In Prussia the state is divided into provinces, and at the head of each province is a high-president (Ober-Präsident). This official, to whom the religious interests of the Catholics were committed, was always a Protestant. The provinces are divided into districts, and at the head of each district was a Protestant president, and almost all the inferior officers, even in Catholic provinces, were Protestants.
Again, in the courts of justice and in the army all the principal positions were given to Protestants. In the two corps d’armées of Prussia and Silesia, one-half was Catholic; in the army division of Posen, two-thirds; in that of Westphalia and Cleves, three-fifths; and, finally, in that of the Rhine, seven-eighths; yet there was not one Catholic field-officer, not a general or major. In 1832 a royal order was issued to provide for the religious wants of the army, and every care was taken for the spiritual needs of the Protestant soldiers; but not even one Catholic chaplain was appointed. All persons in active service, from superior officers down to private soldiers, were declared to be members of the military parish, and were placed under the authority of the Protestant chaplains. If a Catholic soldier wished to get married or to have his child baptized by a priest, he had first to obtain the permission of his Protestant curate. What was still more intolerable, the law regulating military worship was so contrived as to force the Catholic soldiers to be present at Protestant service.
Let us now turn to the relations of the church in Prussia with the Holy See. All direct communications between the Catholics and the Pope were expressly forbidden. Whenever the bishops wished to consult the Holy Father concerning the administration of their dioceses, their inquiries had to pass through the hands of the Protestant ministry, to be forwarded or not at its discretion, and the answer of the Pope had to pass through the same channel. It was not safe to write; for the government had no respect for the mails, and letters were habitually opened by order of Von Nagler, the postmaster-general, who boasted that he had never had any idiotic scruples about such matters; that Prince Constantine was his model, who had once entertained him with narrating how he had managed to get the choicest selection of intercepted letters in existence; he had had them bound in morocco, and they formed thirty-three volumes of the most interesting reading in his private library. Thus the church was ruled by a system of espionage and bureaucracy which hesitated not to violate all the sanctities of life to accomplish its ends. The bishops were reduced to a state of abject dependence; not being allowed to publish any new regulation or to make any appointment without the permission and approval of the Protestant high-president, from whom they constantly received the most annoying and vexatious despatches.
The election of bishops was reduced to a mere form. When a see became vacant, the royal commissary visited the chapter and announced the person whom the king had selected to fill the office, declaring at the same time that no other would receive his approval.
The minutest details of Catholic worship were placed under the supervision and control of Protestant laymen, who had to decide how much wine and how many hosts might be used during the year in the different churches.
We come now to a matter, vexed and often discussed, in which the trials of the church in Prussia, prior to the recent persecutions, finally culminated; we allude to the subject of marriages between Catholics and Protestants.
When, in 1803, Prussia got possession of the greater part of her Catholic provinces, the following order was at once issued: “His majesty enacts that children born in wedlock shall all be educated in the religion of the father, and that, in opposition to this law, neither party shall bind the other.” Apart from the odious meddling of the state with the rights of individuals and the agreements of parties so closely and sacredly related as man and wife, there was in this enactment a special injustice to Catholics, from the fact that nearly all the mixed marriages in Prussia were contracted by Protestant government officials and Catholic women of the provinces to which these agents had been sent. As these men held lucrative offices, they found no difficulty in making matrimonial alliances; and as the children had to be brought up in the religion of the father, the government was by this means gradually establishing Protestant congregations throughout its Catholic provinces. In 1825 this law was extended to the Rhenish province, and in 1831 a document was brought to light which explained the object of the extension—viz., that it might prove an effectual measure against the proselyting system of Catholics.
The condition of the church was indeed deplorable. With the name of being free, she was, in truth, enslaved; and while the state professed to respect her rights, it was using all the power of the most thoroughly organized and most heartless system of bureaucracy and espionage to weaken and fetter her action, and even to destroy her life. This was the state of affairs when, in the end of 1835, Von Droste Vischering, one of the greatest and noblest men of this century, worthy to be named with Athanasius and with Ambrose, was made archbishop of Cologne.
The Catholic people of Prussia had long since lost all faith in the good intentions of the government, of whose acts and aims they had full knowledge; and it was in order to restore confidence that a man so trusted and loved by them as Von Droste Vischering was promoted to the see of Cologne. The doctrines of Hermes, professor of theology in the University of Bonn, had just been condemned at Rome, but the government ignored the papal brief, and continued to give its support to the Hermesians; the archbishop, nevertheless, condemned their writings, and especially their organ, the Bonner Theologische Zeitschrift, forbade his students to attend their lectures at the university, and finally withdrew his approbation altogether from the Hermesian professors, refusing to ordain students unless they formally renounced the proscribed doctrines.
By a ministerial order issued in 1825, priests were forbidden, under pain of deposition from office, to exact in mixed marriages any promise concerning the education of the offspring. A like penalty was threatened for refusing to marry parties who were unwilling to make such promises, or for withholding absolution from those who were bringing up their children in the Protestant religion. To avert as far as possible any conflict between the church and the government, Pius VIII., in 1830, addressed a brief to the bishops of Cologne, Treves, Münster, and Paderborn, in which he made every allowable concession to the authority of the state in the matter of mixed marriages. The court of Berlin withheld the papal brief, and, taking advantage of the yielding disposition of Archbishop Spiegel of Cologne, entered, without the knowledge of the Holy See, into a secret agreement with him, in which still farther concessions were made, and in violation of Catholic principle. Von Droste Vischering took as his guide the papal brief, and paid no attention to such provisions of the secret agreement as conflicted with the instructions of the Holy Father.