His daily life at home was as simple, hardy, and frugal as it had been at Beckum: he rose at four and worked incessantly, yet finding time, besides his Breviary, to say the rosary and the office of the Third Order of St. Francis every day. Add to this his writings, his minute supervision of the ecclesiastical machinery of his diocese, his conferences with political leaders, his necessary journeys or excursions, besides his frequent undertaking of the duties of the archbishop of Freiburg after the latter grew too infirm to go on long confirmation rounds, and it will be easily seen that he was far from an ordinary man. In virtue of his office he was entitled to a seat in the Upper House (in the grand-duchy of Hesse), with the right of sending a representative, if he chose, which he did, sending one of his canons, Dr. Monsang, who, among other things, distinguished himself by voting for the freedom of the Jewish religious bodies, in the matter of internal reform, from state interference, and for their right to receive state aid, provided they themselves solicited it. In the German Reichstag, however, where Bishop Ketteler represented the borough of Tauberbischofsheim, he sat in person, and was numbered among the members of what was known as the Fraction of the Centre, of whom Windthorst, his friend, was and is the leader. During the two German wars, 1866 and 1870, he, though deploring the civil nature of the first, according to the tradition of the greater part of the Westphalian nobility, leaned to the side of Prussia, in whose mission to unite Germany his belief never wavered, and whose influence in things purely political he always upheld. His very patriotism and enlightened views in this direction made his firm stand against the Prussian aggression on the church of more weight and importance—a fact which his enemies fully appreciated and often tried to make capital of, dubbing him as inconsistent with himself. Every one will see how one-sided this view was.
He was so far modern in his ideas that he claimed not to have lost any of the rights of a citizen by becoming a priest; but the way in which he used those rights, civic and parliamentary, roused the anger of men whose interpretation of the same principle led them to see in a priest nothing more than a military serf of the empire. He never claimed for the church any privilege or any exemption, only the full meed of liberty due to any other corporation; the exception need not be in her favor, but should not be directed specially against her. The state and the church were separate bodies, indeed, and well for the latter that such a doctrine could be conscientiously held; but the very separation involved perfect autonomy for the church, and forbade any interference on the part of political authorities, while her influence in social questions was to be exerted only through her direct influence on individuals; for a state under bondage to the church never occurred to him as desirable. Meanwhile, he labored to carry out his ideal of internal church government, a noble and primitive one, based upon the importance of parish organization and of the thorough efficacy of the parish clergy, to whom the religious orders, in his view, were to act as helpers and subordinates. To the disuse of ancient church laws and customs he attributed the troubles that have often come upon the church in all times; for he held her discipline, and even her ritual, to be no less than her doctrine under the direct guidance of the Holy Ghost. This alone would have made him a reformer in a lax and lukewarm age, when it was the fashion for Catholics themselves to join in mild or witty reflections upon their own faith, and to remain outwardly in conformity with that faith only by habit and by intellectual sluggishness. But this, joined to his powerful zeal in matters more prominent and public, made him specially the leader of a spiritual revival among the people of his city, his diocese, and Germany at large. It was not in vain that he sat in the see of St. Boniface; and when he encouraged the celebration of his predecessor’s eleventh centenary, it was fully as much to stir up the zeal of his people for church liberty as to honor the memory of the great missionary. His five journeys to Rome on various solemn anniversaries, and notably that on the occasion of the Vatican Council, were the only other incidents of his life that remain to be noticed; on his way back from the last, in 1876, when the Holy Father received him with special marks of esteem and rejoiced to have him as a witness of his “golden” anniversary, Bishop Ketteler fell ill at Alt-Oetting, a shrine where he had encouraged and taken part in many a pilgrimage. He could get no farther than the Capuchin convent of Burghausen, where he died on the 13th of July, of typhoid fever; on the 18th he was buried in his own cathedral amidst the lamentations of his clergy and people. The country people, to whom he had always had a special leaning, and who knew him as familiarly as his own canons did through his frequent presence at and ministry in the great Rhine pilgrimages, were loud in their expressions of grief; all felt that they had lost a father, but those whose chief concern was in temporal matters felt also that a great speaker and thinker had departed. Of his style, his mode of thinking, and the zeal, always burning yet never intemperate, which he brought to his work even so early as 1848, one can judge by the famous passage of his speech at the funeral of Lichnowsky and Auerswald at Frankfort: “Who are the murderers of our friends? Are they the men who shot them through the breast, or those who clove open their heads with their axes? No, these are not the murderers. Their murderers are the principles which produce both good and evil deeds upon the earth, and the principles which produced this deed are not born of our people. I know the German people, not, indeed, by the experience of conventions, but by that of its inner, daily life.... I have devoted my life to the service of the poor people, and the more I have learnt to know them the more have I learnt to love them; I know what a great and noble character our German people has received from God. No, I repeat it: it is not our noble, our honest German people who are answerable for this wicked deed.... The true murderers are those who, before the people, seek to bring into contempt and to soil with their low ribaldry both Christ, Christianity, and the church; those who strive to efface from the heart of the people the healing message of the redemption of mankind; those who do not look upon revolution as a sad necessity under certain circumstances, but erect revolution into a principle, and hurry people from revolution to revolution; ... those who would take from the people the belief in the duty of man to command himself, to curb his passions, and to obey the higher laws of order and of virtue, and would, on the contrary, make laws of those passions and therewith inflame the people; those men who would set themselves up as lying gods over the people, in order that it may fall down before them and worship them.”
