A GREAT BISHOP.
In writing the lives of saints their biographers often forget that they are writing history, and telling the part which a wise, strong, and manly character bore in that history. William Emmanuel von Ketteler, the late Bishop of Mayence, might by many be reckoned among saints, so holy was his life and so like the primitive Christian ideal. But he has another claim to fame, as one of the greatest modern champions of order against socialism, and of the church against organized godlessness. The “iron bishop,” the “fighting bishop,” were nicknames given him by his foes, and, though given in hate and derision, they unconsciously set forth one side of his powerful character. A man of his reach of mind, however humble, could not have taken a less prominent part and position in the struggle of principle against license of which the present religious disturbances in Germany are the type. It fell naturally to his share to be the speaker and standard-bearer of the cause of church liberties, and the representative of the episcopal order. His legal studies and experience, as well as his hardy habits and magnificent physique, seemed to have prepared him and pointed him out among all others for the championship of his party, including all the bodily fatigue and mental anxiety incident to such a leadership. He was as thorough a man as he was an ideal bishop and exceptional orator, and this manliness, physical and intellectual, was the basis of his simple and grand character. His chosen motto, “Let all be as one,” is no bad interpretation of the leading ideal which he tried through life to realize: church unity and Christian loyalty, served by the whole round of his exceptional and perfectly-developed faculties. Before setting forth the fruits of his special studies, and examining his life and personality from the point of view most important in this century of social strife, we purpose giving a short biographical sketch of the Bishop of Mayence.
He was born on Christmas day, 1811, at Münster in Westphalia, of a noble family, one branch of which, embracing the doctrines of the Reformation, had in the sixteenth century migrated to Poland and become hereditary dukes of Courland, and a second, remaining German and Catholic, had been distinguished by giving more than one member to the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. His own branch, the third, known as that of Alt-Assen, was worthily represented by his father, a stern, faithful, and upright man, an uncompromising Christian, and a moralist of what our easier age calls the “old school.” As in every great character, there was something of the soldier in Baron Frederick von Ketteler of Harkotten, and this streak was reproduced in at least two of his sons, William and Richard. His mother, Clementina, Baroness von Wenge of Beck, was a woman of superior character, as it is noticed that the mothers of remarkable men almost invariably are, and one of the bishop’s biographers is certainly entitled to dwell as he does, with special force, on the fact of the home-training of young Ketteler having had more real influence in shaping his character than either the schooling he got at the cathedral school of Münster until he was thirteen years of age, or the atmosphere of the Swiss Jesuit College at Brieg, where he studied until he was eighteen. The two most conspicuous traits in the youth were his passion for hunting and sport of all kinds, athletic games, Alpine climbing, and all exercises requiring hardiness and disregard of wind and weather, and his earnest and unobtrusive piety. He was spared the trial through which so many noble natures pass before fully identifying themselves with the spirit of the church, whose letter they have been early taught to obey: he experienced no time of doubt, of wavering, of temptation, and the modern sore of unbelief never seems to have even come near his mind. From a youth passed in alternate study and sport and a free, out-of-door life he grew to a manhood serious and industrious, with a routine of work always hallowed by early prayer and daily attendance at Mass, and a social position in his native town, as counsel or referee for the government, which was, if not fully worthy of his talents, yet sufficiently honorable as the beginning of a professional career. His university life had, like that of most young Germans, been marked by one duel, which seriously displeased his father, and his military obligations had been discharged, according to the laws as they then stood, by his service as a “one-year volunteer” in the local militia. His legal career seemed assured, though there were many among his early friends who foresaw that his entering the church was not unlikely. The incident that determined this change was the outbreak of Cologne in 1838, when the first note of the coming ecclesiastical troubles was sounded by a municipality that went to the length of imprisoning the archbishop, Clement von Droste-Vischering; the friend of Stolberg, and the primate of the Rhine provinces.
