More clearly than his allies, however, Bismarck saw liberalism as an expression of the political, economic, and social interests of the propertied urban class associated with industrialization. Otto Von Bismarck was the Prussian Chancellor. His main goal was to further strengthen the position of Prussia in Europe.
Bismarck had a number of primary aims: to unify the north German states under Prussian control. Germany: Domestic concerns. In November Bismarck passed the Kanzelparagraph the Pulpit Law which severely penalised criticism of the government by the clergy.
In March , all schools were placed under government control. In July the Jesuits and later other religious orders were expelled or interned. It is important to note that, with the exception of an anti-Jesuit bill pushed through the Reichstag in , all of the laws of the Kulturkampf were passed in the Prussian Landtag and were applicable only in the State of Prussia, though some other states like Baden and Hesse followed with anti-Catholic laws of their own.
Imperial Germany was a federation, composed of several German states which each retained their own regional parliaments and laws. Prussia, of course, was the largest and most powerful of these states, and the way Prussia went tended to determine the course of the whole empire. But it important to keep in mind that the Kulturkampf was primarily a phenomenon restricted to the federal state of Prussia; some Catholic states, like Bavaria, did not participate in it.
The first law of the Kulturkampf was an imperial anti-Jesuit law passed in , which even appeared harsh to some of the liberals. The Law of authorized the government to dissolve all chapters of the Society of Jesus and to banish its members from the country Jesuitengesetz. The Jesuits subsequently left the Empire. The next year the law was extended to the Redemptorists, Lazarists, Fathers of the Holy Ghost, and the Ladies of the Sacred Heart, as being closely related to the Jesuits, whereupon these orders also left Germany.
Although most portions of the Kulturkampf were repealed with time, the Jesuits remained banned in Germany for the duration of the Empire. In , the criminal code was modified to infringe on clerics' right to freedom of speech. In the so-called Kanzelparagraph "Pulpit Laws" , clergy who discussed politics from the pulpit could be sentenced to two years in prison.
The Kanzelparagraph would remain in force throughout the Weimar period and would be used by Hitler to stifle the political opposition of the Church.
It was not in fact revoked until The heart of the Kulturkampf legislation was the Prussian School Supervision Law of touching on Catholic education.
Like Julian the Apostate, Bismarck knew the Church was too powerful to be destroyed and instead sought to weaken her influence by driving her out of education. The law simultaneously extended civil service supervision to religious education and abolished ecclesiastical oversight of the Prussian primary school system, which up until then had been conducted by religious and secular authorities working together. This meant the practical exclusion of the clergy from education.
Bismarck also attacked the education of the clergy through his new Kultus-Minister, Adalbert Falk. To Falk was given the task of making the German bishops independent of Rome, the clergy independent of the bishops, and all dependent on the State. Falk devised a plan by which the traditional regimen of clerical study was to be replaced by a modern education in a liberal German institution, thus ensuring that candidates to the priesthood were imbibed with the spirit of secularism.
Furthermore, Falk proposed that ecclesiastical offices could only be filled with the permission of the highest civil authority in each province, essentially reviving the ancient practice of lay investiture. Hence, judgments of the Holy See or the Roman Rota would not be binding upon them; the highest court would be made up of Prussian ecclesiastics, all of whom would have been appointed with the permission of Prussian civil authorities.
Falk sought to restrict the Church's juridical and punitive powers by allowing any cleric to appeal to a Prussian "Royal Court of Justice for Ecclesiastical Affairs" that would consist of lay civil officials.
This was to help facilitate the great apostasy, so that those clerics who chose to compromise with the State would not find themselves inconvenienced by decrees or punitive measures coming from Rome. In short, the proposals of Falk set out to establish a national Prussian Church, in which education of the clergy, appointments, and discipline were under the control of the State.
Falk went even further in his law which forbid any priest to exercise his priestly duties without authorization of the civil power on pain of imprisonment, and threatened bishops who opposed it. Falk and Bismarck here underestimated the resolve of the Catholic faithful. Rather than conform and obtain the hated "authorization", most Catholic priests chose to simply continue their duties clandestinely, or else cease their ministries.
This in effect left large amounts of the Catholic population without access to sacraments, a state of affairs which thoroughly angered them and give rise to a national backlash against the laws. Patronage of Old Catholics A large part of the Kulturkampf was not only the persecution of Catholics, but the patronage of the Old Catholics, who in that decade after Vatican I were at their strongest. The State interfered whenever a Catholic Bishop disciplined a cleric for adhering to the Old Catholic sect; in several places, dismissed Old Catholic priests and even bishops were reinstated by the power of the State, similar to the manner in which the heretic emperors of old used to force the reinstatement of Arian bishops and priests.
In , the Prussian Landtag passed the May Laws, which authorized the Old Catholics to establish themselves as a recognized Church and even contributed funding to help them in this purpose. The imperial Reichstag assisted this law by passing the Priests-Expulsion Law Priester-ausweisungsgesetz , by which all priests deprived of their offices for violation of the May Laws were turned over to the discretion of the police authorities.
Many bishops began to protest, and during Bismarck faced the first significant opposition to the Kulturkampf. Archbishops of Posen and Cologne and the Bishop of Trier were condemned to imprisonment; later, the Archbishop of Posen Count von Ledochowski, whose overtures to Bismarck in had precipitated the entire crisis, was deposed.
Following the May Laws and the subsequent episcopal protests, Falk's Ministry saw to it that all the Prussian episcopal sees were vacated. Many parishes were also deprived of their pastors, and most ecclesiastical educational institutions were closed. Bismarck had hoped that depositions would intimidate the Church, and that faced with the possibility of a total lack of Catholic ministry in whole regions, the Church would cave in and agree to state-appointed or authorized pastors.
This was not to be, however. Cathedral chapters refused to select an administrator, and no parish consented to elect an "authorized" parish priest. The exiled bishops managed to govern their sees from abroad through secretly delegated priests.
The faithful everywhere made it possible to hold Divine Services in the privacy of their homes, not unlike the faithful of England during the Elizabethan era of the "priest holes. Assassination Attempt and Land Confiscations In , a man named Kullman, who had a very loose connection to a Catholic workingman's club, attempted to assassinate Bismarck.
Bismarck was only slightly wounded in the hand, but he tried to link the attempt to the Catholic Centrum and paint the entire party with disloyalty to the State. In Bismarck suspended all state payments to the Prussian Catholic bishops, which had been guaranteed in the Prussian constitution. Please login through your library system or with your personal username and password on the homepage.
Your library may not have purchased all subject areas. If you are authenticated and think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian. Don't have an account? User Account Sign in to save searches and organize your favorite content. Not registered? Sign up. More Contact us Publish with us Subscribe Accessibility. Print Email. Show Less You do not have access to this content. Religion and Comparative Development is the first analytical endeavor on religion and government that incorporates microeconomic modeling of democracy and dictatorship as well as empirical linkages between religious norms and the bureaucratic provision of public goods within the framework of survey data analysis and public goods experiments.
0コメント