Ketteler’s first well-known speech on social subjects was delivered on the 4th of October, 1848, at the original meeting of the Catholic Union at Mayence—a body whose “congresses” have been held yearly since that time, and have been distinguished by speeches such as those of Montalembert, Dupanloup, Manning, Döllinger, before 1870, and others whose names are public property. His subject was “The Freedom of the Church, and the Social Crisis”; and says one of his biographers, “It is no mean testimony to his far-sightedness that he already foresaw and took part in the importance of the social question.” His lectures in the cathedral took in such themes as these: “The Catholic Doctrine of Property,” “Rational Freedom,” “The Destiny of Man,” “The Family, based on Christian Marriage,” “The Authority of the Church, based on Man’s Need of Authority.” Of the impression these discourses made on all classes we have spoken already. To show how liberal were his views on the form of government, it may be mentioned that it was one of his axioms that it mattered little who ruled, but much how he ruled. All forms of legitimate government were practically alike to him, though his own ideal for Germany was a revival of the old unity of confederation, with the equal representation of the burghers and of the peasantry by the side of the clergy and nobility; but the manner in which the government, no matter what it called itself, dealt with weighty questions of morals was in his view a touchstone. It will be seen from this that if his foes delighted in calling him the most ultramontane of ultramontanes, they had no reason, politically speaking, to call him retrograde, absolutist, or even monarchist. In fact, it seems as if one might sum up his political character thus: a citizen of a free imperial city of the middle ages, imbued with the keenness of sight and the versatility of tongue peculiar to the modern European politician.
In 1851 and 1852 a new phase of unbelief, dubbing itself “German Catholicism,” did its best to bewilder the mind of Catholic Germany, and the bishop plainly warned his people against it, saying: “Though I should incur hereby the reproach of intolerance, I must warn you against ‘German Catholicism,’ for it denies the Godhead of Christ, revelation, and redemption, and makes itself a god according to its own fancy.” In 1852, in his Lenten pastoral, he touched upon the connection between this belief and political radicalism; also upon the common reproach of rebellion against authority or of flattery towards princes which these new philosophers were constantly bringing against the church. “When the church,” he says, “advises the people to submit to the civil power, she is thus attacked: ‘See the flatterer of princes, the protectress of all abuses, the willing instrument of the oppression of the people.’ When, on the other hand, she reminds the state of its obligations, and, under certain circumstances, proclaims that God is to be obeyed rather than man, the spirit of deception cries out: ‘See the rebel, the seeker after undue authority.’” In 1873, when a new attack was made on religion by the establishment of communal schools, he resisted, by writing and preaching, “these institutions which contradict all the principles of religion, disturb Christian education, contradict and confuse the understanding and the nature of childhood, and damage all the interests of the Christian family.” In 1851, when every government in Germany had been more or less remodelled, and many fetters of old prescription and prejudice had been shaken off by the revolution of 1844, the bishops of the Upper Rhine province came together at Freiburg, and presented a memoir on church relations with the state to the neighboring rulers of Hesse, Würtemberg, Baden, and Nassau. No notice was taken of it, and two years later it was repeated with almost the same result, save that in Hesse the grand-duke and his prime minister, Dalwigk, called a convention in 1854, and established the liberty and autonomy of the church upon a legal basis. Ketteler’s pamphlet in the same year, three months previous to the convention, had some influence on the course of affairs; it was on “The rights, and the right to protection, of the Catholic Church in Germany, with special reference to the claims of the episcopate of the Upper Rhine and the present struggle,” and may be summed up in this quotation from it: “The rights of sovereignty are doubtless holy. They belong to God’s ordinances, and are therefore of God; but those indefinite, boundless, unhistorical, unfounded rights of sovereignty stand exactly on a level with the equally indefinite, boundless, unhistorical, unfounded rights of humanity. They are distorted images of lofty truths, and are born of the same fallacy as absolutism. Once face to face with them, the church must either allow herself to be ravaged or must begin a struggle for life and death.”
