§ 192.2. The Prince-Primate of the Confederation of the Rhine.—Baron Carl Theod. von Dalberg, distinguished for his literary culture and his liberal patronage of art and science, was made in 1802 Elector of Mainz and Lord High Chancellor of the German empire. When by the recess of 1803 the territories of the electorate on the left of the Rhine were given over to France and those on the right secularized, the electoral rank was abolished. The same happened with respect to the lord high chancellorship through the creation of the Rhenish Confederation. Dalberg was indemnified for the former by the favour of Napoleon by the gift of a small territory on the right of the Rhine, and for the latter by the renewal of the prince-primacy of the Confederation of the Rhine with a seat in the Federal council. He still retained his episcopal office and fixed its seat at Regensburg. The founding of a metropolitan chapter at Regensburg embracing the whole domain of the Rhenish Confederation he did not succeed in carrying out, and in 1813 he felt compelled to surrender also his territorial possessions. His spiritual functions, however, as Archbishop of Regensburg, he continued to discharge until his death in 1817.
§ 192.3. The Vienna Congress and the Concordat.—The Vienna Congress of 1814, 1815, had assigned it the difficult task of righting the sorely disturbed political affairs of Europe and giving a new shape to the territorial and dynastic relations. But never had an indispensably necessary redistribution of territory been made more difficult or more complicated by diplomatic intrigues than in Germany. Instead of the earlier federation of states, the restoration of which proved impossible, the federal constitution of June 8th, 1815, created under the name of the German Confederation a union of states in which all members of the confederation as such exercised equal sovereign rights. Their number then amounted to thirty-eight, but in the course of time by death or withdrawal were reduced to thirty-four. The new distribution of territory, just as little as the Luneville Peace, took into account confessional homogeneity of princes and territories, so that the combination of Catholic and Protestant districts with the above referred to consequences, occurred in a yet larger measure. But the federal constitution secured in Article XVI. full toleration for all Christian confessions in the countries of the confederation. The claims of the Romish curia, which advanced from the demand for the restoration of all ecclesiastical principalities and the return of all impropriated churches and monasteries to their original purposes, to the demand for the restoration of the holy Roman-German empire in the mediæval and hierarchical sense, as well as the solemn protest against its conclusions laid upon the table of the congress by the papal legate Consalvi, were left quite unheeded. But also a proposal urgently pressed by the vicar-general of the diocese of Constance, Baron von Wessenberg (§ [187, 3]), to found a German Catholic national church under a German primate found no favour with the congress; and an article recommended by Austria and Prussia to be incorporated in the acts of the confederation by which the Catholic church in Germany endeavoured to secure a common constitution under guarantee of the confederation, was rejected through the opposition of Bavaria. And since in the Frankfort parliament neither Wessenberg with his primacy and national church idea nor Consalvi with a comprehensive concordat answering to the wishes of the curia, was able to carry through a measure, it was left to the separate states interested to make separate concordats with the pope. Bavaria concluded a concordat in 1817 (§ [195, 1]); Prussia in 1821 (§ [193, 1]). Negotiations with the other German states fell through owing to the excessiveness of the demands of the hierarchy, or led to very unsatisfactory results, as in Hanover in 1824 (§ [194, 1]) and the states belonging to the ecclesiastical province of the Upper Rhine in 1837 (§ [196, 1]). In the time of reaction against the revolutionary excesses of 1848 the curia first secured any real advance. Hesse-Darmstadt opened the list in 1854 with a secret convention (§ [196, 4]); then Austria followed in 1855 with a model concordat (§ [198, 2]) which served as the pattern for the concordats with Württemberg in 1857 (§ [196, 6]), and with Baden in 1859 (§ [196, 2]), as well as for the episcopal convention with Nassau in 1861 (§ [196, 4]). But the revived liberal current of 1860 swept away the South German concordats; the Vatican Council by its infallibility dogma gave the deathblow to that of Austria, and the German “Kulturkampf” sent the Prussian concordat to the winds, and only that of Bavaria remained in full force.
