The Frankfort Parliament decreed the total separation of church and state, and was therefore compelled to guarantee the freedom of all religions. This separation was sanctioned by the Catholic members of the Assembly, who looked upon it as less dangerous to the cause of religion and morality than ecclesiastical Josephism. In the present conflict between the church and the German Empire the Catholic party has again demanded, and in vain, the separation of church and state. In rejecting their urgent request, Dr. Falk declared that the leading minds in England and America are already beginning to regret that their governments have so little control over the ecclesiastical organizations within their limits.
Whilst the representatives of the German people at Frankfort were abolishing the privileges of the nobles, decreeing the separation of church and state, and forgetting the standing armies, the governments were quietly gathering their forces. Marshal Radetzky put down the Italian rebellion, Prince Windischgrätz quelled the democracy of Vienna, and General Wrangel took possession of Berlin, without a battle. Russia, at the request of Austria, sent an army into Hungary to destroy the rebellion in that country, and the disturbances in Bavaria and in the Palatinate were suppressed by Prussian troops under the present Emperor of Germany. The representatives of the larger states withdrew from the Frankfort Parliament, which dwindled, and finally, amidst universal contempt and neglect, came to an end at Stuttgart, June 18, 1849.
But the liberties of the church were not lost. In Prussia, as we have seen, a better state of things had begun with the imprisonment of the heroic Archbishop of Cologne in 1837. In the face of the menacing attitude of the German democrats and republicans, Frederick William IV. confirmed the liberties of the Catholic Church by the letters-patent of 1847.
The constitutions of December 5, 1848, and January 31, 1850, were drawn up in the lurid light of the revolution, which had beaten fiercest upon the house of Hohenzollern. The king had capitulated to the insurgents, withdrawn his soldiers from the capital, and abandoned Berlin, and with it the whole state, for nine months to the tender mercies of the mob. He was forced to witness the most revolting spectacles. The dead bodies of the rioters were borne in procession under the windows of his palace, while the rabble shouted to him: “Fritz, off with your hat.”
It is not surprising, in view of this experience, that we should find in the constitution of 1850 (articles 15 to 18 inclusive) a very satisfactory recognition of the rights of the church. Why these paragraphs granting the church freedom to regulate and administer its own affairs; to keep possession of its own revenues, endowments, and establishments, whether devoted to worship, education, or beneficence; and freely to communicate with the Pope, were inserted in the constitution, we know from Prince Bismarck himself. In his speech in the Prussian Upper House, March 10, 1873, he affirmed that “they were introduced at a time when the state needed, or thought it needed, help, and believed that it would find this help by leaning on the Catholic Church. It was probably led to this belief by the fact that in the National Assembly of 1848 all the electoral districts with a preponderant Catholic population returned—I will not say royalist representatives, but certainly men who were the friends of order, which was not the case in the Protestant districts.”
The provisions of the constitution of 1850 with regard to the church were honorably and faithfully carried out down to the beginning of the present conflict. Never since the Reformation had the church in Prussia been so free, never had she made such rapid progress, whether in completing her internal organization or in extending her influence. The Prussian liberals and atheists, who had fully persuaded themselves that without the wealth and aid of the state the Catholic religion would have no force, were amazed. The influence of the priests over the people grew in proportion as they were educated more thoroughly in the spirit and discipline of the church under the immediate supervision of the bishops, unfettered by state interference; the number of convents, both of men and women, rapidly increased; associations of all kinds, scientific, benevolent, and religious, spread over the land; religious journals and reviews were founded in which Catholic interests were ably advocated and defended; and all the forces of the church were unified and guided by the harmonious action of a most enlightened and zealous episcopate.
This was the more astonishing as the Evangelical Church, whose liberties had also been guaranteed by the constitution of 1850, had shown itself unable to profit by the greater freedom of action which it had received. In fact, the Evangelical Church was lifeless, and it needed only this test to prove its want of vitality. It was a state creation, and in an age when the world had ceased to recognize the divine right of kings to create religions. It was only in 1817 that the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches of Prussia, together with the very name of Protestant, were abolished by royal edict, and a new Prussian establishment, under the title of “evangelical,” was imposed by the civil power upon a Protestant population of nearly eight millions, whose religious and moral sense was so dead that they seemed to regard with stolid indifference this interference of government with all that freemen deem most sacred in life. Acts of parliament may make “establishments,” but they cannot inspire religious faith and life; and it was therefore not surprising that, when the mummy of evangelicalism was put out into the open air of freedom by the constitution of 1850, it should have been revealed to all that the thing was dead.
Nevertheless, the Prussian government continued to act toward the Catholic Church with great justice, and even friendliness, and the war against Catholic Austria in 1866 wrought no change in its ecclesiastical policy. Even the opening of the Vatican Council caused no alarm in Prussia; on the contrary, King William, as it was generally believed at least, was most civil to the Holy Father; and Prince Bismarck himself at that time saw no reason for apprehension, though he had been the head of the ministry already eight years. To what, then, are we to attribute Prussia’s sudden change of attitude toward the church? Who began the present conflict, and what was its provocation?
This is a question which has been much discussed in the Prussian House of Deputies and elsewhere. Prince Bismarck has openly asserted in the House of Deputies within the past year that the provocation was the definition of papal infallibility by the Vatican Council on the 18th of June, 1870, and subsequently the hostile attitude of the party of the Centrum toward the German Empire.
Herr von Kirchmann, a member of the German Parliament and of the Prussian House of Deputies, a national liberal, and not a Catholic, but in the main a sympathizer with the spirit of the Falk legislation, has recently discussed this whole subject with great ability, and—as far as it is possible for one who believes in the Hegelian doctrine that “the state is the present god”—also with fairness.[255]