However well known and widely spread were Ketteler’s influence and writings, the latter partook of the local and circumstantial nature of most political writings: they were not solid, dignified, technical treatises of theology, nor popular and “taking” books of devotion, but the outcome of present necessities, quick and vigorous protests against injustice, weapons specially adapted to the ever-shifting warfare between socialism and religion. His pamphlets were mostly short, terse, and to the point; he slept in his armor and was always on the watch. He speaks of his work in this direction with great simplicity to Prof. Nippold, of Heidelberg: “Besides my spiritual ministry in my diocese, I follow and observe all the movements of my time, and cannot help meeting with all the injustices which men do to one another, not always, indeed, of malice prepense, but often through misunderstandings, prejudices, and false representations. Then, if I can spare time from my work, I make an effort towards clearing up those unfortunate misunderstandings....” But though he spoke and felt thus modestly about his important part in the questions of the day, we know how impossible it is for a man of his stamp not to rise to his natural level. He was born to be a leader, and neither necessity nor humility could block the path to political prominence. Such a man, weighted with even more absorbing work than his, would have made time for occupations so naturally fitted for him; such a mind, even had it been in a less robust body, would have overcome disease and weakness, and wrested from them the power to make itself known. A list of a few of his writings will show how universal was his watchfulness: Can a believing Christian be a Freemason? The True Foundations of Religious Peace. The Defamation of the Church by the Tribune. The Right of Free Election of the Cathedral Chapter. Germany after the War of 1866. The Fraction of the Centre at the First German Reichstag. Catholics in the German Empire. Freedom, Authority, and the Church, considerations upon the Great Problem of the Day. The Labor Question and Christianity. Liberalism, Socialism, and Christianity. The General Council and its Influence on Our Time. The Doctrinal Infallibility of the Pope after the Definition of the Vatican Council.
What he has said and written on the social question, including the subjects of marriage, the family, education, and the relations between capital and labor, even most of his opponents judge to belong to the quota of wisest utterances extant on the subject. His gift of opportunity, or of speaking always to the point, has been noticed already. Here is what a German contemporary says of it: “The bishop did not devote himself to journalism as a profession, for he looked upon his ministry as immeasurably more precious and higher than political influence. But he used it as a weapon at every important turning-point of contemporary German history, when dangers threatened the moral order of German society, and when the rights of the church were violated and her institutions hampered; and precisely because his writings sprang from instant necessities or the peculiarities of the day, they were, in the noblest sense of the word, timely—not productions of labored pulpit-wisdom, but the forcible words, piercing through bone and marrow, of a powerful voice sounding the battle-cry of a mind-conflict; of a man whose keen and far-sighted look measured the heights and depths of the mind-disturbances of his day, and shared heartily in the joys and sorrows of his time.”
It is worth while to notice his usual method in these earnest pamphlets. It consisted, as a rule, of taking his opponents’ own arguments or “accomplished facts” nakedly as they stood, and carrying them on to their strictly legitimate but startling consequences. Yet, in the whole course of his polemical writings, he carefully abstained from the least personality. In this he might with advantage be taken as a model by most schools of political pamphleteering. Soon after his speech at Frankfort his fame as an orator was already held so high that it suggested the following poetical portrait of him by Bede Weber, in a work entitled Historico-Political Sketches. This is almost a literal translation:
“The parish priest of Hopsten has a tall and powerful figure, with sharply-cut features, in which speak a fearlessness impelling him irresistibly to ‘do and dare,’[[163]] joined to an old Westphalian tradition of loyalty to God and church, to emperor and realm. To his discerning spirit the German nation, in its unity, its history, and its Catholic traditions, is still living and strong. Luther and Melanchthon, Charles the Fifth and Napoleon, the Peace of Basle and the cowardly Pillersdorf, are nothing in his eyes but passing shadows over the black, red, and gold shield of the German people. From the blood of General Auerswald and of Prince Lichnowsky, from the murder of Lamberg and Latour, the roses of hope spring only more obstinately for him, and his tears hang on them only as the pearly dew of the dawn of German freedom, German loyalty to the faith, and German order. He bears the great, brave German people, with the everlasting spring of its virtues, in the innermost depths of his heart, and from this union, or rather identification, flows the peculiar pride of his address, which, in the evil seething of elements in the ‘days of March,’ still points out the means of building up the cathedral of the German Church sooner and more beautifully than the cathedral of Cologne. Therefore was it that his words impressed his hearers with a resistless might. When I think of the orator Ketteler, I see before me a thorough man, who can awake fear in many a heart, but whose individuality is in itself a right to do so.”
Most of his bitterest opponents in the Reichstag acknowledged his power in speaking, and respected the fearless use he made of his position to remind them of their duties as men, Christians, and lawmakers; and when circumstances made it impossible for him to combine his duties as deputy with his dignity as bishop, and caused him to retire from his place, his party felt the loss of his voice as much as his adversaries rejoiced in their deliverance from a parliamentary “Son of Thunder.” His lectures and sermons, even on ordinary days and stereotyped subjects, were always startling and mind-compelling by the manner in which old truths were handled and new meanings brought out therefrom; while his open-air preaching at pilgrimages, where he was often heard by ten thousand people, bore an equally powerful and peculiar stamp, and, though his thoughts were then clothed in simpler language, they lacked none of the breadth which distinguished his more finished speeches.
In a monthly magazine edited at Mayence by the bishop’s friends Heinrich and Monsang, both dignitaries of his cathedral chapter, is a review of his life which gives a prominent place to his opinion on the importance and seriousness of social questions: