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

by Francis A. Cunningham

The bishops of Heldesheim, Osnabrück, Münster and Treves, were also condemned by the High Court. Every day the priests of the Prussian dioceses were punished for daring to prefer the jurisdiction of the bishops to that of the bureaucrats. Religious and Sisters were hunted and banished under the pretext that they were affiliated with the Jesuits. Catholic teachers were driven from the schools, which were then committed to Protestants, rationalists, anything but Catholics.

On November 24 the Government invited Mgr. Ledochowski to resign his See; on the 30th of that month his palace was forced by agents of the Government, and searched, and all his correspondence with Rome and with his clergy was seized. In answer to the demand of the Government he had declared that as he had been placed over his diocese by God, through the means of His Vicar, the Government had no power to depose him; nor could any Court deprive him of his jurisdiction; as to resigning his See, that would never happen as long as his persecuted people were exposed to such dangers.

On February 6, 1874, the Archbishop was arrested in his palace, and without trial or sentence, was carried away to Ostrowo, where he was cast into prison. On April 15 the High Court passed its sentence upon the Archbishop, already in prison, as on March 31, Archbishop Mechers had been sentenced and imprisoned. On March 6, Bishop Eberhard of Treves received the same fate, and three days after soldiers and guards surrounded his Grand Seminary, banished its directors and professors and confiscated all its property.

In the meantime a dissension had arisen in the Camp of the enemy. Arnim, who had served Bismarck during the Council of the Vatican, had come into disfavor with his powerful employer, and began to show revolutionary tendencies. One of the results of this discord between the Chancellor and his former tool was the disclosure of certain shady operations of Bismarck prior to 1870. Certain documents were brought forth showing that, in 1869, Doellinger had influenced the Bavarian Prince Hohenlohe to begin the war against Rome, and that at that time Bismarck was laboring in every part of Europe to arouse the Governments against the definition of papal infallibility. It was shown also that from June 18, 1870, this Arnim, whom Pius IX. called the "New Architofel," had suggested against the Church all the measures of which Bismarck had made use during the year that followed. These revelations coming thus in 1874, in the very heat of the persecution, gave additional evidence that the Council and the infallibility were only pretexts, and not the real causes of the Kulturkampf, an event which had been in preparation long before the Council was convened.

The greater indignities perpetrated upon the heads of the Catholic Church in Germany now followed each other with such rapidity and violence as to overshadow the thousands of minor grievances. On July 27, 1874, Bishop Janiczewski, auxiliary of the See of Posen, was imprisoned at Kosmin for fifteen months for having assumed the episcopal office without the permission of the Government. The same day, Mgr. Koryskowski, delegated by the Archbishop of Gnesen to administer the affairs of that diocese, was sent into exile at Stargard. The Canon Woiyewski was imprisoned for having continued in his capacity as ecclesiastical judge after the imprisonment of his Archbishop. Bishop Martin of Paderborn was deposed from his bishopric; he refused to read the sentence which was nailed to the door of his prison cell; he was liberated, however, but conducted to the frontiers at Wesel. On January 18, 1875, the Seminary of Fulda, the most ancient establishment of its kind in Germany, was closed.

The record of persecution during the first five years of the Kulturkampf is an appalling arraignment of its perpetrators. Five bishops imprisoned, and all bishops fined and insulted, fourteen hundred priests incarcerated, all the seminaries closed, it seemed little short of miraculous that religion survived the merciless onslaught. Yet the end had not arrived. On December 4, 1874, Bismarck suppressed the embassy to the Vatican, an act which moved the Catholic people to send to the Sovereign Pontiff an address signed by all the faithful of the Empire. It was in answer to this address that Pius IX. published that eloquent encyclical of February 5, 1875.

Strange to say, however, all the previous legislation had not begotten the results that were expected. The clergy like the episcopate resisted the anti-religious laws, preferring exile, imprisonment and fines to defection, however tempting. The faithful stood loyally by their afflicted pastors, refusing with one mind the ministrations of ecclesiastics sent to them by governmental orders.

The Chancellor, therefore, was driven to a final resort to effect his purpose of extinguishing Catholic faith in Germany. Accordingly a new series of laws was elaborated, entitled the Sperrgesetz, or laws suppressing the payments made to ecclesiastics by the State. One cannot rightly term these payments "salaries," a word which indicates no other claim than remuneration for services performed. The amounts annually payed to the Church by the State were moneys which the State owed to the Church since the beginning of the century on account of the wholesale confiscation of ecclesiastical properties and revenues following upon the Treaty of Luneville in 1803. As such they had been formally recognized, and hence their payment to the officials of the Church was a matter of justice which the State could not afford to refuse without incurring the stigma of robbery.

This, however, was the object of the new laws which were as follows:

Article 1. Beginning from the day on which the present law shall be published, the payment of all that the Government has hitherto allotted to dioceses, to institutions and to ecclesiastics who belong to such dioceses shall be suppressed. The same measure shall be extended to such ecclesiastical funds as the State administers permanently.

Art. 2. The ecclesiastical salaries shall be re-established whenever the bishop, or the diocesan administrator shall pledge himself in writing to observe the laws of the State.

Art. 3. In the dioceses of Posen-Gnesen and Paderborn the ecclesiastical salaries shall be re-established as soon as a new bishop shall be appointed in concert with the Government.

Art. 5. If in any diocese, in which the ecclesiastical salaries shall have been re-established, any priest refuses obedience to the laws of the State despite the pledges given by his bishop, the Government is authorized to suppress anew any allowance in favor of such recalcitrants.

Art. 6. The Government is authorized to re-establish the salaries of priests who by their acts manifest the intention of obeying the laws of the State. If after that they shall violate the law, the suppression of their salaries shall be enforced.