Ketteler, never averse to Prussia, in whose mission to Germany he believed, even up to the late Falk or May Laws which tore away the veil, could, nevertheless, not reconcile himself to serve any longer a government that allowed such violations of personal freedom and of the principles which underlie that freedom. In the autumn of the same year he went to the Münich Theological College and began his ecclesiastical studies. Among his professors were Döllinger and Görres, and others whose fame is less European but scarcely less great in Germany itself; and among his fellow-students Paul Melchers, the present Archbishop of Cologne, who, like himself, had been a lawyer of great promise. Coming at the age of twenty-seven to study among a body of whom many members were hardly more than boys, it may have been a hard task to preserve humility and charity; yet the verdict of his fellow-students, summed up by one of themselves, was to the effect that Ketteler’s simplicity and good-nature were in every way as marked as his intellectual superiority. These qualities came out again later in his intercourse with his country parishioners, each of whom, peasants as they were, he treated with the cordiality and respect of a neighbor and an equal. He was no demagogue, and had no theories save the everlasting theories of the Gospel and the church; but, as is usually the case, his practice with his social inferiors went far beyond the noisy and deceiving show of equality made by professional agitators. After four years’ study in Münich he devoted one year more to theological subjects in the episcopal seminary at Münster, and received holy orders in 1844, when he was sent as curate to Beckum, a small town in Westphalia. He was then thirty-three, and had reached half his allotted years; for it has been noticed that his term of service as priest and bishop was also thirty-three years. The coincidence of his last illness having lasted thirty-three days also struck many persons who are fond of these calculations.
At Beckum, where he was associated with two other young priests (one of whom, Brinkmann, is now Bishop of Münster), he led a life as near as possible to one of his ideals—still unfulfilled in practice, but only postponed in his mind because of more urgent and present needs—the life in common of the secular clergy. He and his fellow-curates lived in a small house, where each had one room besides the common gathering-room, and one purse for all uses, whether personal or charitable. He and Brinkmann founded a hospital during their short stay, and this grew afterwards to very satisfactory proportions; but Ketteler had opportunities of proving himself a good nurse under his own roof, where his third colleague was often bedridden for months at a time. His public ministry, however, never suffered, and his assiduity at the bedside of his sick parishioners and in the confessional at all times, in season and out of season, were remarkable. If all priests would reflect how momentous, nay, how awful, is the responsibility incurred in this matter of ever-readiness to hear a man’s confession, they would less seldom deviate from the self-sacrificing example which Bishop Ketteler gave consistently throughout his life. His zeal in this particular was not inferior, however, to his care of the schools which in his public career so distinguished him; and both led his diocesan after two years to remove him from Beckum, to a full parish, that of Hopsten.
His life here was a repetition of the life at Beckum; his ministry was so efficacious that the spiritual life of the parish resembled a permanent “mission,” or revival, and his active charity had a large field for exercise in the famine and the fever which visited his people during his incumbency. It is related of him that, his sister coming to visit him at Hopsten, he proposed to take her to see some of his friends in the neighborhood, and accordingly took her to his poorest people, begging for each a gift sorely needed, which resulted in her emptying her purse so effectually that she had to borrow money for her journey home. He provisioned his parish during the famine, and got his rich relations to help him in the work; and in the fever, besides his gifts of food, bedding, and medicines, and his regular offices as their pastor, he literally became his people’s physician and nurse.