§ 192.4. The Frankfort Parliament and the Würzburg Bishops’ Congress of 1848.—As in the March diets of 1848 the magic word “freedom” roused through Germany a feverish excitement, it found a ready response among the Catholics, whose church was favoured in the highest degree by the movement. In the Frankfort parliament the ablest leaders of Catholic Germany had seats. Among the Catholic population there were numerous religio-political societies formed (§ [186, 3]), and the German bishops, avowedly for the celebration of the 600th anniversary of the building of Cologne cathedral, set alongside of the Frankfort people’s parliament a German bishops’ council. After they had at Frankfort declared themselves in favour of unconditional liberty of faith, conscience, and worship, the complete independence of all religious societies in the ordering and administering of their affairs, but also of freeing the schools from all ecclesiastical control and oversight, as well as of the introduction of obligatory civil marriage, the bishops’ council met in October at Würzburg under the presidency of Archbishop Geissel of Cologne with nineteen episcopal assistants and several able theological advisers. In thirty-six sessions they reached the conclusion that complete separation between church and state is not to be desired so long as the state does not refuse to the church the place of authority belonging to it. On the other hand, by all means in their power they are to seek the abrogation of the placet of the sovereign, the full independence of ecclesiastical legislation, administration and jurisdiction, with the abolition of the appellatio tanquam ab abusu, the direction and oversight of the public schools as well as the control of religious instruction in higher schools to be given only by teachers licensed for the purpose by the bishops, and finally to demand permission to erect educational institutions of their own of every kind, etc., and to forward a copy of these decisions to all German governments. The main object of the Würzburg assembly to secure currency for their resolutions in the new Germany sketched out at the Frankfort parliament, was indeed frustrated by that parliament’s speedy overthrow. Nevertheless in the several states concerned it proved of great and lasting importance in determining the subsequent unanimous proceedings of the bishops.
§ 193. Prussia.
To the pious king Frederick William III. (1797-1840) it was a matter of heart and conscience to turn to account the religious consciousness of his people, re-awakened by God’s gracious help during the war of independence, for the healing of the three hundred years’ rent in the evangelical church by a union of the two evangelical confessions. The jubilee festival of the Reformation in 1817 seemed to him to offer the most favourable occasion. The king also desired to see the Catholic church in his dominions restored to an orderly and thriving condition, and for this end concluded a concordat with Rome in 1821. But it was broken up in 1836 over a strife between canon and civil law in reference to mixed marriages. Frederick William IV. was dominated by romantic ideas, and his reign (1840-1858), notwithstanding all his evangelical Christian decidedness, was wanting in the necessary firmness and energetic consistency. In the Catholic church the Jesuits were allowed unhindered to foster ultramontane hierarchical principles, and in the evangelical church the troubles about constitution, union, and confession could not be surmounted either by its own proper guardian, the episcopate, or by the superior church councils created in 1850. And although the notifications of William I. on his entrance upon the sole government in 1858 were hailed by the liberals as giving assurance that a new era had dawned in the development of the evangelical national church, this hope proved to be premature. With the exaltation of the victory-crowned royal house of Prussia to the throne of the newly erected German Empire on January 18th, 1871, a new era was actually opened for ecclesiastical developments and modifications throughout the land.
