Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (84 page)

The assault can be said to have begun with the elimination, in mid 1871, of the Catholic bureau in the Prussian education ministry, and then with the so-called Pulpit Law, passed by the Reichstag late in the year. This statute outlawed criticism of the state from the pulpit—a statute aimed at Catholic priests. From then on, the anti-Catholic campaign was carried on at many levels, and would involve the banishing of priests and nuns from the country, the driving of bishops from their chairs, the closing of schools, the confiscation of church property, the disruption of Church gatherings, the disbanding of Catholic associations, and an open feud with the Vatican. The campaign was called the Kulturkampf, a word invented, ironically, by a progressive politician
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and meaning "cultural struggle," or, as the conservative American politician Patrick Buchanan might put it, "culture war." The Kulturkampf lasted from 1871 until about 1887, and was characterized by a Catholic who lived through it as "Diocletian persecution."
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Among the reasons to consider it closely is to see the kind of resistance the Roman Catholic Church can mount, both locally and from the Vatican, when confronted with a ruthless, calculated, and systematic attempt to destroy it. The Church's response to Bismarck, in that sense, sets a standard against which its later behavior, in response to Hitler, must be measured.

In 1871, the wily Bismarck appointed as imperial Germany's first ambassador to the Vatican an aristocrat named Gustav von Hohenlohe, an appointment that on its face seemed rather politic, since Hohenlohe was a Roman Catholic cardinal. But the pope was furious at the appointment, since this cardinal had vociferously opposed the doctrine of infallibility at the General Council the year before. (Döllinger had just been excommunicated for his similar position.) The pope rejected Hohenlohe, and, following further Vatican protest, Bismarck severed diplomatic relations with the Holy See in 1872. "We shall not go to Canossa," he said, displaying the long German memory: Henry IV had been humiliated in the mountain snows of Canossa by Pope Gregory VII in 1076. Instead, the anti-Church campaign escalated. In 1872, priests and nuns were banned from teaching posts in schools, and all Jesuits were ordered out of Germany.

The next year, other religious orders were expelled, and in May the so-called May Laws were passed in the Prussian legislature. These statutes gave to the government authority to oversee the training and assignments of priests, and put bishops under the direct control of the state. Nearly the entire Catholic clergy of Prussia reacted to these laws with adamant rejection, simply refusing to obey. The state responded ruthlessly, arresting, jailing, and exiling priests and even bishops. Eighteen hundred priests were imprisoned or banished from the state, and a vast fortune in church holdings was confiscated by the government.
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The Catholic people supported their clergy, and in many towns spontaneous rallies occurred as angry demonstrators gathered to protest when police or soldiers hauled away curates.

In 1875, Pius IX issued an encyclical from Rome that amounted to a counterattack on the Kulturkampf, and its fierce provisions remain striking. The pope declared the May Laws null and void, "since they are completely contrary to the God-given institutions of the church."
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He urged the Catholics of Germany to engage in a strategy, as he called it, of "passive resistance."
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And, most telling, he decreed that priests who cooperated with the German government's implementation of these policies, the so-called state-priests, were ipso facto excommunicated.
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"Many millions" of German Catholics, in the phrase of one contemporary,
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did just as the pope asked, and passive resistance became the prevalent response even to the escalations of the Kulturkampf.

Before long, nine of twelve Prussian bishops were in exile, but perhaps the most dramatic resistance by a bishop came, in yet another uncanny coincidence, in Trier. That city, the senior Catholic diocese in the north of Europe (a status dating back to Saint Helena), was a hotbed of opposition. The seminary had been ordered shut in 1873. Two hundred and fifty Trier priests were hauled before Prussian judges, and many were, in Blackbourn's words, "on the run disguised as peasants or riverboat captains and in one case as a Jewish hawker; others slipped into villages in the early hours of the morning to celebrate mass illegally."
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Their bishop, Matthias Eberhard, openly defied the May Laws, and in March 1874 he was arrested. Government officials could hardly take the bishop away, however, because the Catholics of Trier immediately gathered to protest. In the words of Eberhard's contemporary biographer, "The people threw themselves to the ground, tore their hair, and one heard lamentations that pierced the soul." Bishop Eberhard raised his hand to offer a blessing to his people, at which point, "the agitation of the masses at this final moment was so great, their wailing and moaning so heartrending, and the emotion that seized even sturdy men so powerful, so overwhelming, that the whole scene is indescribable."
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The bishop was in prison for nine months.

