The German term (literally, "culture struggle") refers to German policies in relation to secularity and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, enacted from 1871 to 1878 by the Prime Minister of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck. The Kulturkampf did not extend to the other German states such as Bavaria. As one scholar put it, "the attack on the church included a series of Prussian, discriminatory laws that made Catholics feel understandably persecuted within a predominantly Protestant nation." Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans and other orders were expelled in the culmination of twenty years of anti-Jesuit and antimonastic hysteria.[1]
The Catholic Church comprised one third of the population of Prussia. In the newly founded German Empire, Bismarck sought to appeal to liberals and Protestants by reducing the political and social influence of the Catholic Church.
Priests and bishops who resisted the Kulturkampf were arrested or removed from their positions. By the height of anti-Catholic legislation, half of the Prussian bishops were in prison or in exile, a quarter of the parishes had no priest, half the monks and nuns had left Prussia, a third of the monasteries and convents were closed, 1800 parish priests were imprisoned or exiled, and thousands of laypeople were imprisoned for helping the priests.[2]
Bismarck's program backfired, as it energized the Catholics to become a political force in the Centre party. The Kulturkampf ended about 1880 with a new pope willing to negotiate with Bismarck, and with the departure of the anti-Catholic Liberals from his coalition. By retreating, Bismarck won over the Centre party support on most of his conservative policy positions, especially his attacks against Socialism.
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Prussia had greatly expanded and by 1871 included 16,000,000 Protestants, both Reformed and Lutheran, and 8,000,000 Catholics. They were generally segregated into their own worlds, living in rural districts or city neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly of the same religion, and sending their children to separate public schools where their religion was taught. There was little interaction or intermarriage. On the whole, the Protestants had a higher social status, and the Catholics were more likely to be peasant farmers or unskilled or semiskilled industrial workers. In 1870, the Catholics formed their own political party, the Centre Party, which generally supported unification and most of Bismarck's policies. However, Bismarck, a devout pietistic Protestant, distrusted parliamentary democracy in general and opposition parties in particular, especially when the Centre Party showed signs of gaining support among dissident elements such as the Polish Catholics in Silesia.
A powerful intellectual force of the time was anti-Catholicism, led by the liberal intellectuals who formed a vital part of Bismarck's coalition. They saw 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.[3] Jesuit and other Catholic missionaries had restored the vitality of Catholicism in Germany, and, although they were not intended to convert non-Catholics, the missions attracted Protestants in large numbers--even the heir to the Prussian throne, who attended sessions with the king's approval.[4] Response to the Catholic revival, and, importantly, the draw on Protestant congregants was a wave of anti-Catholic, anticlerical and antimonastic pamphleteering and preaching.[4]
The Kulturkampf launched by Bismarck in 1872 affected Prussia; although there were similar movements in Baden and Hesse the rest of Germany was not affected. According to the new imperial constitution, the states were in charge of religious and educational affairs; they funded the Protestant and Catholic schools. In July 1871 Bismarck abolished the Catholic section of the Prussian Ministry of ecclesiastical and educational affairs, depriving Catholics of their voice at the highest level. The system of strict government supervision of schools was applied only in Catholic areas; the Protestant schools were left alone.[5]
The Kulturkampf measures also targeted the Catholic Poles in Silesia, a part of Prussia.[6]
The Kulturkampf failed because the Catholics were unanimous in their resistance and organized themselves to fight back politically, using their strength in other states besides Prussia. The Prussian state officials imprisoned most of the bishops and thousands of Catholic clergy and laymen. The Catholics responded not with violence but with votes, as the newly formed Catholic Center Party became a major force in the Imperial Parliament. The culture war gave secularists and socialists an opportunity to attack all religions, an outcome that distressed the Protestant leaders and especially Bismarck himself, who was a devout pietistic Protestant.[7]
From 1871 to 1875 Kanzelparagraph introduced a series of sanctions against Catholicism in Prussia. To characterize Bismarck's politics toward the Catholic Church, the pathologist and member of the parliament of the Deutsche Fortschrittspartei (Progressive Liberals) Rudolf Virchow used the term Kulturkampf the first time on January 17, 1873 in the Prussian house of representatives.[8] Since this conflict brought him an ever growing political defeat, he moderated his struggle with the Catholic Church and in the wake of Pius IX's death on February 7, 1878, reconciled with the new Pope, Leo XIII, lifting some sanctions. The Kanzelparagraph remained in force until 1953, several religious orders like the Jesuits remained banned from the German Empire, confiscated properties were not returned, a de facto discrimination against the Catholic minority continued in Civil Service positions and civil marriage remained mandatory.
Tensions were increased by the 1870 Vatican Council proclamation on papal infallibility. There were also significant Catholic populations in Prussia (mainly Poles), in the Rhineland and in Alsace-Lorraine.
Among the measures aimed at the Catholic Church was the addition in 1871 of § 130a to the German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch), infringed on clerical freedom of speech, threatening clergy who discussed politics from the pulpit with two years of prison; this article was dubbed the Kanzelparagraph (from the German Kanzel — "pulpit").[9]
In March 1872 religious schools were forced to undergo official government inspection and in June religious teachers were banned from government schools. In 1872, the Jesuits were banned (and remained banned in Germany until 1917) and in December the German government broke off diplomatic relations with the Vatican. In addition, under the May Laws of 1873 administered by Adalbert Falk, the state began to supervise the education of clergy closely, created a secular court for cases involving the clergy, and required notification of all clergy employment.