§ 193.1. The Catholic Church to the Close of the Cologne Conflict.—The government of Frederick William III. entered into negotiations with the papal curia, not so much for the old provinces in which everything was going well, but rather in the interests of the Rhine provinces annexed in 1814, whose bishops’ sees were vacant or in need of circumscription. The first Prussian ambassador to the Roman curia (1816-1823) was the famous historian Niebuhr. Although a true Protestant and keen critic and restorer of the history of old pagan Rome he was no match for the subtle and skilful diplomacy of Consalvi. In presence of the claims of the curia he manifested to an almost incredible extent trustful sympathy and acquiescence, even taking to do with matters that lay outside of Prussian affairs, eagerly silencing and opposing any considerations suggested from the other side. A complete concordat, however, defining in detail all the relations between church and state was not secured, but in 1821 an agreement was come to, with thankful acknowledgment of the “great magnanimity and goodness” shown by the king, by the bull De salute animarum, sanctioned by the king through a cabinet order (“in the exercise of his royal prerogative and without detriment to these rights”), according to which two archbishoprics, Cologne and Posen, and six bishoprics, Treves, Münster, Paderborn, Breslau, Kulm, and Ermeland, with a clerical seminary, were erected in Prussia and furnished with rich endowments. The cathedral chapter was to have the free choice of the bishop; but by an annexed note it was recommended to make sure in every such election that the one so chosen would be a grata persona to the king. The union thus effected between church and state was of but short duration. The decree of Trent forbade Catholics to enter into mixed marriages with non-Catholics. A later papal bull of 1741, however, permitted it on condition of an only passive assistance of the clergy at the wedding and an engagement by the parents to train up the children as Catholics. The law of Prussia, on the other hand, in contested cases made all the children follow the religion of their fathers. As this was held in 1825 to apply to the Rhine provinces, and as the bishops there had, in 1828, appealed to the pope, Pius VIII. when negotiations with the Prussian ambassador Bunsen (1824-1838) proved fruitless, issued in 1830 a brief which permitted Catholic priests to give the ecclesiastical sanction to mixed marriages only when a promise was given that the children should be educated as Catholics, but otherwise to give only passive assistance. When all remonstrances failed to overcome the obstinacy of the curia, the government turned to the Archbishop of Cologne, Count Spiegel, a zealous friend and promoter of the Hermesian theology (§ [191, 1]), and arranged in 1834 a secret convention with him, which by his influence all his suffragans joined. In it they promised to give such an interpretation to the brief that its observance would be limited to teaching and exhortation, but would by no means extend to the obligation of submitting the children to Catholic baptism, and that the mere assistentia passiva would be resorted to as rarely as possible, and only in cases where absolutely required. Spiegel died in November, 1835. In 1836 the Westphalian Baron Clement Droste von Vischering was chosen as his successor. Although before his elevation he had unhesitatingly agreed to the convention, soon after his enthronization he strictly forbad all the clergy celebrating any marriage except in accordance with the brief, and blamed himself for having believed the agreement between convention and brief affirmed by the government, and having only subsequently on closer examination discovered the disagreement between the two. At the same time, in order to give effect to the condemnation that had been meanwhile passed on the Hermesian theology, he gave orders that at the confessional the Bonn students should be forbidden to attend the lectures of Hermesians. When the archbishop could not be prevailed on to yield, he was condemned in 1837 as having broken his word and having incited to rebellion, and sent to the fortress of Minden. Gregory XIV. addressed to the consistory a fulminating allocution, and a flood of controversial tracts on either side swept over Germany. Görres designated the archbishop “the Athanasius of the nineteenth century.” The government issued a state paper justifying its procedure, and the courts of law sentenced certain refractory priests to several years’ confinement in fortresses or prisons. The moderate peaceful tone of the cathedral chapter did much to quell the disturbance, supporting as it did the state rather than the archbishop. The example of Cologne encouraged also Dunin, Archbishop of Gnesen and Posen, to issue in 1838 a pastoral in which he threatened with suspension any priest in his diocese who would not yield unconditional obedience to the papal brief. For this he was deposed by the civil courts and sentenced to half a year’s imprisonment in a fortress, but the king prevented the execution of the sentence. But Dunin fled from Berlin, whither he had been ordered by the king, to Posen, and was then brought in 1839 to the fortress of Kolberg. While matters were in this state Frederick William IV. came to the throne in 1840. Dunin was immediately restored, after promising to maintain the peace. Droste also was released from his confinement with public marks of respect, but received in 1841, with his own and the pope’s approval, in the former Bishop of Spires, Geissel, a coadjutor, who in his name and with the right of succession administered the diocese. The government gave no aid to the Hermesians. The law in regard to mixed marriages continued indeed in force, but was exercised so as to put no constraint of conscience upon the Catholic clergy. Of his own accord the king declined further exercise of the royal prerogative, allowing the bishops direct intercourse with the papal see, whereas previously all correspondence had to pass through royal committees, with this proviso by the minister Eichhorn, “that this display of generous confidence be not abused,” and with the expectation that the bishops would not only communicate to the government the contents of their correspondence with the pope, but also the papal replies which did not deal exclusively with doctrine, and would not speak and act against the wish and will of the government. But Geissel, recommended by Louis of Bavaria to his son-in-law Frederick William IV. instead of Baron von Diepenbrock (§ [187, 1]) who was first thought of, by his skilful and energetic manœuvring, going on from victory to victory, raised ultramontanism in Prussia to the very summit of its influence and glory.