It was no wonder that he should so have won the respect and trust of his neighbors that, even in that very Protestant borough of Lengerich, of which his parish formed part, he was unanimously returned as deputy to the Frankfort Parliament in 1848. It was here that he first came publicly before Germany as an orator and a statesman, and that he made that famous speech at the funeral of the Prussian delegates, Lichnowsky and Auerswald, murdered during the riots, which has become the most popular and widely known of any of his discourses. After his retirement from Parliament, and his attendance in the same year at the first meeting of the Catholic Union at Mayence, he was asked to give a course of lectures in the cathedral on the social and political problems of the day. It is said that Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, besides free-thinkers, crowded to hear these eloquent and exhaustive lectures, and that the competition for seats was a fitting type of the intellectual stir they made in the city. His physical endurance was no less marvellous, and added much to the impressiveness of the discourses, delivered in close succession, with a full, melodious, resounding voice under perfect control of the speaker, and carefully husbanded, so that neither enthusiasm nor emotion should drive it into shrillness or sink it into huskiness. That year saw the preacher transferred to the provostship of St. Hedwige’s Church in Berlin, which he occupied only for ten months, but long enough to win the love of his city congregation as he had that of his country parish. His younger brother, Richard, who had left the army to become a priest, succeeded him at Hopsten, but left the place later to become a Capuchin; he was long known as Father Bonaventure. In 1849 Provost Ketteler was chosen Bishop of Mayence, after a stormy election and dispute in the cathedral chapter. The first nominee, Doctor Leopold Schmid, professor of theology at Giesen, the local university, being, on grounds of “undue influence,” strongly disapproved of by a large minority of the canons, they and their opponents of the majority agreed to a re-election and to an appeal to the Holy See, upon which, out of the three names sent in, the Pope chose the provost of St. Hedwige. He was not consecrated till July, 1850, by the archbishop of Freiburg, assisted by the bishops of Limburg and Fulda. Thenceforward one may say that his life was entirely a public one, so intimately was it connected with the living and burning questions of the time. Each year the crisis between church and state seemed to draw nearer; and, if one may say so, the gap between the two has become complete since the promulgation of the May Laws. In this struggle, which lasted all through his episcopate, the state certainly proved the aggressor, for the lukewarmness of German Catholics in the last generation was a proverb; and Ketteler succeeded to a diocese in very different order from the one he has left. Things were working, or rather lapsing, into the hands of the church’s enemies, had they been wise enough to wait and watch; by hurrying matters they roused the spirit of Catholics, and raised against themselves a zealous band firmly attached to their faith and determined to vindicate its rights and liberties.
Of this band Bishop Ketteler, whether as deputy, pamphleteer, lecturer, or spiritual guide, was practically the head. His first works in Mayence were, on a wider scale, the repetition of those in Hopsten. He instituted reforms and amendments in every department; gathered the clergy together in yearly retreats, during which the exercises of St. Ignatius, which he held in high esteem, were made the basis of instruction; founded several Capuchin convents for the purpose of giving missions, especially in the country, and one Jesuit college, on the occasion of whose establishment he had to bear the brunt of a determined journalistic opposition; set up schools and an orphanage for girls under the care of the Sisters of Mercy, an asylum for repentant women under the nuns of the Good Shepherd, a refuge for servant-maids out of employment, a community of Poor Clares to visit and relieve the poor in their own homes, a Boys’ Orphanage, Boys’ Reformatory, and Boys’ Refuge, several unions and brotherhoods to keep the people together and preserve them from the snares of irreligious associations—notably a Working-men’s Catholic Union—and last, not least, a school taught by the Christian Brothers, which soon won such golden opinions that Protestants by scores withdrew their children from the communal schools and placed them under the new teachers. With rare liberality a Lutheran clergyman was allowed free access to the school to teach these children the religion of their parents. The bishop’s care for, and personal visitation of, the hospitals also reacted on the management of these institutions, so that they were more than ever well conducted during his episcopate. Though his enemies, despairing of finding other sins to lay to his charge, accused him of undue harshness as a taskmaster in the things he required of his clergy, this body itself never found fault with his zeal for discipline and austerity. He counselled nothing which he did not perform and, indeed, far surpass; for, unlike many bishops, estimable and even holy men, he did not consider his rank as exempting him from the most ordinary duties of a priest; he sat as many hours on regular days in the confessional as any country curate, and his daily Mass at five o’clock was always said in the cathedral instead of a private house-chapel—that is, until the last four or five years of his life, when old age made this indulgence necessary. He preached almost incessantly; the Sundays in Lent and Advent always in his own cathedral, other Sundays alternating with his clergy, and in the evenings of Sundays and week-days alike in any church, chapel, or even hall, where he was asked to further any good cause. His confirmation and church-visitation journeys were remarkable; he returned to the rightful custom of confirming, no matter how few the candidates, separately in each parish, instead of lumping many parishes together in one central ceremony, and this in order that he might gain a personal knowledge of each place, its needs and workings. On these occasions he would give a preliminary introduction on the eve of the confirmation, then hear confessions far into the night or morning, say Mass early, and confess again till he preached the sermon and administered the sacrament; in the afternoon inspect the schools, catechise the children, and visit any sick persons there might happen to be; conduct the evening service himself and preach a second time, the intermediate moments being passed again in the confessional or in private intercourse with any one who asked for special advice or comfort.
