The “final philosophy,” as we have already remarked, will be of no use to the Catholic world. Protestants may, perhaps, relish it all the more. But no class of men will, in our opinion, be more gratified with it than the sceptics, the free-thinkers, and the enemies of supernatural truth; for they will not fail to see that to set up philosophy as “umpire” between religion and science is to make men distrust the doctrines of religion, and to prepare, though with the best intentions, the triumph of religious scepticism.
A GREAT BISHOP.
In writing the lives of saints their biographers often forget that they are writing history, and telling the part which a wise, strong, and manly character bore in that history. William Emmanuel von Ketteler, the late Bishop of Mayence, might by many be reckoned among saints, so holy was his life and so like the primitive Christian ideal. But he has another claim to fame, as one of the greatest modern champions of order against socialism, and of the church against organized godlessness. The “iron bishop,” the “fighting bishop,” were nicknames given him by his foes, and, though given in hate and derision, they unconsciously set forth one side of his powerful character. A man of his reach of mind, however humble, could not have taken a less prominent part and position in the struggle of principle against license of which the present religious disturbances in Germany are the type. It fell naturally to his share to be the speaker and standard-bearer of the cause of church liberties, and the representative of the episcopal order. His legal studies and experience, as well as his hardy habits and magnificent physique, seemed to have prepared him and pointed him out among all others for the championship of his party, including all the bodily fatigue and mental anxiety incident to such a leadership. He was as thorough a man as he was an ideal bishop and exceptional orator, and this manliness, physical and intellectual, was the basis of his simple and grand character. His chosen motto, “Let all be as one,” is no bad interpretation of the leading ideal which he tried through life to realize: church unity and Christian loyalty, served by the whole round of his exceptional and perfectly-developed faculties. Before setting forth the fruits of his special studies, and examining his life and personality from the point of view most important in this century of social strife, we purpose giving a short biographical sketch of the Bishop of Mayence.
He was born on Christmas day, 1811, at Münster in Westphalia, of a noble family, one branch of which, embracing the doctrines of the Reformation, had in the sixteenth century migrated to Poland and become hereditary dukes of Courland, and a second, remaining German and Catholic, had been distinguished by giving more than one member to the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. His own branch, the third, known as that of Alt-Assen, was worthily represented by his father, a stern, faithful, and upright man, an uncompromising Christian, and a moralist of what our easier age calls the “old school.” As in every great character, there was something of the soldier in Baron Frederick von Ketteler of Harkotten, and this streak was reproduced in at least two of his sons, William and Richard. His mother, Clementina, Baroness von Wenge of Beck, was a woman of superior character, as it is noticed that the mothers of remarkable men almost invariably are, and one of the bishop’s biographers is certainly entitled to dwell as he does, with special force, on the fact of the home-training of young Ketteler having had more real influence in shaping his character than either the schooling he got at the cathedral school of Münster until he was thirteen years of age, or the atmosphere of the Swiss Jesuit College at Brieg, where he studied until he was eighteen. The two most conspicuous traits in the youth were his passion for hunting and sport of all kinds, athletic games, Alpine climbing, and all exercises requiring hardiness and disregard of wind and weather, and his earnest and unobtrusive piety. He was spared the trial through which so many noble natures pass before fully identifying themselves with the spirit of the church, whose letter they have been early taught to obey: he experienced no time of doubt, of wavering, of temptation, and the modern sore of unbelief never seems to have even come near his mind. From a youth passed in alternate study and sport and a free, out-of-door life he grew to a manhood serious and industrious, with a routine of work always hallowed by early prayer and daily attendance at Mass, and a social position in his native town, as counsel or referee for the government, which was, if not fully worthy of his talents, yet sufficiently honorable as the beginning of a professional career. His university life had, like that of most young Germans, been marked by one duel, which seriously displeased his father, and his military obligations had been discharged, according to the laws as they then stood, by his service as a “one-year volunteer” in the local militia. His legal career seemed assured, though there were many among his early friends who foresaw that his entering the church was not unlikely. The incident that determined this change was the outbreak of Cologne in 1838, when the first note of the coming ecclesiastical troubles was sounded by a municipality that went to the length of imprisoning the archbishop, Clement von Droste-Vischering; the friend of Stolberg, and the primate of the Rhine provinces.
