To show how far freedom of discussion prevails in the Prussian Parliament over and above the speech quoted of Prince Bismarck, the dissolution of the Upper House on refusing to go the length of the government on the education question, and the creation of new peers for the purpose of overcoming that opposition, may be added the very significant announcement made by Dr. Falk on presenting the bill to the Chamber in the first instance, before a word of discussion had taken place on it, that his majesty’s sanction was certain beforehand; which was saying practically: You may vote as you please, but this bill must be passed, and he who opposes its passage is an enemy to the throne—no small threat in a military nation.
So much for freedom of discussion! Where, then, is one to find that mysterious body, the state, of which there is so much talk? Of course, this bill has passed both houses; it has been debated and divided on, and the divisions have gone with the ministry. Well, in representative governments, such is the rule. Whatever the majority votes becomes law. All looks fair. The bill has gone against the Catholics, and that is all that can be said about it.
But how has it gone against them? It is a sweeping measure; of that there can be no doubt. It is the most tremendous measure framed within this century, perhaps in all time, for the suppression of the faith; for, to any honest mind, these laws are absolute suppression of all that constitutes the Catholic Church, so far as human enactments can effect it. Prince Bismarck endeavored from the beginning of this contest with the church to throw a false light over it. He banished the Jesuits and the other orders on the plea that they were conspiring against the empire. There was no trial, or searching, or investigation. It was simply his ipse dixit: he commanded, and they were banished. At that time his contest, as he and his organs and representatives in the Chamber continued to assure the world, was one with conspirators, and in no wise with the Catholic Church. The secularization, which has been better called the dechristianization, of the schools, and the abolition of the sacrament of marriage, had nothing whatever to do with the Catholic faith. What mockery! Now he comes and forces this bill through the parliament, which, if carried out, as it doubtless will be to the letter—for Prince Bismarck does nothing by halves—simply and absolutely stops the life of religion, not alone the Catholic, but all religion with any pretension to the name, throughout Germany; and still he persists in declaring that the contest is not with the church. In his speech of March 10, which will be remembered in history, and in calmer moments read aright by all, the prince chancellor said: “The question in which we are at present involved is placed, according to my judgment, in a false light if we call it a confessional religious question. It is essentially political; it has nothing to do with the conflict of an evangelical dynasty against the Catholic Church, as our Catholic fellow-citizens are taught to believe; it has nothing to do with the conflict between faith and infidelity: it has solely to do with the ancient contest for dominion, which is as old as the human race; with the contest for power between monarchy and priesthood—the contest which is much older than the appearance of the Redeemer in the world.”
Now, if this statement of the relative position of the opposing forces be correct, Prince Bismarck makes the contest all the easier for the Catholics. He professes to remove it altogether out of the region of religion into that of politics, and thus the conflict, according to him, is one between two purely political parties. As will be shown, the party opposed to the present Bismarck policy is not at all restricted to the Catholics; it embraces the greater portion of the Evangelicals, most probably all of them, as well as those who, outside of Germany, would be called democrats. Basing the contest, then, on purely political grounds, the majority of the German Empire is driven by sheer force of the will of one man or of a few men, backed by the most powerful army in the world, into accepting a state of things which it abhors, and against which it vehemently protests. The claims of either party are to be decided purely on their own merits, and the verdict of a fair mind cannot fail to side with that at whose head stand the Catholics; for they claim nothing more than that the Prussian constitution, under which all up to the present have lived happily, be preserved inviolate. “Leave the Prussian law as it stood,” demand the Catholics and the Evangelicals. “We are content with it; we demand nothing more.” How such a plain and patriotic request can be contorted into conspiracy against the empire it is hard to conceive. As for the allegation that the relations of Catholics to the state have been altered one jot by the declaration of infallibility, that is idle. Catholics believe now precisely what they believed from the beginning. Prince Bismarck, then, was fully alive to the importance of the question he was engaged in at the time. It was no insignificant measure that might quietly sneak through the House almost without the House being aware of its existence. The German Empire numbers 40,000,000 of souls; of these 14,000,000 are Catholics; that is to say, more than one-third of the entire population. Call the relation existing to-day between these 14,000,000 of Catholics and the head of their church, the Pope, between them and their bishops and clergy, what you please, political or religious, the result of the passing of this measure is one and the same—the total breaking up of that relation in all that makes it what it is, in so far as it lies in Prince von Bismarck to effect that result. And so the world understands it.
“There is no parallel in history,” says the Pall Mall Gazette, “to the experiment which the German statesmen are resolutely bent on trying, except the memorable achievement of Englishmen under the guidance of Henry VIII.... Like all these measures, the new law concerning the education of ecclesiastical functionaries, which is the most striking of the number, will apply to all sects indifferently, but, in its application to the Roman Catholic priesthood, it almost takes one’s breath away.”
The London Times of April 19, in a curious article on our Holy Father which will call for attention afterwards, sums up the situation thus:
“The measures now in the German Parliament, and likely to become [which since have become] law, amount to a secular organization so complete as not to leave the Pope a soul, a place, an hour, that he can call entirely his own. Germany asserts for the civil power the control of all education, the imposition of its own conditions on entrance to either civil or ecclesiastical office, the administration of all discipline, and at every point the right to confine religious teachers and preachers to purely doctrinal and moral topics. Henceforth there is to be neither priest, nor bishop, nor cardinal, nor teacher, nor preacher, nor proclamation, nor public act, nor penalty, nor anything that man can hear, do, or say for the soul’s good of man in Germany, without the proper authorization, mark, and livery of the emperor.”
The Times is no special advocate of Catholic interests, so that, when it puts the case thus, it is out of no love for them. But after such a graphic picture of the situation, it is needless to reiterate what has been maintained, that, call these measures what you please, they simply involve and mean the legal suppression of the Catholic Church in Germany.
The bill, then, required some consideration; for it could only be regarded by one-third of the empire at least, and by the millions of their co-religionists outside the empire, not simply as an outrage on their conscience—that would be a weak word for it—but as a measure, whether it passed or was defeated, to be resisted with all the power that lies in man’s nature. In this light alone could it be looked upon by the Catholics, and thus the hearts of one-third of the empire were at once and, if freedom of conscience be not a meaningless phrase, most justly alienated from the government of an empire scarce yet two years old.