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Kulturkampf

Prussian church-state conflict (1872–1878)

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In modern political usage, the German term Kulturkampf describes any conflict (political, ideological, or social) between the secular government and the religious authorities of a society. The term also describes the great and small culture wars among political factions that hold deeply opposing values and beliefs within a nation, a community, and a cultural group.

Background

Europe and the Catholic Church

The philosophic influences of the Enlightenment, scientific realism, positivism, materialism, nationalism, secularism, and liberalism impinged upon and ended the intellectual and political roles of religion and the Catholic Church, which then was the established church of Europe (excluding Scandinavia, the Russian Empire, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and crucially Prussia). By way of the legislated separation of church and state, the Age of Reason reduced society's financial debts to the Church and rendered secular the public sphere of society, and established the state's supremacy concerning the content and administration of public education for all of society. During the Age of Reason in the 17th and the 18th centuries, the European Kulturkampf principally occurred in the regional and local politics of a society, especially in cities and towns where the educated populations were politically Liberal and practised the politics of anti-clericalism and of anti-Catholicism.

The Catholic Church resisted such intellectual trends, which often were associated with attacks on the religion itself. With the growing influence of enlightenment and after having lost much of its wealth, power, and influence in the course of the secularization of the early 19th century, the Church had been in a state of decline. The papacy was at a weak point in its history, having in 1870 lost all its territories to Italy, with the pope a "prisoner in the Vatican". The Church strove to regain its influence and to hold sway in such matters as marriage, family, and education. It initiated a Catholic revival by founding associations, papers, schools, social establishments and new orders, and encouraging religious practices such as pilgrimages, mass assemblies, devotion to the Virgin Mary, or the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the veneration of relics; the pope himself became an object of devotion.

Apart from the growth in religious orders, the 19th century was a time when numerous Catholic associations and organisations were founded, especially in Germany and in France. In the United States, there was a comparable rise in fraternal organizations in the late 19th century. Catholic propaganda, including the interpretation of daily events, was promoted through local and national Catholic newspapers that were prominent in all Western European nations. In addition, organised missions and groups were dedicated to producing pious literature.

In the 19th century, the popes issued a series of encyclicals, such as Mirari vos (1832) by Pope Gregory XVI, condemning liberalism and freedom of the press. These generated controversy in some quarters. Under the leadership of Gregory's successor, Pope Pius IX, the church dogmatised Mary's Immaculate Conception in 1854. In 1864, Pius IX published the encyclical Quanta cura with its appended Syllabus Errorum ("Syllabus of Errors"), and in 1870 convened the First Vatican Council. In turn, the Council proclaimed the dogma of papal infallibility. In Syllabus Errorum, Pius IX condemned as false some 80 philosophical and political statements. It rejected outright such concepts as freedom of religion, separation of church and state, civil marriage, sovereignty of the people, liberalism and socialism, reason as the sole base of human action, and in general condemned the idea of conciliation with progress. The announcements included an index of forbidden books. The Church gradually re-organised and began to use mass media expansively to promote its messages. In addition, the popes worked to increase their control of the Church. The Church centralised some functions and streamlined its hierarchy, which prompted strong criticism by European governments. The bishops sought direction from the Holy See, and the needs and views of the international church were given priority over the local ones. Opponents of the new hierarchical church organisation pejoratively called it ultramontanism.

In view of the church's opposition to enlightenment, liberal reforms, and the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, these dogmas angered the liberal-minded across Europe, even among some Catholics. Debates were heated. The dogmas were perceived as threatening the secularized state, as they reaffirmed that the fundamental allegiance of Catholics was not to their nation-state, but to the Gospel and the Church. The pope's teaching was promoted as absolutely authoritative and binding on all the faithful. Secular politicians wondered whether "Catholicism and allegiance to the modern liberal state were not mutually exclusive". British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone wrote in 1874 that the teaching on papal infallibility compromised the allegiance of faithful English Catholics. For European liberalism, the dogmas were perceived as a declaration of war against the modern state, science, and spiritual freedom.

The pope's handling of dissent from the dogmas, e.g. by excommunication of critics or demanding their removal from schools and universities, was considered the "epitome of papal authoritarianism". In direct response to papal announcements, Austria passed the May Laws for Cisleithania in 1868, restricting the Concordat of 1855, and then cancelled the Concordat altogether in 1870. Saxony and Bavaria withheld approval to publish the papal infallibility dogma; Hesse and Baden even denied it any legal validity. France refused to publish the doctrines altogether; Spain forbade publication of Syllabus Errorum in 1864.

