation and embitterment of the Catholic parishioners. Soon the prisons began to open, and Falk declared (24 Oct., 1873) that still greater severity would be used. The Minister of War declared Catholic theological stutlents subject to military service ; the Marian congregations were forbidden to exist; the Catholic popular associa-
