Peace Association of German Catholics

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The Friedensbund Deutscher Katholiken (FDK) was a pacifist association of politically committed Catholics in the Weimar Republic . It was founded in 1919 by Max Josef Metzger in Munich and existed to July 1, 1933. A new foundation in 1945 lasted until April 1951. Its members wanted the commandment of love of Jesus Christ in all aspects of life bring to bear and therefore in building a peaceful world order to participate, the War should be superfluous in the future.

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The foundation followed various attempts to end the First World War in the third year of the war: On May 27, 1917, the Catholic priest Max Josef Metzger founded the World Peace Association of the White Cross in Graz . On July 6th, Matthias Erzberger, as the representative of the Catholic Center Party, gave a much-noticed peace speech. On July 19, the SPD , the Center Party and the Progressive People's Party passed a joint peace resolution introduced by Erzberger and Philipp Scheidemann with their majority in the Reichstag , which called on the Reich government under Wilhelm II to renounce territorial conquests and peace negotiations. On August 1, 1917 - the third anniversary of the start of the war - Pope Benedict XV. the encyclical Dès le début , which offered its neutral mediation in peace negotiations and took up some demands of the peace movement of the time , including general controlled disarmament and an international arbitration tribunal for non-military conflict resolution.

The Catholic priest Johann Baptist Wolfgruber (1868–1950) then founded the Peace Association of Catholic Clergy on August 28, 1917 . The Catholic theologians and priests who were close to him decided on October 2, 1919 at a "Conference of Catholic Pacifists" in Munich to open this peace alliance to lay people and to position it as an emphatically political association. While the center politician Matthias Erzberger supported this cause, almost all German Catholic bishops rejected the establishment of the FDK.

Chaplain Magnus Jocham (1886–1923) and Josef Kral (1887–1965) then founded the FDK in Munich on October 9, 1919, which was not limited to clergy. Franziskus Maria Stratmann took over the leadership of the North German FDK sub-groups; Jocham became the first chairman and managing director. From 1923 Alfred Wilhelm Miller took over , from 1929 Dr. Rudolf Gunst took the chair.

Jocham and Kral had already emerged during the war with writings on a social and peace-politically committed Catholicism or religious socialism ; Kral published the book Der Christian Sozialismus in 1919 and founded the Christian Social Party of Bavaria with Vitus Heller (1882-1956) in 1920 , from which the Christian Social Reich Party emerged in 1925 .

In 1923 the French pacifist Marc Sangnier (1874–1950) invited to Freiburg / Breisgau to the third International Peace Congress (“Congrès démocratique international pour la paix”), which the FDK helped to organize. There, in front of around 7,000 participants, Sangnier called on the French government to no longer militarily occupy the Ruhr area as a step towards reconciliation with Germany . As a result, the FDK also received more attention and support, including media representatives such as Friedrich Dessauer and Walter Dirks .

FDK membership grew from 1,200 (1921) to around 8,000 active and 40,000 corporate members (1932). They often came from the Kolping Youth , the Catholic Young Men Association, the Young Center , the Quickborn Working Group and Catholic workers' associations. This made the FDK the second largest German pacifist organization during the Weimar period after the German Peace Society (DFG). In addition to Dessauer and Dirks, prominent members included the central politicians Heinrich Krone , Christine Teusch and Ludwig Windthorst . Bishops and large Catholic associations, however, remained aloof.

In 1924 Stratmann published the book Weltkirche und Weltfrieden . In it he argued from the double commandment of love for God and neighbor ( Mk 12.29ff  EU ) and the ban on killing, which was tightened by Jesus ( Ex 20.13  EU ; Mt 5.21-26  EU ; 26.52 EU ). He affirmed the neo-scholastic version of the Church's teaching of the Just War , but, precisely because of its criteria, considered a war in the age of the means of mass destruction , especially the poison gas used in World War I , to be immoral and therefore any further war was morally prohibited.

On this theological basis, the participants of the first Reichstag in Hildesheim in 1924 decided on the “Guidelines of the Peace Association of German Catholics”. The FDK's magazine was the Catholic Peace Watchdog , which was renamed Der Friedenskäufer in 1926 . Stratmann remained the second chairman and theological director of the FDK until 1933.

In terms of foreign policy, the FDK advocated the League of Nations , the contractual exclusion of war of aggression in international law and a European peace order based on the Versailles Treaty of 1919. It fought militarism and nationalism , especially the construction of the armored cruisers (1928), the formation of military sports groups and the at that time frequent criminal convictions of pacifists as traitors . With these concerns he increasingly turned against the line of the Center Party.

For years, FDK chairman Miller tried to get the Fulda Bishops' Conference to officially recognize the FDK as a Catholic association. He was only able to win over FDK member Nikolaus Ehlen . In 1927, the new diocesan bishop Joannes Baptista Sproll also agreed to support the FDK vis-à-vis the bishops. The chairman, Cardinal Adolf Bertram, prevented this with an apolitical resolution that contained no reference to the FDK and its goals. From 1930 the Archbishop of Munich Michael Faulhbaber approached the positions of the Peace League and took up formulations of the FDK in his sermons. However, no bishop could be won for the desired office of protector.

In December 1930 Paulus Lenz took over the office of Secretary General. In the Sauerland , the Friedensbund organized the big international FDK peace meeting of 1931 on the Borberg .

On July 1, 1933, the NSDAP regime, along with other pacifist and democratic associations, also banned the FDK. Some of his leaders - Lenz, Dessauer, Dirks, Stratmann and Josef Knecht  - were imprisoned in concentration camps. Others were sentenced to long prison terms ( Joseph Cornelius Rossaint 1936; 11 years) or executed ( Richard Kuenzer , Max Josef Metzger 1944).

Stratmann, Gunst and Felix Hinz re- founded the FDK in 1946. He was one of the first Christian groups to take a stand against plans for German rearmament in West Germany. He was then violently attacked in public by the German Catholic bishops as well as the then federal government under Konrad Adenauer . Under this pressure it broke up in 1951.

See also

literature

  • Konrad Breitenborn: The Peace Association of German Catholics, 1918 / 19–1951. East Berlin 1981.
  • Dieter Riesenberger : The Catholic Peace Movement in the Weimar Republic. Düsseldorf 1976.
  • Beate Höfling: Catholic peace movement between two world wars. The “Peace Association of German Catholics” 1917–1933. (= Tübingen contributions to peace research and peace education. Volume 5). Waldkirch 1979.
  • Johannes Horstmann (Ed.): 75 years of the Catholic peace movement in Germany. On the history of the Peace Association of German Catholics and of Pax Christi. (Catholic Academy Schwerte: Academy Lectures 44), Schwerte 1995.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Rösch: “If you want peace, prepare peace!”. The Peace Association of German Catholics and the Church Hierarchy. In: pax_zeit. Issue 2014/4, p. 17.
  2. ↑ Joachim Köhler: Sermon in Rottenburg Cathedral, September 21, 2003 on the occasion of the annual conference of Pax Christi , accessed on February 16, 2015.
  3. ^ Agnès Lecointre: Intellectuels catholiques allemands et pouvoir au début du XXe siècle. In: Paul Colonge, Angelika Schober (eds.): Le christianisme dans les pays de langue allemande. Enjeux et défis . Presses universitaires de Limoges, Limoges 1997, ISBN 2-84287-062-X , p. 128.
  4. ^ Antonia Leugers : Catholic war peace discourses in Munich between the wars. In: theologie.geschichte. Supplement 7/2013, p. 177.

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