Germany

Pre-1871

By the mid-19th century, liberal policies had also come to dominate Germany and the separation of church and state became a prominent issue. The Kulturkampf in Prussia is usually bracketed by the years 1871 and 1878, with the Catholic Church officially announcing its end in 1880; however, the struggle in Germany had been an ongoing matter without definite beginning and the years 1871 to 1878 only mark its culmination in Prussia. In the wake of other European countries, most German states had taken the first steps in secularisation well before unification. Predominantly Catholic Baden was at the forefront of curbing the power of the Catholic Church, as in the Baden Church Dispute (1852–1854) and the Kulturkampf Baden (1864–1876).

Other examples are Prussia (1830s, 1850, 1859, and 1969), Württemberg (1859/1862), Bavaria (Bayerischer Kulturkampf, 1867), Hesse-Nassau or Hesse-Darmstadt. In the 1837 Kölner Wirren (Cologne Confusion) of legal and policy issues regarding the children of mixed Protestant-Catholic marriages, Prussia's final settlement was considered a defeat for the state as it had given in to the demands of the Catholic Church. In 1850, Prussia again had a dispute with the church about civil marriage and primary schools and in 1852, it issued decrees against the Jesuits. As in many European countries, Jesuits were being banned or heavily restricted in many of the German states, e.g. in Saxony (1831), Baden (1960) or Württemberg (1862), and even in Catholic ones such as Bavaria (1851).

In the Vormärz period, Catholic publications usually portrayed revolutions as negative and dangerous to the existing order as well as to the interests of the Catholic Church. Most of them considered a viable Catholicism to be necessary for the very health of society and state and to be the only true and effective protection against the scourge of revolution. The unsuccessful German revolutions of 1848–1849, which the Catholic Church had opposed, produced no democratic reforms and attempts to radically disentangle state-church relationships failed. In the revolutionary parliament, many prominent representatives of political Catholicism sat on the right wing. In the years following the revolution, Catholicism became increasingly politicized due to rising liberal ideologies contrasted with the anti-modernist and anti-liberal policies of the Vatican. The Catholic dogmas and doctrines promulgated in 1854, 1864 and 1870 were perceived in Germany as direct attacks on the modern nation state.

Bismarck, the Liberals, and the Conservatives, representing orthodox Protestants, found the Centre Party's support of the pope highly provocative. Many Catholics shared these sentiments, especially against the pope's declared infallibility and the majority of Catholic German bishops deemed the definition of the dogma as "unpropitious in light of the situation in Germany". While most Catholics eventually reconciled themselves to the doctrine, some founded the small breakaway Old Catholic Church. According to the Bavarian head of government, Hohenlohe, the dogma of infallibility compromised the Catholics' loyalty to the state. He sent a circular letter to all the diplomatic representatives of the Bavarian Kingdom saying, "The only dogmatic thesis which Rome desires to have decided by the Council, and which the Jesuits in Italy and Germany are now agitating, is the question of the Infallibility of the Pope. This pretension, once become a dogma, will have a wider scope than the purely spiritual spheres, and will become evidently a political question: for it will raise the power of the Sovereign Pontiff, even in temporal matters, above all the princes and peoples of Christendom."

The liberal majorities in the Imperial Diet and the Prussian parliament, as well as liberals in general, regarded the Church as backward, a hotbed for reactionaries, enemies of progress and cast monastic life as the epitome of a backward Catholic medievalism. They were alarmed by the dramatic rise in the number of monasteries, convents and clerical religious groups in an era of widespread religious revival. The Diocese of Cologne, for example, saw a tenfold increase in monks and nuns between 1850 and 1872. Prussian authorities were particularly suspicious of the spread of monastic life among the Polish and French minorities. In turn, the Church saw the National-Liberals as its worst enemy, accusing them of spearheading the war against Christianity and the Catholic Church.

