The War Upon Religion / Being an Account of the Rise and Progress of Anti-Christianism in Europe

by Francis A. Cunningham

FROHSCHAMMER.

In 1862 Pius IX. warned Catholics of new dangers. In the University of Munich, which from being the centre of German Catholic thought in the days of Görres, had under Maximilian become a very nest of false Catholicism, there was a professor of theology, James Frohschammer, whose tenets approached so closely to rationalism as to excite suspicion from the very outset. In 1858 he published his Introduction to Philosophy, and in 1861 a treatise on the Liberty of Science, and another work entitled Atheneus. These three volumes were full of grave errors and pernicious doctrines. In Frohschammer's system reason was accredited with undue authority; full freedom of thought was permitted without regard to revealed or unrevealed truth; philosophy, it was declared, by its own power could arrive at those same principles which are common to faith and to natural reason, and even the divinely revealed truths of the Christian religion such as the supernatural end of man, the great mysteries of the Incarnation, and others like it were, it was stated, a part of science, and hence the material of philosophy, which could attain to the knowledge of them not through the principle of divine authority, but through its own natural forces. Moreover, it was taught that philosophy had no right to subject itself to any authority whatsoever; that its liberty was boundless, even though, as was asserted, the philosopher himself ought not to teach anything contrary to what divine revelation and the Church has taught, to call it into doubt because he cannot understand it, or to refuse to accept the judgment of the Church. Hence the wish expressed by Frohschammer that the Church should not meddle with philosophy, that it ought to permit philosophy to make its own corrections, even though it should have fallen into error.

These errors were especially harmful when rationalism was rampant in Germany; in fact the works of Frohschammer were condemned by the Church, not as if she loved philosophy less than a misguided world, but that she might prevent it from falling from its true position and becoming a poison rather than a food, and it was to that effect that Pius IX. wrote to the Archbishop of Munich on December 11, 1862.

Frohschammer had already one of his former books On the Origin of the Soul condemned by the Church: but instead of acknowledging his errors, he repeated them in subsequent works, at the same time maligning the Congregation of the Index and abusing the Church with epithets and calumnies. But Frohschammer effected less harm when he placed himself in open rebellion so that all Catholics could be on their guard when his teachings were brought forward. To the liberals, however, he was a welcome aid, reading as they did in his works, and as coming from a Catholic source, the very tenets they were striving to inject into the German mind.

DOELLINGER.

Perhaps no more potent evil genius existed for the corruption of the Catholic German mind at the time than the too famous theologian of Munich, Ignatius Doellinger. Born at Bamberg, on February 28, 1799, he made rapid and brilliant studies at Wurzburg and in his native town. He was ordained priest in 1822 and spent a few months in parochial work. In 1823 he was made professor of history and canon law in the preparatory college of Aschaffenburg, and when the University of Landshut was transferred to Munich, he was selected for the chair of history in the new institution.

DOELLINGER.

In his earlier career, in fact as late as 1860, Doellinger was one of the foremost and loyal of German Catholics. At a time when so many of his co-religionists were being led into the campaign of hostility to Papal authority and the ancient discipline of the Church, Doellinger ever remained true to his ultramontain principles. In 1826 appeared his first theological work, The Doctrine of the Eucharist During the First Three Centuries of the Church, which was followed in rapid succession by a series of brilliant expositions of Catholic truth and history. In 1847 appeared his three magnificent volumes on "The Reformation, Its Interior Development and Its Effects." It was the signal for a crusade against the falsehoods of Protestant historians as uttered in nearly all the universities of Germany.

In 1861 appeared his "Church and the Churches, the Papacy and the Temporal Power," a collection of public lectures which the author had delivered at the "Odeon" of Munich during that year. The work created a sensation among the Catholic teachers of the land, who could not but recognize in it the germs of the conflict which Doellinger was yet to wage with the Holy See. The Piedmontese had just completed their invasion of the Papal States, and naturally the world looked to Doellinger for words of protest. The unhappy theologian proved recreant to his duty at a moment of so much importance. Instead of uttering an unequivocal protest, Doellinger babbled only about the necessity of liberal institutions secularization, etc., imitating to a humiliating degree the expressions of Cavour and Napoleon III. Doellinger had now steered his bark into the stormy waters of Liberalism.