Bavarian culture war

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The Bavarian Kulturkampf was a dispute between the Catholic Church and the government of the Kingdom of Bavaria . It began in the late 1860s and was settled in 1890.

term

The Bavarian Kulturkampf from the late 1860s to 1890 can be understood as part of the general conflict between the modern state and the Catholic Church , which can be seen in many Catholic and mixed-denominational states in Europe in the 19th century. The term Kulturkampf , coined by Rudolf Virchow in a speech in the Prussian House of Representatives on January 17, 1873, has established itself to denote this conflict . This designation makes it clear that it was not just a question of the conflict between two institutions (state and church), but that there was a spiritual-ideological confrontation behind it: liberalism , belief in progress, modern science on the one hand, ultramontanism , anti-modernism , neo-Scholastic theology on the one hand the other side. This ideological background is also recognizable in Bavaria, for example when Johann von Lutz , the protagonist of the Bavarian culture war on the state side, declared in 1871: “There are not just two dogmatic systems: there are two ages, two social orders, two legal systems, in one word two cultural epochs, which are struggling for the preponderance at the moment. ”In Bavaria, which was dominated by Catholicism (Lutz himself was a Catholic, Ludwig II anyway), this ideological contrast took a back seat to the conflict between the state church and church autonomy. The Kulturkampf in Bavaria did not escalate in a way comparable to the Prussian Kulturkampf .

State and Church in Bavaria

The relationship between state and church in Bavaria had been reorganized after the upheavals of the Napoleonic era . This reorganization found its expression in two legal documents: the Concordat between the Bavarian State and the Holy See of 1817 and the Religious Edict, which was added as a second annex to the Bavarian Constitution of 1818 . However, while the Concordat, as an international agreement between partners with equal rights, tended to follow the principle of church autonomy, the religious edict as a state law was more in the tradition of the Wittelsbach state church. This contradiction became particularly clear at a point that was to be of central importance for the Bavarian Kulturkampf: the regulation of the so-called place (right of the king to approve internal church ordinances before their publication). Article XII of the Concordat stipulated that internal church ordinances could be issued without state approval, whereas Paragraph 58 of the Religious Edict insisted on such approval, namely the Plazet. The contradiction was never resolved in principle, but only defused by the fact that the state promised in several declarations (Tegernsee Declaration of 1821, ministerial resolutions of 1852 and 1854) to use its church sovereignty in accordance with the Concordat. The state insisted on its legal position, but renounced its enforcement. The Bavarian government only moved away from this line in the conflict over the resolutions of the First Vatican Council .

Political polarization

The confrontation of the Kulturkampf era was prepared during the reign of the Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst Ministry (December 1866 to March 1870). A Catholic-conservative opposition formed against the liberal economic and social policy, the small German- oriented nation-state policy and the anti-clerical cultural policy of the Hohenlohe government, which led to the establishment of the Bavarian Patriot Party in 1868/69 . In this process of politicizing large sections of the population, the Bavarian government's primary school policy played a central role (as it did in Baden and later in Prussia). In October 1867, Minister of Education, Franz von Gresser, presented the draft of a liberal school law, through which, among other things, the influence of the churches on Bavarian elementary schools was to be reduced (church school supervision as state contract administration, enabling simultaneous schools ). Although this draft law failed in the first chamber of the Bavarian state parliament in April 1869 , the majority of the Catholic population had meanwhile been mobilized by journalism and the church in such a way that the newly formed patriot party in the elections for the Chamber of Deputies , the second chamber of the Bavarian state parliament, im In 1869 the absolute majority of the mandate was obtained. From this point on (and until 1912) in Bavaria liberal governments faced a Catholic-conservative majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Cultural struggle measures were therefore not possible on the basis of state law in Bavaria, one of the most important differences to the Prussian Kulturkampf.