The Papal encyclical Etsi multa of Pope Pius IX in 1873 claimed that Freemasonry was the motivating force behind the Kulturkampf.[10] The Catholic Encyclopedia also claims that the Kulturkampf was instigated by Masonic lodges.[11]
On July 13, 1874 in the town of Bad Kissingen Eduard Kullmann attempted to assassinate Bismarck with a pistol, but only hit his hand. Kullmann cited church laws as the reason why he had to shoot Bismarck.
The “May Laws”, Maigesetze, or Falk Laws of 1873 gave responsibility for the training and appointment of clergy to the state, which resulted in the closing of nearly half of the seminaries in Prussia by 1878. During the discussion of these laws, Rudolf Virchow first used the word "Kulturkampf."[12]
The Congregations Law of 1875 abolished religious orders, stopped state subsidies to the Catholic Church, and removed religious protections from the Prussian constitution.
In 1875, marriage became a mandatory civil ceremony, removed from the control of the Church.
Many clerics resisted the laws and were imprisoned or removed from their positions by the state.[13]
Bismarck's attempts to restrict the power of the Catholic Church, represented in politics by the Catholic Centre Party, were not entirely successful. In the 1874 elections, these forces doubled their representation in the parliament. Needing to counter the Social Democratic Party, Bismarck softened his stance, especially with the election of the new Pope Leo XIII in 1878, and tried to justify his actions to the now numerous Catholic representatives by stating that the presence of Poles (who are predominantly Catholic) within German borders required that such measures be taken.
The general ideological enthusiasm among the liberals for the Kulturkampf[14] was in contrast to Bismarck's pragmatic attitude towards the measures[15] and growing disquiet from the Conservatives.[16]
Kulturkampf was hardly a success of Bismarck's government, despite temporary gains within the government itself.[17]
The Kulturkampf had a major impact on the regions of Prussia with a Polish population by instituting a policy of Germanisation of Poznan.
Nearly all German bishops, clergy, and laymen rejected the legality of the new laws, and were defiant in the face of heavier and heavier penalties and imprisonments in closed by Bismarck's government by 1876, all the Prussian bishops were imprisoned or in exile, and a third of the Catholic parishes were without a priest. In the face of systematic defiance, the Bismarck government increased the penalties and its attacks, and were challenged in 1875 when a papal encyclical declared the whole ecclesiastical legislation of Prussia was invalid, and threatened to excommunicate any Catholic who obeyed. There was no violence, but the Catholics mobilized their support, set up numerous civic organizations, raised money to pay fines, and rallied behind their church and the Center Party. The government had set up a capital Old Catholic Church, which attracted only a few thousand members. Bismarck realized his Kulturkampf was a failure when secular and socialist elements used the opportunity to attack all religion. In the long run, the most significant result was the mobilization of the Catholic voters, and their insistence on protecting their church. In the elections of 1874, the Center party doubled its popular vote, and became the second-largest party in the national parliament—and remained a powerful force for the next 60 years, so that after Bismarck it became difficult to form a government without their support.[7][18]
In the decades before the Kulturkampf began, the 1850s and 1860s, there existed extensive and entrenched anti-Jesuit paranoia, anti-Catholicism, anti-monasticism and anti-clericalism.[19] Since 1848, the German states saw a resurgence of Catholic monastic life and a growth in the number of monasteries and convents.[20] German liberals monitored and tabulated a dramatic rise in the numbers and types of monasteries, convents and clerical religious, a fact which made for convenient propaganda, the monastic life being cast as the epitome of a backward Catholic medievalism.[21] Prussian authorities were particularly suspect of the spread of monastic life east and west into the Polish and French ethnic areas.[22] The Diocese of Cologne, for example, saw a tenfold increase of monks and nuns between 1850 and 1872, and other areas saw similar increases.[23]
A wave of anti-Catholicism and anti-Catholic propaganda accompanied the Kulturkampf, accompanied by “outright hatred” by the liberals who considered Catholics the enemy of the modern German nation.[2] The Kulturkampf was not, however, a spontaneous popular occurrence, but “a campaign against the Catholic Church conducted through the law, with the police and bureaucracy as its principal agents”, the legality of which gave it its “sinister character”:
Clergy arrested, humiliated, and marched through the streets by the police; house searches conducted by the police looking for evidence of disloyalty; the Catholic press suppressed; the civil service cleansed of Catholics; the Army used to disperse a Catholic crowd gathered to witness the appearance of the Virgin; nuns and monks and clergy fleeing the country; official support for popular harassment and intimidation of Catholics.[2]
No one however was killed and few were injured, as Bismarck did not seek to extinguish Catholicism in his land, but rather sought to assimilate the Polish peasants and saw international Catholicism as an enemy of the "still fragile German Reich".[2]
The word Kulturkampf has also been used to refer to similar cultural conflicts in other times and places. In the United States, the term culture war has been used by Patrick Buchanan, among others, to describe an analogous conflict starting in the 1960s and continuing to the present between religious social conservatives and secular social liberals (Buchanan used the English "culture war," though in the context Buchanan used it, as a war between traditional morality and avant-garde liberalism, it clearly evoked memories of the earlier German experience). Coincidentally, Buchanan himself is descended from German Catholics on his mother's side. This theme of "culture war" was the basis of Buchanan's keynote speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention.[24] The term culture war had by 2004 become commonly used in the United States by both liberals and conservatives. However, Buchanan's opinions have no relevance to the actual Kulturkampf as it was conducted in Germany in the 1800s.
Justice Antonin Scalia referenced the term in the Supreme Court case Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996), saying "The Court has mistaken a Kulturkampf for a fit of spite." The case concerned an amendment to the Colorado state constitution that prohibited any subdepartment from acting to protect individuals on the basis of sexual orientation. Scalia believed that the amendment was a valid move on the part of citizens who sought "recourse to a more general and hence more difficult level of political decision making than others." The majority disagreed, holding that the amendment violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.