The Trier Cathedral, as we saw, incorporates the
Liebfrauen-kirche,
a Gothic gem dedicated to Mary. After being freed from the Prussian jail, Bishop Eberhard spoke of Trier as standing "under the protection" of the Virgin,
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but only a few months later, he died. It is certain that his flock was devastated, especially since the government could block the appointment of any successor.

Precisely a month later, on July 3, 1876, the same day that 100,000 French Catholics gathered at Lourdes to dedicate a statue to Mary, three eight-year-old girls went picking berries in Marpingen, a village outside Trier but in the same diocese. "Above all," Blackbourn observes, "the Catholic longing for divine intercession against worldly troubles attached itself to the Blessed Virgin."
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And that day their longing was answered when the three girls reported seeing a beautiful lady dressed in white. "Who are you?" they asked. And the lady replied, "I am the Immaculately Conceived." When reports of the apparition spread, thousands of pilgrims made their way to Marpingen. Within a week, Blackbourn says, reports put their number at more than twenty thousand. A nearby stream was found to have miraculous water, and soon Marpingen was spoken of as a German Lourdes.
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But this was the Kulturkampf. In summary, drawing on Blackbourn's exhaustive and impressive account, here is what happened. On July 13, Prussian soldiers moved into the village in force, and among the places they requisitioned as a billet was the priests house. The soldiers were met with hostility and recalcitrance. When bayonet-wielding soldiers tried to clear the apparition site of pilgrims, local miners fought back, and the soldiers withdrew. The pilgrims kept coming, more than ever. The Virgin's apparitions were reported as continuing. In the first three days of September, thirty thousand pilgrims came to Marpingen, and on September 3, the Virgin made the last of her appearances to the girls. Prussian officials, meanwhile, tried to undercut the phenomenon, confiscating religious paraphernalia and trying to intimidate the devoted Catholics, who responded with the unprovocative but unmovable mulishness that had come to characterize their "passive resistance." In the fall, state authorities took the three girls into custody, interrogated them mercilessly, and sequestered them in a Protestant orphanage for more than a month.

All of this only had the effect of drawing German Catholics more firmly behind the girls and the apparitions they reported. There was no bishop in the see of Trier, and wouldn't be for five years; most priests were underground, so Church authorities could have done little to shape the response of Catholics to these extraordinary events. Even Catholics who might otherwise have been skeptical of such an outbreak of popular piety found good reasons to lay their questions aside. Especially once the children were seen as victims of the state, Marpingen became the occasion of a broad exposure of the oafish cruelties of the Kulturkampf, and as such it became a point of German Catholic pride and, increasingly, of liberal and Protestant embarrassment. "The emblems of the apparition movement—the cross that marked the spot and the flowers that adorned it, the lighted candies and pictures, the Marian hymns—became potent symbols of non-compliance with the dictates of the state," Blackbourn observes. "Again and again, Catholics in Marpingen were able to seize the moral initiative and place the authorities in a vulnerable, even laughable position. 'Innocent children' became a symbol of moral superiority against the weapons of soldiers and gendarmes."
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Marpingen, of course, did not become a German Lourdes. In the 1950s, my pious mother would have made a beeline for it if it had. But there is a reason why she, like most Catholics, never heard of Marpingen.

For a time, it became a meeting place of numerous associations of German Catholics and a center of organization. Sodalities, rosary and prayer groups, and young people's clubs feverishly nurtured the cult of the Virgin. Liberals and Protestants regarded the whole business as proof of the primitive character of the Catholic religion, but for Catholics this devotion was a source of sustenance, identity, community, and commitment—all the things the state was trying to destroy. Catholic miners who would refuse to be unionized by socialist labor organizers formed powerful associations around the cult of the Virgin. (Catholic miners in the region went on strike in 1871, but not over working conditions or wages; they refused to work when their daily prayer meetings were canceled.)
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Marpingen, in sum, was instrumental in the surprising German Catholic ability not only to survive, but to thrive.