His daily life at home was as simple, hardy, and frugal as it had been at Beckum: he rose at four and worked incessantly, yet finding time, besides his Breviary, to say the rosary and the office of the Third Order of St. Francis every day. Add to this his writings, his minute supervision of the ecclesiastical machinery of his diocese, his conferences with political leaders, his necessary journeys or excursions, besides his frequent undertaking of the duties of the archbishop of Freiburg after the latter grew too infirm to go on long confirmation rounds, and it will be easily seen that he was far from an ordinary man. In virtue of his office he was entitled to a seat in the Upper House (in the grand-duchy of Hesse), with the right of sending a representative, if he chose, which he did, sending one of his canons, Dr. Monsang, who, among other things, distinguished himself by voting for the freedom of the Jewish religious bodies, in the matter of internal reform, from state interference, and for their right to receive state aid, provided they themselves solicited it. In the German Reichstag, however, where Bishop Ketteler represented the borough of Tauberbischofsheim, he sat in person, and was numbered among the members of what was known as the Fraction of the Centre, of whom Windthorst, his friend, was and is the leader. During the two German wars, 1866 and 1870, he, though deploring the civil nature of the first, according to the tradition of the greater part of the Westphalian nobility, leaned to the side of Prussia, in whose mission to unite Germany his belief never wavered, and whose influence in things purely political he always upheld. His very patriotism and enlightened views in this direction made his firm stand against the Prussian aggression on the church of more weight and importance—a fact which his enemies fully appreciated and often tried to make capital of, dubbing him as inconsistent with himself. Every one will see how one-sided this view was.
He was so far modern in his ideas that he claimed not to have lost any of the rights of a citizen by becoming a priest; but the way in which he used those rights, civic and parliamentary, roused the anger of men whose interpretation of the same principle led them to see in a priest nothing more than a military serf of the empire. He never claimed for the church any privilege or any exemption, only the full meed of liberty due to any other corporation; the exception need not be in her favor, but should not be directed specially against her. The state and the church were separate bodies, indeed, and well for the latter that such a doctrine could be conscientiously held; but the very separation involved perfect autonomy for the church, and forbade any interference on the part of political authorities, while her influence in social questions was to be exerted only through her direct influence on individuals; for a state under bondage to the church never occurred to him as desirable. Meanwhile, he labored to carry out his ideal of internal church government, a noble and primitive one, based upon the importance of parish organization and of the thorough efficacy of the parish clergy, to whom the religious orders, in his view, were to act as helpers and subordinates. To the disuse of ancient church laws and customs he attributed the troubles that have often come upon the church in all times; for he held her discipline, and even her ritual, to be no less than her doctrine under the direct guidance of the Holy Ghost. This alone would have made him a reformer in a lax and lukewarm age, when it was the fashion for Catholics themselves to join in mild or witty reflections upon their own faith, and to remain outwardly in conformity with that faith only by habit and by intellectual sluggishness. But this, joined to his powerful zeal in matters more prominent and public, made him specially the leader of a spiritual revival among the people of his city, his diocese, and Germany at large. It was not in vain that he sat in the see of St. Boniface; and when he encouraged the celebration of his predecessor’s eleventh centenary, it was fully as much to stir up the zeal of his people for church liberty as to honor the memory of the great missionary. His five journeys to Rome on various solemn anniversaries, and notably that on the occasion of the Vatican Council, were the only other incidents of his life that remain to be noticed; on his way back from the last, in 1876, when the Holy Father received him with special marks of esteem and