§ 193.2. The Golden Age of Prussian Ultramontanism, 1841-1871.—In the Cologne-Posen conflict Rome had won an almost complete victory, and with all its satellites now thought only of how it might in the best possible manner turn this victory to account, in which the all too trustful government sought to aid it to the utmost. This movement received a further impulse in the revolution of 1848 (§ [192, 4]). In Prussia as well as in other German lands, and there in a special degree, the Catholic church managed to derive from the revolutionary movements of those times, and from the subsequent reaction, substantial advantage. The constitution of 1850 declared in Article xv.: “The evangelical and the Roman Catholic Church as well as every other religious society regulates and administers its affairs independently;” in Article xvi.: “The correspondence of religious societies with their superiors is unrestricted, the publication of ecclesiastical ordinances is subject only to those limitations which apply to all other documents;” in Article xviii.: “The right of nomination, proposal, election, and institution to spiritual office, so far as it belongs to the state, is abolished;” and in Article xxiv.: “The respective religious societies direct religious instruction in the public schools.” Under the screen of these fundamental privileges the Catholic episcopate now claimed one civil prerogative after another, emancipated itself wholly from the laws of the state, and, on the plea that God must be obeyed rather than man, made the canon law, not only in purely ecclesiastical but also in mixed matters, the only standard, and the decision of the pope the final appeal. At last nothing was left to the state but the obligation of conferring splendid endowments upon the bishops, cathedral chapters, and seminaries for priests, and the honour of being at home the executioner of episcopal tyranny, and abroad the avenger of every utterance unfavourable in the doctrine and worship, customs and enactments of the Catholic church. With almost incredible infatuation the Catholic hierarchy was now regarded as a main support of the throne against the revolutionary tendencies of the age and as the surest guarantee for the loyalty of subjects in provinces predominantly Catholic. Under protection of the law allowing the formation of societies and the right of assembling, the order of Jesuits set up one establishment after another, and made up for defects or insufficient energy of ultramontane pastoral work, agitation and endeavour at conversion on the part of other peaceably disposed parish priests, by numerous missions conducted in the most ostentatious manner (§ [186, 6]). Although according to Article xiii. of the constitution religious societies could obtain corporative rights only by special enactments, the bishops, on their own authority, without regarding this provision, established religious orders and congregations wherever they chose. As these were generally placed under foreign superiors male or female, to whom in Jesuit fashion unconditional obedience was rendered, each member being “like a corpse,” without any individual will, they spread without hindrance, so that continually new cloisters and houses of the orders sprang up like mushrooms over the Protestant metropolis (§ [186, 2]). Education in Catholic districts fell more and more into the hands of religious corporations, and even the higher state educational institutions, so far as they dealt with the training of the Catholic youth (theological faculties, gymnasia, and Training schools), were wholly under the control of the bishops. From the boys’ convents and priests’ seminaries, erected at all episcopal residences, went forth a new generation of clergy reared in the severest school of intolerance, who, first of all acting as chaplains, by espionage, the arousing of suspicion and talebearing, were the dread of the old parish priests, and, as “chaplains at large,” stirred up fanaticism among the people, and secured the Catholic press to themselves as a monopoly. For the purposes of Catholic worship and education the government had placed state aid most liberally at their disposal, without requiring any account from the bishops as to their disposal of the money. Although the number of Catholics in the whole country was only about half that of the Protestants, the endowment of the Catholic was almost double that of the evangelical church. The civil authority readily helped the bishops to enforce any spiritual penalties, and thus the inferior clergy were brought into absolute dependence upon their spiritual superiors. In the government department of Public Worship, from 1840 to 1848 under the direction of Eichhorn, there was since 1841 a subsection for dealing with the affairs of the Catholic church which, although restricted to the guarding of the rights of the king over against the curia and that of the state over against the hierarchy, came to be in an entirely opposite sense “the civil department of the pope in Prussia.” Under Von Mühler’s ministry, 1862-1872, it obtained absolute authority which it seems to have exercised in removing unfavourable acts and documents from the imperial archives. And thus the Catholic church, or rather the ultramontane party dominant in it since 1848, grew up into a power that threatened the whole commonwealth in its very foundations.—By the annexation of Hanover, Hesse, and Nassau in 1866, four new bishoprics, those of Hildesheim, Osnabrück, Fulda and Limburg were added to the previous eight.—Continuation § [197].