Ketteler, never averse to Prussia, in whose mission to Germany he believed, even up to the late Falk or May Laws which tore away the veil, could, nevertheless, not reconcile himself to serve any longer a government that allowed such violations of personal freedom and of the principles which underlie that freedom. In the autumn of the same year he went to the Münich Theological College and began his ecclesiastical studies. Among his professors were Döllinger and Görres, and others whose fame is less European but scarcely less great in Germany itself; and among his fellow-students Paul Melchers, the present Archbishop of Cologne, who, like himself, had been a lawyer of great promise. Coming at the age of twenty-seven to study among a body of whom many members were hardly more than boys, it may have been a hard task to preserve humility and charity; yet the verdict of his fellow-students, summed up by one of themselves, was to the effect that Ketteler’s simplicity and good-nature were in every way as marked as his intellectual superiority. These qualities came out again later in his intercourse with his country parishioners, each of whom, peasants as they were, he treated with the cordiality and respect of a neighbor and an equal. He was no demagogue, and had no theories save the everlasting theories of the Gospel and the church; but, as is usually the case, his practice with his social inferiors went far beyond the noisy and deceiving show of equality made by professional agitators. After four years’ study in Münich he devoted one year more to theological subjects in the episcopal seminary at Münster, and received holy orders in 1844, when he was sent as curate to Beckum, a small town in Westphalia. He was then thirty-three, and had reached half his allotted years; for it has been noticed that his term of service as priest and bishop was also thirty-three years. The coincidence of his last illness having lasted thirty-three days also struck many persons who are fond of these calculations.
At Beckum, where he was associated with two other young priests (one of whom, Brinkmann, is now Bishop of Münster), he led a life as near as possible to one of his ideals—still unfulfilled in practice, but only postponed in his mind because of more urgent and present needs—the life in common of the secular clergy. He and his fellow-curates lived in a small house, where each had one room besides the common gathering-room, and one purse for all uses, whether personal or charitable. He and Brinkmann founded a hospital during their short stay, and this grew afterwards to very satisfactory proportions; but Ketteler had opportunities of proving himself a good nurse under his own roof, where his third colleague was often bedridden for months at a time. His public ministry, however, never suffered, and his assiduity at the bedside of his sick parishioners and in the confessional at all times, in season and out of season, were remarkable. If all priests would reflect how momentous, nay, how awful, is the responsibility incurred in this matter of ever-readiness to hear a man’s confession, they would less seldom deviate from the self-sacrificing example which Bishop Ketteler gave consistently throughout his life. His zeal in this particular was not inferior, however, to his care of the schools which in his public career so distinguished him; and both led his diocesan after two years to remove him from Beckum, to a full parish, that of Hopsten.
His life here was a repetition of the life at Beckum; his ministry was so efficacious that the spiritual life of the parish resembled a permanent “mission,” or revival, and his active charity had a large field for exercise in the famine and the fever which visited his people during his incumbency. It is related of him that, his sister coming to visit him at Hopsten, he proposed to take her to see some of his friends in the neighborhood, and accordingly took her to his poorest people, begging for each a gift sorely needed, which resulted in her emptying her purse so effectually that she had to borrow money for her journey home. He provisioned his parish during the famine, and got his rich relations to help him in the work; and in the fever, besides his gifts of food, bedding, and medicines, and his regular offices as their pastor, he literally became his people’s physician and nurse.