Dispute over the Vatican Council

Ultimately, the conflict was sparked by the question of whether the resolutions of the first Vatican Council had to be approved in Bavaria before they were published (Plazet). Pope Pius IX who had already opposed the liberal and national zeitgeist with the publication of the syllabus in 1864 , called a council in Rome at the end of June 1868, which was to be opened in December 1869. In April 1869, while the council was still being prepared, the Bavarian government under Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst launched a diplomatic initiative: In a circular dispatch drawn up by the Munich church historian Ignaz von Döllinger , the European governments were asked to take a joint initiative vis-à-vis the curia about the planned To prevent dogmatization of papal infallibility . Since this initiative found no international response, the government urged the Bavarian council participants as a precaution not to take any resolutions "which would conflict with the basic principles of the Bavarian state constitution (...)". And the minister of culture announced on November 7, 1869 that the council resolutions to be expected in accordance with the religious edict would require the royal seat. With this, the Bavarian government abandoned its moderate ecclesiastical political stance of the past decades and returned to the “practice of unrestrained sovereign church regiment”. The government remained true to this position even after the infallibility dogma was proclaimed on July 18, 1870. But it soon became clear that the council resolutions in the Bavarian dioceses were published without a place (only the Archbishop of Bamberg Michael von Deinlein asked for the place, which he was denied; he published the council resolutions anyway). The Bavarian government responded to this questioning of its authority with the announcement that the council decisions would have no legal consequences in the state: As a result, the state looked at those people who were excommunicated by the church because they did not recognize the new dogma (e.g. Ignaz von Döllinger and Johann Friedrich ), continued as part of the Catholic Church. Dealing with the emerging Old Catholic Church thus became a central point of contention in the Bavarian culture war.

Combat measures in Bavaria and in the Reich

The Bavarian Kulturkampf was limited in two ways: on the one hand by the lack of a legislative majority in the government, on the other hand by the personality and intentions of the formative minister Johann von Lutz. The liberal statist , who emerged from the Bavarian ministerial bureaucracy, strove to preserve the state's traditional church sovereignty; the diversity of the political motives of the culture fighter Otto von Bismarck remained alien to Lutz. But it was Lutz, who lacked a majority in the Bavarian state parliament, who raised the conflict to the level of Reich legislation even before the culture war broke out in Prussia: the Reich’s first martial law, the pulpit paragraph (1871), was passed by the Bavarian government through the Bundesrat introduced and Lutz justified the amendment on November 23, 1871 in the Reichstag . Three more imperial laws followed: the Jesuit Law (1872), the Expatriation Law (1874) and the Law on the Introduction of Civil Marriage (1875). In addition, the Bavarian government had the option of issuing ordinances , which it used in 1873 for four ordinances: firstly , the establishment and management of educational institutions were made subject to strict conditions; second , Bavarian theologians were banned from attending the Collegium Germanicum in Rome; thirdly , the so-called school district ordinance directed the individual school districts to the political communities, no longer to the parish districts, and made it possible to set up simultaneous schools; fourthly, finally, the mitigating declarations of the state, which had promised the concordat-compliant variant in disputed questions of interpretation between the concordat and the religious edict , were revoked. There were no further imperial laws or Bavarian ordinances related to cultural warfare. Rather, the state set signs of relaxation in the years 1882/83: the old Catholic Johann Friedrich was transferred from the Catholic faculty to the philosophy faculty of the University of Munich in 1882, at the same time the distinguished center parliamentarian Georg von Hertling was appointed to a chair for philosophy ; Most significant was the enactment of a new school district ordinance in 1883, through which denominational elementary schools became the rule again.

opposition

Opposite the state was initially the Catholic Church, i.e. Bavaria's bishops and the curia . The actions of the Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst government (school policy, circular dispatch) had already met with unanimous rejection. The Bavarian politics after the proclamation of the council resolutions led to a complaint from the Pope in 1873, who also protested in 1875 against the introduction of civil marriage. The Bavarian bishops officially submitted their complaints in 1875 (Plazet, Old Catholics, school and religious orders). All of these church initiatives clashed with the attitude of the Bavarian government. The willingness to work with the Catholic popular movement as represented in the Bavarian Patriot Party grew at the curia and among the “ultramontane” -oriented Bavarian bishops ( Ignatius von Senestrey , Franz Leopold von Leonrod ). The absolute majorities in the Bavarian Chamber of Deputies, which the party achieved during the entire Kulturkampf era (i.e. in May 1869 and November, 1875, 1881 and 1887) prevented the government from taking legislative measures, but at the same time presented the party with a dilemma: the as a conservative, loyal to the king and state-preserving party had to live with the fact that the king, since 1886 also the prince regent, clung to the liberal and culture-fighting government. This led to considerable disputes about the goal-oriented opposition strategy within the patriotic parliamentary group: radical MPs like Joseph Bucher , who can be characterized as clerical democrats , ultimately strove to overthrow the "Lutz system" and were ready to use the means of denying the budget or the collective To practice resignation; the majority around the parliamentary group leader of the 1870s, Joseph Edmund Jörg , rejected these unconstitutional measures. In 1877, the controversies even led to the break-off of the radical “Catholic People's Party” of the publisher Johann Baptist Sigl , which only a few MPs joined. Overall, it can be said that the internal disputes hampered the party's ability to assert itself and that radical forces were only able to determine the faction line up to and including refusal of the budget twice for a short time: in 1881/82 under Alois Rittler's leadership and in 1889/90, largely promoted by the coming Center leaders Balthasar Daller and Georg Orterer ; These actions were not successful either.