§ 193.3. The Evangelical Church in Old Prussia down to 1848.—On the accomplishment of the union by Frederick William III. and the confusions arising therefrom, see § [177]. Frederick William IV. on his accession declared his wish in reference to the national evangelical church, that the supreme control of the church should be exercised only in order to secure for it in an orderly and legal way the independent administration of its own affairs. The realization of this idea, after a church conference of the ordinary clergy from almost all German states had been held in Berlin without result, was attempted at Berlin by a general synod, opened on Whitsunday, 1846. The synod at its eighteenth session entered upon the consideration of the difficult question of doctrine and the confession. The result of this was the approval of an ordination formula drawn up by Dr. Nitzsch (§ [182, 10]), according to which the candidate for ordination was to make profession of the great fundamental and saving truths instead of the church confession hitherto enforced. And since among these fundamental truths the doctrines of creation, original sin, the supernatural conception, the descent into hell and the ascension of Christ, the resurrection of the body, the last judgment, everlasting life and everlasting punishment were not included, and therefore were not to be enforced, since further by this ordination formula the special confessions of Lutheran and Reformed were really set aside, and therewith the existence of a Lutheran as well as a Reformed church within the union seemed to be abolished, a small number of decided Lutherans in the synod protested; still more decided and vigorous protests arose from outside the synod, to which the Evang. Kirchenzeitung opened its columns. The government gave no further countenance to the decisions of the synod, and opponents exercised their wit upon the unfortunate Nicænum of the nineteenth century, which as a Nitzschenum had fallen into the water. In March, 1847, the king issued a patent of toleration, by which protection was assured anew to existing churches, but the formation of new religious societies was allowed to all who found not in these the expression of their belief.
§ 193.4. The Evangelical Church in Old Prussia, 1848-1872.—When the storms of revolution broke out in 1848, the new minister of worship, Count Schwerin, willingly aided in reorganizing the church according to the mind of the masses of the people by a constitutional synod. But before it had met the reaction had already set in. The transition ministry of Ladenberg was assured by consistories and faculties of the danger of convoking such a synod of representatives of the people. Instead of the synod therefore a Supreme Church Council was assembled at Berlin in 1850, which, independent of the ministry, and only under the king as præcipuum membrum ecclesiæ, should represent the freedom of the church from the state as something already realized. On March 6th, 1852, the king issued a cabinet order, in consequence of which the Supreme Church Council administered not only the affairs of the evangelical national church as a whole, but also was charged with the interests of the Lutheran as well as the Reformed church in particular, and was to be composed of members from both of those confessions, who should alone have to decide on questions referring to their own confession. On the Itio in partes thus required in this board, only Dr. Nitzsch remained over, as he declared that he could find expression for his religious convictions in neither of the two confessions, but only in a consensus of both. The difficulty was overcome by reckoning him a representative equally of both denominations. Encouraged by such connivance in high places to entertain still bolder hopes, the Lutheran societies in 1853 presented to the king a petition signed by one hundred and sixty one clergymen, for restoring Lutheran faculties and the Lutheran church property. But this called forth a rather unfavourable cabinet order, in which the king expressed his disapproval of such a misconception of the ordinances of the former year, and made the express declaration that it never was his intention to break up or weaken the union effected by his father, that he only wished to give the confession within the union the protection to which it was undoubtedly entitled. After this the separate Lutheran interest so long highly favoured fell into manifest and growing disfavour. Still the ministerial department of worship under Von Raumer, 1850-1858, continued to conduct the affairs of schools and universities in the spirit of the ecclesiastical orthodox reaction, and issued the endless school regulations conceived in this spirit of the privy councillor Stiehl. The Supreme Church Council also