It was no wonder that he should so have won the respect and trust of his neighbors that, even in that very Protestant borough of Lengerich, of which his parish formed part, he was unanimously returned as deputy to the Frankfort Parliament in 1848. It was here that he first came publicly before Germany as an orator and a statesman, and that he made that famous speech at the funeral of the Prussian delegates, Lichnowsky and Auerswald, murdered during the riots, which has become the most popular and widely known of any of his discourses. After his retirement from Parliament, and his attendance in the same year at the first meeting of the Catholic Union at Mayence, he was asked to give a course of lectures in the cathedral on the social and political problems of the day. It is said that Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, besides free-thinkers, crowded to hear these eloquent and exhaustive lectures, and that the competition for seats was a fitting type of the intellectual stir they made in the city. His physical endurance was no less marvellous, and added much to the impressiveness of the discourses, delivered in close succession, with a full, melodious, resounding voice under perfect control of the speaker, and carefully husbanded, so that neither enthusiasm nor emotion should drive it into shrillness or sink it into huskiness. That year saw the preacher transferred to the provostship of St. Hedwige’s Church in Berlin, which he occupied only for ten months, but long enough to win the love of his city congregation as he had that of his country parish. His younger brother, Richard, who had left the army to become a priest, succeeded him at Hopsten, but left the place later to become a Capuchin; he was long known as Father Bonaventure. In 1849 Provost Ketteler was chosen Bishop of Mayence, after a stormy election and dispute in the cathedral chapter. The first nominee, Doctor Leopold Schmid, professor of theology at Giesen, the local university, being, on grounds of “undue influence,” strongly disapproved of by a large minority of the canons, they and their opponents of the majority agreed to a re-election and to an appeal to the Holy See, upon which, out of the three names sent in, the Pope chose the provost of St. Hedwige. He was not consecrated till July, 1850, by the archbishop of Freiburg, assisted by the bishops of Limburg and Fulda. Thenceforward one may say that his life was entirely a public one, so intimately was it connected with the living and burning questions of the time. Each year the crisis between church and state seemed to draw nearer; and, if one may say so, the gap between the two has become complete since the promulgation of the May Laws. In this struggle, which lasted all through his episcopate, the state certainly proved the aggressor, for the lukewarmness of German Catholics in the last generation was a proverb; and Ketteler succeeded to a diocese in very different order from the one he has left. Things were working, or rather lapsing, into the hands of the church’s enemies, had they been wise enough to wait and watch; by hurrying matters they roused the spirit of Catholics, and raised against themselves a zealous band firmly attached to their faith and determined to vindicate its rights and liberties.
Of this band Bishop Ketteler, whether as deputy, pamphleteer, lecturer, or spiritual guide, was practically the head. His first works in Mayence were, on a wider scale, the repetition of those in Hopsten. He instituted reforms and amendments in every department; gathered the clergy together in yearly retreats, during which the exercises of St. Ignatius, which he held in high esteem, were made the basis of instruction; founded several Capuchin convents for the purpose of giving missions, especially in the country, and one Jesuit college, on the occasion of whose establishment he had to bear the brunt of a determined journalistic opposition; set up schools and an orphanage for girls under the care of the Sisters of Mercy, an asylum for repentant women under the nuns of the Good Shepherd, a refuge for servant-maids out of employment, a community of Poor Clares to visit and relieve the poor in their own homes, a Boys’ Orphanage, Boys’ Reformatory, and Boys’ Refuge, several unions and brotherhoods to keep the people together and preserve them from the snares of irreligious associations—notably a Working-men’s Catholic Union—and last, not least, a school taught by the Christian Brothers, which soon won such golden opinions that Protestants by scores withdrew their children from the communal schools and placed them under the new teachers. With rare liberality a Lutheran clergyman was allowed free access to the school to teach these children the religion of their parents. The bishop’s care for, and personal visitation of, the hospitals also reacted on the management of these institutions, so that they were more than ever well conducted during his episcopate. Though his enemies, despairing of finding other sins to lay to his charge, accused him of undue harshness as a taskmaster in the things he required of his clergy, this body itself never found fault with his zeal for discipline and austerity. He counselled nothing which he did not perform and, indeed, far surpass; for, unlike many bishops, estimable and even holy men, he did not consider his rank as exempting him from the most ordinary duties of a priest; he sat as many hours on regular days in the confessional as any country curate, and his daily Mass at five o’clock was always said in the cathedral instead of a private house-chapel—that is, until the last four or five years of his life, when old age made this indulgence necessary. He preached almost incessantly; the Sundays in Lent and Advent always in his own cathedral, other Sundays alternating with his clergy, and in the evenings of Sundays and week-days alike in any church, chapel, or even hall, where he was asked to further any good cause. His confirmation and church-visitation journeys were remarkable; he returned to the rightful custom of confirming, no matter how few the candidates, separately in each parish, instead of lumping many parishes together in one central ceremony, and this in order that he might gain a personal knowledge of each place, its needs and workings. On these occasions he would give a preliminary introduction on the eve of the confirmation, then hear confessions far into the night or morning, say Mass early, and confess again till he preached the sermon and administered the sacrament; in the afternoon inspect the schools, catechise the children, and visit any sick persons there might happen to be; conduct the evening service himself and preach a second time, the intermediate moments being passed again in the confessional or in private intercourse with any one who asked for special advice or comfort.