Last escalation

While the Prussian Kulturkampf was settled with the two peace laws in 1885/87, the situation in Bavaria worsened again due to a thoughtless remark by Prince Regent Luitpold . In a public statement after the end of the King's Crisis, he had expressed his confidence in the Lutz government, noting that “the highest Catholic church authority has repeatedly expressed complete satisfaction with the situation of the Catholic Church in Bavaria”. This formulation caused outrage in Catholic circles, Pope Leo XIII. rejected the statement in the encyclical Officio sanctissimo (1887), the Bavarian bishops put their complaints together again in a memorandum (1888), but Johann von Lutz stuck to his unyielding stance on the central points (Plazet, Old Catholic Question). As a result, Catholic lay people around Karl zu Löwenstein initiated the first Bavarian Catholic Day (September 1889), which was to be understood as a Catholic mass demonstration. The assembly passed a sharp resolution against the Bavarian state church, the concerns of which were subsequently brought into the state parliament's work in three demands by the center faction (the Patriot Party had renamed itself the Bavarian Center Party in 1887): firstly , the plazet should no longer refer to the Catholic faith and ethics extend, secondly, the Old Catholics should be regarded as a different from the Catholic Church and religious community , thirdly should a Bavarian Federal initiative will be made to the Redemptorists from the effect of the Jesuit law exempt. Because Lutz continued to show no concessions, a radical opposition strategy prevailed in the Bavarian center faction: cuts in the cultural budget were announced.

Resolving the conflict

The way out of the deadlock was finally brought about by negotiations between the Bavarian government and the Munich Nunciature (without the involvement of the Center Party), which were led on the state side by Friedrich Krafft von Crailsheim , the Bavarian Foreign Minister , who at this stage was the sick Johann von Lutz represented. A compromise was found here: the Bavarian government continued to insist on its Plazeta conception, but from now on assessed the Old Catholics as a religious community separate from the Catholic Church; as a justification, however, reference was no longer made to the dogma of infallibility (which had just not been placed), but to the fact that the Old Catholics also rejected the Pope's primacy of jurisdiction and the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary . The government announced the new line in a ministerial resolution on March 15, 1890, the center faction then ended its budget blockade. Johann von Lutz, who had determined Bavarian politics for twenty years, resigned on May 30th for health reasons, and died on September 3rd, 1890. The end of the Kulturkampf and the Lutz era marked a turning point in 19th century Bavarian history.

