Catholics and Protestants in Graubünden: Confessional Discipline and Confessional Identities without an Early Modern State? (original) (raw)
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Wichmann-Jahrbuch des Diözesangeschichtsvereins Berlin, 2015
The end of the Holy Roman Empire marked the beginning of a new era in the German world. Napoleon transformed hundreds of small political entities into 37 sovereign states, each one with an individual tale of integration and territorialization. The delimitation of religious boundaries was an important feature of these tales, since a centralized administration would not accept cross-border religious authorities. The previously existent competition between religious and political authorities could not be tolerated by these developing new states. This was not just a matter of legal reforms or secularization but rather a question of spatial boundaries regarding the formal definition of religious districts and their correspondence with the state ones. The reformation and counter-reformation roughly divided the German population into three religious churches: Catholic, Lutheran and Reform. The subsequent religious wars of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to a relatively clear spatial and political division between the different churches. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) in particular, which officially ended the first wave of religious wars, established the principle of “Curius region, eius Religio”, thus forming a legal and binding connection between the choice of religion and political affiliation. However, the chaotic Holy Roman Empire was not a place for homogeneity or rational distribution of authority. Consequently, Catholic principalities with small Protestant minorities and Protestant principalities with small Catholic minorities were quite common in the eighteenth Century. As a result, religious authorities often operated beyond the realm of their political territorial affiliation. The late eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century brought about two fundamental changes to church/state relations: first, the restructuring of German territories into 37 states changed the demographics and the relative homogeneity of past centuries; second, the evolving modernization and growing bureaucracies of the various states expanded the horizons of the state public sphere and the levels of centralization it aspired. Officials of these new states, influenced by French centralism, operated under a primary directive of integrating the new territories. The existence of cross border religious authorities was both a threat to the concept of state centralism and popular integration, due to the large religious minorities. This led to both legal and spatial delimitation of religious authorities, Catholic and Protestant, in all the states. In this article, I will analyze the spatial strategies used by five medium sized German states, Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Württemberg and Baden. Although these states differed in demographic, political, social, economic and geographical circumstances, I will show that the essential strategies were identical, and were a response to the nature of the Catholic and Protestant Churches, and not the specific circumstances of each state.
Invoking Germany's Imperial Past to Position Catholics in Germany's Prussian Future
Most nineteenth-century Germans saw German Catholics as either liberal, patriotic, and enlightened, or ultramontane, anti-German, and backward. However, dividing nineteenth-century German Catholics into two neat camps cannot explain certain movements among them. Particu- larly, the movement among Catholic intellectuals to found a new Catholic university in Germany and rejuvenate the reputation of Catholic scholars, reveals more than two clashing Catholic opin- ions about modernization and nation-building in Germany. The opinions of one particular leader in the movement can lead us further in and reveal more variation among Catholics in nineteenth- century Germany. Wilhelm Emmanuel Freiherr von Ketteler, Bishop of Mainz from 1850 to 1877, often used secular and nationalistic rhetoric to convince both fellow Catholics and non- Catholic fellow Germans that Catholic scholarship was a key ingredient of German leadership in Europe. Ketteler’s case for a new Catholic university demonstrates that the devoutly traditional did not all oppose the nation-building and modernization of the nineteenth century, and that German Catholics envisioned and enacted their role in the German nation and German modernity in more complex terms than either “liberal” or “ultramontane.” Reading his sermons, correspon- dence, and publications with methodological inspiration from literary scholars and Carl Schorske allows surface inconsistencies to give way to a coherent case for Catholic scholarship that inhab- ited a middle ground between Catholics and non-Catholics and between ultramontane Catholics and liberal Catholics. Ketteler’s invocation of the history of the Church and the Catholic history of Germany was the key to his narrative placing Catholics in Germany’s future. The existence of Ketteler’s narrative reveals as yet unfathomed depths in nineteenth-century German Catholicism. Studying Ketteler’s arguments can deepen our understanding of German nation-building in the nineteenth century as well as of European secularization in the modern age.
In the midst of the nineteenth century an evolving, relatively small movement of dissenters shook the foundations of the mainstream Protestant Church in Prussia (Evangelisch-Lutherische Landeskirche). The Baptists or Wiedertäufer, as they were pejoratively called, attracted many Landeskirche church-goers with a living testimony, an answer to the social question, and assurance of salvation (Heilsgewissheit). 2 The Landeskirche thereby faced a growing number of proselytes in its own ranks that were ready to be baptized again and, by doing so, leave the church in a time, which already held internal theological and even political conflict. Thus, a huge and varied corpus of polemical Landeskirche literature was published as a response to the circulation of Baptist pamphlets, which were "printed in masses in Hamburg at Onken's and then given to the recently baptized". 3 The situation was precarious and the atmosphere tense since some proselytes even renounced their new-found faith only a short while after their original conversion. 4 Hence, the anonymously published counter-polemic Wiedertaufe oder Taufe?Lebens-und Bekehrungsgeschichte eines getauften Christen (Baptisten) im Warthebruch, written by Gustav Rühl in 1859 while he was a pastor of the Landeskirche in Landsberger Holländer in the Warthebruch, 5 is a vivid indicator of these developments as it served as a defense of the doctrines of the Landeskirche. 6 The polemic gives an account of the day laborer Karl Odebrecht's spiritual journey. He converts to the Baptist faith from his background in the Landeskirche by means of his rebaptism (Erwachsenentaufe or Wiedertaufe). After the death of his wife, who strongly resisted Odebrecht's new convictions, and having been tormented for years with the validity of his Heilsgewissheit he finally finds his way back to the Landeskirche. In the appendix of the 1 This essay is a slightly revised