exhibited a rare activity and passed many wholesome ordinances. The evangelical church won great credit by the care it took of its members scattered over distant lands, in supplying them with clergy and teachers. The evident favour with which Frederick William IV. furthered the efforts of the Evangelical Alliance of 1857 (§ [178, 3]) was the last proof of decided aversion from the confessional movement which he was to be allowed to give. A long and hopeless illness, of which he died in 1861, obliged him to resign the government to his brother William I. When this monarch in October, 1855, began to rule in his own name, he declared to his newly appointed ministers that it was his firm resolve that the evangelical union, whose beneficent development had been obstructive to an orthodoxy incompatible with the character of the evangelical church, and which had thus almost caused its ruin, should be maintained and further advanced. But in order that the task might be accomplished, the organs for its administration must be carefully chosen and to some extent changed. All hypocrisy and formalism, which that orthodoxy had fostered, is wherever possible to be removed. The “new era,” however, marked by the appearance of liberal journals, by no means answered to the expectations which those words excited. The ministry of Von Bethmann-Hollweg, 1858-1862, filled some theological and spiritual offices in this liberal spirit; Stahl withdrew from the Supreme Church Council; the proceedings against the free churches, as well as the severe measures against the re-marriage of divorced parties, were relaxed. But the marriage law laid down by the ministry with permission of civil marriage was rejected by the House of Peers, and the hated school regulations had to be undertaken by the minister himself. The ecclesiastically conservative ministry of Von Mühler, 1862-1872, which, however, wanted a fixed principle as well as self-determined energy of will, and was therefore often vacillating and losing the respect of all parties, was utterly unfit to realize these expectations. The Supreme Church Council published in 1867 the outlines of a provincial synodal constitution for the six East Provinces which were still without this institution, which the Rhine Provinces and Westphalia had enjoyed since 1835. For this purpose he convened in autumn, 1869, an extraordinary provincial synod, which essentially approved the sketch submitted, whereupon it was provisionally enacted.
§ 193.5. The Evangelical Church in Old Prussia, 1872-1880.—After the removal of Von Mühler, the minister of worship, in January, 1872, his place was taken by Dr. Falk, 1872-1879. The hated school regulations were now at last set aside and replaced by new moderate prescriptions, conceived in an almost unexpectedly temperate spirit. On September 10th, 1873, the king issued a congregational and synodal constitution for the eastern provinces, with the express statement that the position of the confession and the union should thereby be in no way affected. It prescribed that in every congregation presided over by a pastor, elected by the ecclesiastically qualified church members, i.e. those of honourable life who had taken part in public worship and received the sacraments, there should be a church council of from four to twelve persons, and for more important matters, e.g. the election of a pastor, a congregational committee of three times the size, half of which should be reappointed every third year. To the district synod, presided over by the superintendent, each congregation sends as delegates besides the pastor a lay representative chosen by the church council from among its members or from the congregational committee. According to the same principle the District Synods choose from their members a clerical and a lay representative to the provincial synod, to which also the evangelical theological faculty of the university within the bounds sends a deputy, and the territorial lord nominates a number of members not exceeding a sixth part of the whole. The general synod, in which also the two western provinces, the Rhenish and Westphalian, take part, consists of one hundred and fifty delegates from the provincial synods, and thirty nominated by the territorial lords, to which the faculties of theology and law of the six universities within the bounds send each one of their members. Although this royal decree had proclaimed itself final, and only remitted to an Extraordinary General Synod to be called forthwith the task of arranging for future ordinary general synods, yet at the meeting of this extraordinary synod in Berlin, on November 24th, 1875, a draft was submitted of a constitution modified in various important points. Of the three demands of the liberal party now violently insisted upon—