literature

  • Dieter Albrecht : From the establishment of an empire to the end of the First World War (1871–1918). In: Alois Schmid (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Bavarian Geschichte Volume IV, 1. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2003, pp. 318-438, ISBN 3-406-50451-5 .
  • Winfried Becker : The culture war in Prussia and Bavaria. A comparative consideration. In: Jörg Zedler (Ed.): The Holy See in International Relations 1870–1939. Herbert Utz Verlag, Munich 2010, pp. 51–91.
  • Franz Xaver Bischof : Kulturkampf in Bavaria - Bavarian state church versus ultramontanism. In: Götterdämmerung. King Ludwig II. And his time , ed. by Peter Wolf u. a., Augsburg 2011, p. 125 ff.
  • Walter Brandmüller : The publication of the 1st Vatican Council in Bavaria. From the beginning of the Bavarian culture war. In: Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte 31 (1968), 1st part: pp. 197-258 ( digitized version ) and 2nd part, pp. 575-634 ( digitized version ).
  • Friedrich Hartmannsgruber: In the field of tension between ultramontane movement and liberalism (1864–1890). In: Walter Brandmüller (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Bayerischen Kirchengeschichte Volume 3. Eos-Verlag, St. Ottilien 1991, pp. 205-262, ISBN 978-3-88096-673-4 .
  • Peter Herde : The Holy See and Bavaria between the Customs Parliament and the founding of an empire (1867 / 68–1871). In: Journal for Bavarian State History 45 (1982), pp. 589-662 ( digitized version ).
  • Heinz Hürten : The Catholic Church since 1800. In: Alois Schmid (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Bayerischen Geschichte Volume IV, 2. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2007, pp. 300-330, ISBN 978-3-406-50925-4 .
  • Hans-Michael Körner : State and Church in Bavaria 1886-1918 (Publications of the Commission for Contemporary History Series B: Research Volume 20). Matthias Grünewald Verlag, Mainz 1977, ISBN 3-7867-0624-7 .
  • Anton Landersdorfer : Gregor von Scherr (1804–1877) (= Studies on the Old Bavarian Church History, Volume 9). Verlag des Verein, Munich 1995.
  • Margot Weber: On the Kulturkampf in Bavaria. In: Journal for Bavarian State History 37 (1974), pp. 93-120 ( digitized version ).

Web links

  • Ludwig II in the database Kingdom of Bavaria 1806–1918 of the House of Bavarian History.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Heinrich August Winkler: The long way to the west , Volume 1, Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2000, p. 222 with p. 593, note 7.
  2. ↑ Thomas Nipperdey: German History 1866-1918. Volume II: Power state before democracy , Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1992, pp. 364–369.
  3. ^ Margot Weber: Zum Kulturkampf in Bayern , in: Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 37 (1974), pp. 93–120, here p. 94.
  4. ^ Hans-Michael Körner: State and Church in Bavaria 1886-1918 , Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, Mainz 1977, pp. 8-14.
  5. ↑ Dieter Albrecht: From the establishment of an empire to the end of the First World War , in: Alois Schmid: Handbuch der Bavarian Geschichte Volume IV, 1, Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2003, p. 336 f.
  6. ↑ On the significance of the school bill: Friedrich Hartmannsgruber: Die Bayerische Patriotenpartei 1868–1887 , Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1986, pp. 22–33.
  7. ↑ Dieter Albrecht: From the establishment of an empire to the end of the First World War , in: Alois Schmid (ed.): Handbook of Bavarian History Volume IV, 1, Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2003, p. 371.
  8. ^ So Heinz Hürten: The Catholic Church since 1800 , in: Alois Schmid (ed.): Handbook of Bavarian History Volume IV, 2, Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2007, p. 314; the previous quote ibid p. 312.
  9. ↑ Thomas Nipperdey: German History 1866–1918. Volume II: Power state before democracy , Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1992, pp. 371–374.
  10. ^ Johann von Lutz in the German Reichstag on November 23, 1871.
  11. ↑ Dieter Albrecht: From the establishment of an empire to the end of the First World War (1871-1918) , in: Alois Schmid (Ed.): Handbuch der Bayerischen Geschichte Volume IV, 1, Munich 2003, pp. 373–376.
  12. ↑ Dieter Albrecht: From the founding of the empire to the end of the First World War (1871-1918) , in: Alois Schmid (Ed.): Handbuch der Bayerischen Geschichte Volume IV, 1, Munich 2003, pp. 375-376.
  13. ↑ Heinz Hürten: The Catholic Church since 1800 , in: Alois Schmid (Ed.): Handbuch der Bayerischen Geschichte Volume IV, 2, Munich 2007, p. 315.
  14. ^ So Friedrich Hartmannsgruber: Die Bavarian Patriotenpartei , Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1986, p. 129.
  15. ^ Text: Ludwig Schrott: Der Prinzregent , Munich 1962, p. 160.
  16. ↑ Dieter Albrecht: From the establishment of an empire to the end of the First World War , in: Alois Schmid: Handbuch der Bayerischen Geschichte Volume IV, 1, Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2003, pp. 400–402.
  17. ^ Hans-Michael Körner: State and Church in Bavaria 1886-1918 , Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, Mainz 1977, p. 59.