rejoiced to have him as a witness of his “golden” anniversary, Bishop Ketteler fell ill at Alt-Oetting, a shrine where he had encouraged and taken part in many a pilgrimage. He could get no farther than the Capuchin convent of Burghausen, where he died on the 13th of July, of typhoid fever; on the 18th he was buried in his own cathedral amidst the lamentations of his clergy and people. The country people, to whom he had always had a special leaning, and who knew him as familiarly as his own canons did through his frequent presence at and ministry in the great Rhine pilgrimages, were loud in their expressions of grief; all felt that they had lost a father, but those whose chief concern was in temporal matters felt also that a great speaker and thinker had departed. Of his style, his mode of thinking, and the zeal, always burning yet never intemperate, which he brought to his work even so early as 1848, one can judge by the famous passage of his speech at the funeral of Lichnowsky and Auerswald at Frankfort: “Who are the murderers of our friends? Are they the men who shot them through the breast, or those who clove open their heads with their axes? No, these are not the murderers. Their murderers are the principles which produce both good and evil deeds upon the earth, and the principles which produced this deed are not born of our people. I know the German people, not, indeed, by the experience of conventions, but by that of its inner, daily life.... I have devoted my life to the service of the poor people, and the more I have learnt to know them the more have I learnt to love them; I know what a great and noble character our German people has received from God. No, I repeat it: it is not our noble, our honest German people who are answerable for this wicked deed.... The true murderers are those who, before the people, seek to bring into contempt and to soil with their low ribaldry both Christ, Christianity, and the church; those who strive to efface from the heart of the people the healing message of the redemption of mankind; those who do not look upon revolution as a sad necessity under certain circumstances, but erect revolution into a principle, and hurry people from revolution to revolution; ... those who would take from the people the belief in the duty of man to command himself, to curb his passions, and to obey the higher laws of order and of virtue, and would, on the contrary, make laws of those passions and therewith inflame the people; those men who would set themselves up as lying gods over the people, in order that it may fall down before them and worship them.”
Ketteler’s first well-known speech on social subjects was delivered on the 4th of October, 1848, at the original meeting of the Catholic Union at Mayence—a body whose “congresses” have been held yearly since that time, and have been distinguished by speeches such as those of Montalembert, Dupanloup, Manning, Döllinger, before 1870, and others whose names are public property. His subject was “The Freedom of the Church, and the Social Crisis”; and says one of his biographers, “It is no mean testimony to his far-sightedness that he already foresaw and took part in the importance of the social question.” His lectures in the cathedral took in such themes as these: “The Catholic Doctrine of Property,” “Rational Freedom,” “The Destiny of Man,” “The Family, based on Christian Marriage,” “The Authority of the Church, based on Man’s Need of Authority.” Of the impression these discourses made on all classes we have spoken already. To show how liberal were his views on the form of government, it may be mentioned that it was one of his axioms that it mattered little who ruled, but much how he ruled. All forms of legitimate government were practically alike to him, though his own ideal for Germany was a revival of the old unity of confederation, with the equal representation of the burghers and of the peasantry by the side of the clergy and nobility; but the manner in which the government, no matter what it called itself, dealt with weighty questions of morals was in his view a touchstone. It will be seen from this that if his foes delighted in calling him the most ultramontane of ultramontanes, they had no reason, politically speaking, to call him retrograde, absolutist, or even monarchist. In fact, it seems as if one might sum up his political character thus: a citizen of a free imperial city of the middle ages, imbued with the keenness of sight and the versatility of tongue peculiar to the modern European politician.