1871–1872

At unification in 1871, the new German Empire included 25.5 million Protestants (62% of the population) and 15 million Catholics (36.5% of the population). Although a minority in the empire, Catholics were the majority in the states of Bavaria and Baden as well as in the four Prussian Provinces of West Prussia, Posen, Rhineland, Westphalia and in the Prussian region of Upper Silesia, and in the territory of Alsace-Lorraine. Since the Thirty Years' War, the population was generally segregated along religious lines and rural areas or towns were overwhelmingly, if not entirely, of the same religion. Education was also separate and usually in the hands of the churches. There was little mutual tolerance, interaction or intermarriage. Protestants in general were deeply distrustful of the Catholic Church. Unification had been achieved through many obstacles with strong opponents. These were the European powers of France and Austria, both Catholic nations. For Bismarck, the empire was very fragile and its consolidation was an important issue. Biographer Otto Pflanze notes that "all of these developments, real and imagined, reinforced Bismarck's belief in the existence of a widespread Catholic conspiracy that posed a threat to both his German and European policies."

In a nation state dominated by Protestant Prussia, the Catholic Church was to lose its standing. Thus, in 1870, on the eve of unification, the Center Party was explicitly founded to defend the position of the church in the new empire. Bismarck was highly concerned that many major members and supporters of this new party were not in sympathy with the new empire: the House of Hanover, the ethnic minority of the Poles and the southern German states. In 1871, the predominantly Catholic states of Southern Germany had only reluctantly joined the empire, increasing the overall share of the Catholic population to 36.5%. Among this Catholic share was Germany's largest ethnic minority, well over 2 million Poles in the east of Prussia, who under Prussia and Germany suffered discrimination and oppression. Bismarck regarded the new Centre Party not only as an illegal mixup of politics and religion and the church's "long arm" but also as a unifying force for Catholic Germans and Poles and thus a threat to the consolidation of the empire. He feared that the Centre Party would frustrate his broader political agendas and he accused the Catholic priests of fostering Polish nationalism as had been done openly in the provinces of Posen and Upper Silesia.

The Liberals regarded the Catholic Church as a powerful force of reaction and anti-modernity, especially after the proclamation of papal infallibility in 1870 and the tightening control of the Vatican over the local bishops. The renewed vitality of Catholicism in Germany, with its mass gatherings, also attracted Protestants – even the heir to the Prussian throne, with the king's approval, attended one. Anti-liberalism, anti-clericalism and anti-Catholicism became powerful intellectual forces of the time and the antagonism between Liberals and Protestants on one side and the Catholic Church on the other was fought out through mud-slinging in the press. A wave of anti-Catholic, anticlerical and anti-monastic pamphleteering in the liberal press was answered by anti-liberal preaching and propaganda in Catholic newspapers and vice versa. For these reasons, the government sought to wean the Catholic masses away from the hierarchy and the Centre Party and the liberals' demands to curb the power of the churches meshed well with Bismarck's main political objective to crush the Centre Party. According to historian Anthony J. Steinhoff:

Bismarck's plan to disarm political Catholicism delighted liberal politicians, who provided the parliamentary backing for the crusade. Yet, the phrase the left-liberal Rudolf Virchow coined for this struggle, the Kulturkampf, suggests that the liberals wanted to do more than prevent Catholicism from becoming a political force. They wanted victory over Catholicism itself, the long-delayed conclusion of the Reformation.

At least since 1847 and in line with the Liberals, Bismarck had also been of the professed opinion, that state and church should be completely separated and "the sphere of the state had to be made secure against the incursions by the church", although his ideas were not as far-reaching as in the United States or in Great Britain. He had in mind the traditional position of the Protestant church in Prussia and provoked considerable resistance from conservative Protestants. This became clear in a heated debate with Prussian culture minister von Mühler in 1871 when Bismarck said: "Since you stopped my plans in the Protestant church, I have to go via Rome." In August 1871, at Bad Ems, Bismarck revealed his intention to fight against the Centre Party, to separate state and church, to transfer school inspection to laymen, to abolish religious instruction from schools and to transfer religious affairs to the minister of justice.

On 22 January 1872, liberal Adalbert Falk replaced conservative Heinrich von Mühler as Prussian minister for religion, education and health. In Bismarck's mind, Falk was "to re-establish the rights of the state in relation to the church". Yet, unlike Bismarck, whose main motivation for the Kulturkampf was the political power struggle with the Centre Party, Falk, a lawyer, was a strong proponent of state authority, having in mind the legal aspects of state-church relationships. Falk became the driving force behind the Kulturkampf laws. Although Bismarck publicly supported Falk, he doubted the success of his laws and was unhappy with his lack of political tact and sensitivity. The differences in their attitudes concerning the Kulturkampf eventually put the two politicians at odds with each other. With this background and the determination of church and state, the Kulturkampf in Germany acquired an additional edge as it gathered in intensity and bitterness.

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