Years later, as a young adult, one of the three girls would confess that their reports of the Virgin's apparitions were "one great lie,"
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and it would become clear that, whether ill intended or not, much coaching had gone into what the girls had had to say. By the time Catholics had reason to question the apparition openly, however, the Kulturkampf was over. Marpingen had served its purpose. When the local hierarchy was reestablished, the Church had reasons not to stamp the apparition site and its miraculous waters with the imprimatur of authenticity reserved for Lourdes, Knock, and a few others. If Marpingen had become a permanent, officially sanctioned pilgrimage site, it would have competed with Trier itself, and as we shall see, drawing pilgrims to venerate the Seamless Robe, if only on rare occasions, had a value that the Church wanted to protect.

Our interest in the potent Catholic resistance to Bismarck, recall, lies in its providing a standard against which to measure Church responses to Nazism. Not all such resistance to the Kulturkampf was mystical. Anticipating Bismarck's assault on the Church, Catholics had formed the Center Party in 1870, an opposition political organization that immediately put forth candidates for election to the new imperial Reichstag. Bismarck tried to outflank the party by appealing to the Vatican, hoping Rome would disown it in return for other liberties. But the Vatican refused.

The Center Party had only one aim—to defend the Catholic population of Germany (not the institutional interests of the Church, a preference that, as we will see, would lead to problems between the Holy See and the party in the next century). In the Reichstag election of 1874, it drew 83 percent of the Catholic vote,
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but even that bloc was a minority, so the party set about making alliances across regions and classes, joining other factions, for example, to argue for a federalist government instead of the centralized state that Bismarck wanted. As the Conservative and Liberal parties, representing Protestant and socialist factions, fell in with the restrictive Kulturkampf legislation, the Center was reduced to protest—but protest the Center politicians did. Their strong, visible participation in the political debate served as a counterpoint to the resisting mulishness of the Catholic population, but more, their organizing had specific results in the institutional ability of Catholics to respond. For one thing, the Center Party contributed to the impressive growth of the German Catholic press in the 1870s, as more and more newspapers found readers eager to know about the maneuvers of politicians who were fighting for them. When the government tried to prevent the publication, in 1875, of Pius IX's encyclical condemning the May Laws, a Center Party representative took to the floor of the Prussian legislature and read the pope's decree for all to hear, cleverly taking advantage of the constitutional provision that guaranteed the right to reprint what was said in that forum.
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The story of the Center Party also brings to light one of the more curious aspects of the Kulturkampf. Because Catholics found themselves in a vulnerable position, their response to the plight of the other besieged minority in the new Germany, the Jews, was not what readers of this narrative may have expected. In 1873, an economic depression jolted the young nation and soon engulfed much of Europe. Unemployment and widespread financial loss hit Germany hard. Predictably, many Germans instinctively scapegoated "Jewish swindlers" as the cause of the crash. Jewish emancipation in Germany dated only to the 1860s, and the official support of Jewish participation in German life now proved to be fragile. Economic pressures meshed with the racism of the new, pseudoscientific eugenics movement that had such appeal to intellectuals, and that reignited the rationalist antisemitism we first saw with Voltaire. At the other end of the cultural and social scale, the nascent
volkisch
nationalism that was already defining the Jew as the German negative other was spreading quickly. If you recall, it was in 1879 that the word "antisemitism" was coined by the German racist Wilhelm Marr, whose widely read
The Victory of Judaism over Germanism
served as a battle cry for what would follow.
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The Anti-Semitic League became active in this period, laying the groundwork for the Anti-Semitic Party, which would win seats in the Reichstag in 1882. That year, the age-old ritual-murder charge would resurface in the Rhineland.
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Adding fuel to all this was Bismarck's strategy of using a hated enemy as a means of uniting and controlling otherwise diverse political elements. As the Catholics withstood the pressures of the Kulturkampf, the Iron Chancellor willingly shifted the pressure onto the Jews.