In 1851 and 1852 a new phase of unbelief, dubbing itself “German Catholicism,” did its best to bewilder the mind of Catholic Germany, and the bishop plainly warned his people against it, saying: “Though I should incur hereby the reproach of intolerance, I must warn you against ‘German Catholicism,’ for it denies the Godhead of Christ, revelation, and redemption, and makes itself a god according to its own fancy.” In 1852, in his Lenten pastoral, he touched upon the connection between this belief and political radicalism; also upon the common reproach of rebellion against authority or of flattery towards princes which these new philosophers were constantly bringing against the church. “When the church,” he says, “advises the people to submit to the civil power, she is thus attacked: ‘See the flatterer of princes, the protectress of all abuses, the willing instrument of the oppression of the people.’ When, on the other hand, she reminds the state of its obligations, and, under certain circumstances, proclaims that God is to be obeyed rather than man, the spirit of deception cries out: ‘See the rebel, the seeker after undue authority.’” In 1873, when a new attack was made on religion by the establishment of communal schools, he resisted, by writing and preaching, “these institutions which contradict all the principles of religion, disturb Christian education, contradict and confuse the understanding and the nature of childhood, and damage all the interests of the Christian family.” In 1851, when every government in Germany had been more or less remodelled, and many fetters of old prescription and prejudice had been shaken off by the revolution of 1844, the bishops of the Upper Rhine province came together at Freiburg, and presented a memoir on church relations with the state to the neighboring rulers of Hesse, Würtemberg, Baden, and Nassau. No notice was taken of it, and two years later it was repeated with almost the same result, save that in Hesse the grand-duke and his prime minister, Dalwigk, called a convention in 1854, and established the liberty and autonomy of the church upon a legal basis. Ketteler’s pamphlet in the same year, three months previous to the convention, had some influence on the course of affairs; it was on “The rights, and the right to protection, of the Catholic Church in Germany, with special reference to the claims of the episcopate of the Upper Rhine and the present struggle,” and may be summed up in this quotation from it: “The rights of sovereignty are doubtless holy. They belong to God’s ordinances, and are therefore of God; but those indefinite, boundless, unhistorical, unfounded rights of sovereignty stand exactly on a level with the equally indefinite, boundless, unhistorical, unfounded rights of humanity. They are distorted images of lofty truths, and are born of the same fallacy as absolutism. Once face to face with them, the church must either allow herself to be ravaged or must begin a struggle for life and death.”
However well known and widely spread were Ketteler’s influence and writings, the latter partook of the local and circumstantial nature of most political writings: they were not solid, dignified, technical treatises of theology, nor popular and “taking” books of devotion, but the outcome of present necessities, quick and vigorous protests against injustice, weapons specially adapted to the ever-shifting warfare between socialism and religion. His pamphlets were mostly short, terse, and to the point; he slept in his armor and was always on the watch. He speaks of his work in this direction with great simplicity to Prof. Nippold, of Heidelberg: “Besides my spiritual ministry in my diocese, I follow and observe all the movements of my time, and cannot help meeting with all the injustices which men do to one another, not always, indeed, of malice prepense, but often through misunderstandings, prejudices, and false representations. Then, if I can spare time from my work, I make an effort towards clearing up those unfortunate misunderstandings....” But though he spoke and felt thus modestly about his important part in the questions of the day, we know how impossible it is for a man of his stamp not to rise to his natural level. He was born to be a leader, and neither necessity nor humility could block the path to political prominence. Such a man, weighted with even more absorbing work than his, would have made time for occupations so naturally fitted for him; such a mind, even had it been in a less robust body, would have overcome disease and weakness, and wrested from them the power to make itself known. A list of a few of his writings will show how universal was his watchfulness: Can a believing Christian be a Freemason? The True Foundations of Religious Peace. The Defamation of the Church by the Tribune. The Right of Free Election of the Cathedral Chapter. Germany after the War of 1866. The Fraction of the Centre at the First German Reichstag. Catholics in the German Empire. Freedom, Authority, and the Church, considerations upon the Great Problem of the Day. The Labor Question and Christianity. Liberalism, Socialism, and Christianity. The General Council and its Influence on Our Time. The Doctrinal Infallibility of the Pope after the Definition of the Vatican Council.
What he has said and written on the social question, including the subjects of marriage, the family, education, and the relations between capital and labor, even most of his opponents judge to belong to the quota of wisest utterances extant on the subject. His gift of opportunity, or of speaking always to the point, has been noticed already. Here is what a German contemporary says of it: “The bishop did not devote himself to journalism as a profession, for he looked upon his ministry as immeasurably more precious and higher than political influence. But he used it as a weapon at every important turning-point of contemporary German history, when dangers threatened the moral order of German society, and when the rights of the church were violated and her institutions hampered; and precisely because his writings sprang from instant necessities or the peculiarities of the day, they were, in the noblest sense of the word, timely—not productions of labored pulpit-wisdom, but the forcible words, piercing through bone and marrow, of a powerful voice sounding the battle-cry of a mind-conflict; of a man whose keen and far-sighted look measured the heights and depths of the mind-disturbances of his day, and shared heartily in the joys and sorrows of his time.”
It is worth while to notice his usual method in these earnest pamphlets. It consisted, as a rule, of taking his opponents’ own arguments or “accomplished facts” nakedly as they stood, and carrying them on to their strictly legitimate but startling consequences. Yet, in the whole course of his polemical writings, he carefully abstained from the least personality. In this he might with advantage be taken as a model by most schools of political pamphleteering. Soon after his speech at Frankfort his fame as an orator was already held so high that it suggested the following poetical portrait of him by Bede Weber, in a work entitled Historico-Political Sketches. This is almost a literal translation:
“The parish priest of Hopsten has a tall and powerful figure, with sharply-cut features, in which speak a fearlessness impelling him irresistibly to ‘do and dare,’[[163]] joined to an old Westphalian tradition of loyalty to God and church, to emperor and realm. To his discerning spirit the German nation, in its unity, its history, and its Catholic traditions, is still living and strong. Luther and Melanchthon, Charles the Fifth and Napoleon, the Peace of Basle and the cowardly Pillersdorf, are nothing in his eyes but passing shadows over the black, red, and gold shield of the German people. From the blood of General Auerswald and of Prince Lichnowsky, from the murder of Lamberg and Latour, the roses of hope spring only more obstinately for him, and his tears hang on them only as the pearly dew of the dawn of German freedom, German loyalty to the faith, and German order. He bears the great, brave German people, with the everlasting spring of its virtues, in the innermost depths of his heart, and from this union, or rather identification, flows the peculiar pride of his address, which, in the evil seething of elements in the ‘days of March,’ still points out the means of building up the cathedral of the German Church sooner and more beautifully than the cathedral of Cologne. Therefore was it that his words impressed his hearers with a resistless might. When I think of the orator Ketteler, I see before me a thorough man, who can awake fear in many a heart, but whose individuality is in itself a right to do so.”
Most of his bitterest opponents in the Reichstag acknowledged his power in speaking, and respected the fearless use he made of his position to remind them of their duties as men, Christians, and lawmakers; and when circumstances made it impossible for him to combine his duties as deputy with his dignity as bishop, and caused him to retire from his place, his party felt the loss of his voice as much as his adversaries rejoiced in their deliverance from a parliamentary “Son of Thunder.” His lectures and sermons, even on ordinary days and stereotyped subjects, were always startling and mind-compelling by the manner in which old truths were handled and new meanings brought out therefrom; while his open-air preaching at pilgrimages, where he was often heard by ten thousand people, bore an equally powerful and peculiar stamp, and, though his thoughts were then clothed in simpler language, they lacked none of the breadth which distinguished his more finished speeches.
In a monthly magazine edited at Mayence by the bishop’s friends Heinrich and Monsang, both dignitaries of his cathedral chapter, is a review of his life which gives a prominent place to his opinion on the importance and seriousness of social questions:
“He was deeply and firmly convinced that political and social problems are so inseparably connected with religious questions that any one aiming at defending religion from a high stand-point and in a comprehensive manner cannot indifferently pass by these problems.”
A newspaper generally opposed to his political views, the Catholic Voice (or “Opinion”),[[164]] speaks in the same sense:
“One of the most noteworthy traits in the life and works of Bishop Ketteler is the lively interest which he took, by deed, word, and writing, in the social question. It is precisely in this direction that most misunderstandings take place. But we would remind the public that the attitude of the bishop towards this problem was wholly shaped by his Catholic principles and his priestly duties. Nothing was further from his mind than the wish to use the needs of the laborer as a basis for political agitation, or to carry out any chimerical theories of a general millennium. He took a part in the labor question, because he saw in working-men the victims of so-called liberal lawgivers, and because he found it his duty as a pastor to care for the poor. These high and noble motives were not always appreciated, but working-men themselves have repeatedly testified their confidence in him, and after his death were published many gratifying tributes from the same source.”
The sense in which he took part in this question is again impressed on the German public by means of the article from which we have quoted before—namely, that it was determined by personal experience and a sensitive consciousness of his duties as a priest.
“What he wrote and did concerning this subject proceeded not from mere theoretical interest, still less from political reasons, but from Christian love and brotherly feeling towards the people, especially the poorer classes, and from the ardent wish to further their eternal and temporal welfare, as well as to save them, together with the whole of society, from the terrible chaos towards which we are being hurled, if the old maxims and practice of Christian charity and justice do not prevail against the principles of modern liberalism and pseudo-conservatism.”
In his political prominence, and his fearless handling of questions often, under specious pretexts, withdrawn from the allowed limits of clerical oratory, Ketteler seems to invite a comparison with Dupanloup, the Bishop of Orleans, who, having fought in the earlier struggle for freedom of education in France, has lived to take part in a struggle more vital and less local—that of the whole field of Christian doctrine in arms against systematized revolution. Occasion naturally moulds the men it needs; the material of such characters is always present, but in the church, as in the world, “mute, inglorious Miltons” and “village Hampdens” die and leave no mark. This explains the rush of talent to the rescue of every cause seriously imperilled by its successful adversaries; among others the cause of the church, under whatsoever persecution it may chance to suffer. This also explains the present superiority, as a body, of the German episcopate. In the first quarter of this century the reconstruction of society in France, and the reorganization of the church on a basis less majestic but more dignified than that of the ancien régime, brought about the same bristling of great gifts greatly used around the threatened liberties of the church. In Poland, during the two insurrections which this century has witnessed, heroes rose up naturally wherever there was a priest or a bishop; in the late French war, and its sequel, the Commune, the martyrdoms and Christian stoicism of 1793 were repeated and nearly surpassed, while the present more tedious, less brilliant struggle of the church in Germany has called forth men of iron will and fathomless patience to resist, legally and passively, an active, goading injustice. In countries where there is no need for it there is less of this public display of unusual powers; bishops who might be statesmen remain simply administrators, priests who might be heroes remain obscure pastors; in literature it is research, learning, theology which take up their leisure time, not public speaking or political writing; the silent, healthful life of the church goes on, without struggle and hindrance, and work is done indeed, but it seldom becomes known beyond a small local circle. And even this happens only under the shadow of suppressed hostility to the church, such as there exists at present in almost every country; for there have been times when, splendid as the outward position of the church has been, or seemingly unfettered her organization, there was at the core a spiritual drowsiness which was far from honorable. Such a period came before the first French Revolution; another earlier, before the German Reformation; another later, before Catholic Emancipation in England; and another before the late Prussian church laws in Germany. There was either security or sovereignty; no shade of persecution; at most a polished indifference or a scornful toleration, and hence no revival, no earnest, quick-pulsing life.
We have omitted to mention one of Bishop Ketteler’s most important undertakings—that of the theological institute in Mayence, to replace the education given to the clergy at the local university of Hesse, Giesen. The grand-duke heartily approved of the plan of restoring to the episcopal seminary the whole training of the diocesan clergy, instead of the taking on, as a secondary branch, of a chair of theology to Giesen; and the bishop was enabled to carry out his plans in this matter, and to leave behind him a body of priests, zealous, loyal, whole-hearted, and imbued with his own spirit.
Ketteler was in every sense a great man, and no less a man of his age. He accepted everything as it legitimately stands, with no hankerings after the old order of things, no political, or rather romantic, longings after forced revivals of bygone conditions; but he took his stand firmly on the principle that the church has her own appointed and immutable place in every successive system, and ought to stand by her claim to this place. This is the basis whence every member of her army should in these days fight her battles, and, taking up the new weapons, make them his own. Ketteler has shown them the way.