Left Catholicism

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In the first half of the 20th century, left Catholicism was the term used to describe those movements within German political Catholicism that positioned themselves on the left of the political spectrum for religious reasons . Because of the strongly integrating character of the Center Party for the Catholic minority milieu in the German Reich , the engagement on the left wing of the democratic, social and anti-liberal Center Party must first be distinguished from isolated Catholic-inspired socialists.

The term “left Catholicism” was taken from the French discussion ( catholiques de gauche ), in which, however, it rather described a republic-friendly, mostly anti-royalist attitude.

Catholic Church and Politics in Germany

Empire 1871–1918

Under the influence of the charitable and journalistic work of the “workers' bishop” Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler and Adolph Kolpings , the clerics Franz Wärme and Wilhelm Hohoff demanded that church and state care for the living conditions of the workers in different ways. While Heat stood up as a member of the Reichstag and a social politician for the actively intervening state and aid institutions of the church, Hohoff, known in public as the "Red Pastor", took the view that some parts of Marxist social doctrine were compatible with Christianity. Hohoff experienced a certain renaissance among the Catholic Socialists of the Weimar Republic and among the Catholic sixty-eighties .

Weimar Republic and 1933–1945

With the end of the German Empire in 1918, the Catholic associations and confederations regained more freedom of movement - even in distinctly diaspora regions such as Berlin . In the Weimar Republic after 1918, a milieu of alternative Christian groups could develop that tended towards pacifism and partly also towards socialism. The horror of the just ended World War and the questionable nature of the clergy's usual proximity to the military led to the establishment of Catholic-pacifist groups such as the Peace Association of German Catholics from 1919 to 1933.

Some revolutionary hopes of overcoming the capitalist system gave rise to Christian socialist groups such as the League of Catholic Socialists and their Red Leaf in 1929 and 1930. Christian trade unionists such as Heinrich Mertens and Ernst Michel were among their leading figures , while the Rhein-Mainische Volkszeitung , for example, offered Christian journalists such as the socially committed entrepreneur Friedrich Dessauer , Heinrich Scharp or Walter Dirks , the secretary of Romano Guardini , a much-noticed forum. The small Christian Social Reich Party also existed as a decidedly left-wing Catholic party .

The left wing of the Catholic youth movement also contributed a lot to the dispute over reform theology , social and church reforms - especially in Quickborn and in the workbooks of young Catholics (1931–1933). Of the many left Catholic initiatives, the following should also be mentioned:

This often networked milieu strengthened the left wing of the reform of the German Center Party and was the breeding ground for left Catholicism until after 1945. The efforts to reform the liturgy , such as those of the Sudeten German Augustinian Pius Parsch and others who were active in Klosterneuburg, also had an impact on this mixed-up situation between the wars . They strengthened the feeling of many critical Christians to be, so to speak, "Church from below", without this term would have been formulated at the time, since loyalty to the hierarchy was the hallmark of all Catholics.

The Nazi era , however, decisively weakened this milieu. Although Christian-National Socialist groups such as the Working Group for Religious Peace emerged, as were the Protestants and Catholic groups , they were mostly forbidden by the local bishops (for example at the end of 1938 in the “ Ostmark ” (Austria) by Cardinal Theodor, who was later heavily criticized Innitzer ).

But the spineless pacts of some bishops with the Nazi authorities deprived the critical Catholics of their scope of activity. While the Confessing Church was able to come together in the Protestant denomination through its different structure, the resistance of the more progressive Catholics had to remain almost without institutional support. What is difficult to understand today created a rift in Catholic identity that did not fully heal. In all of this, however, it should not be forgotten that the Catholic institutions in the German Reich had been in a minority position since 1871 and their anti-modern attitudes favored an apolitical feeling.

Germany since 1945

The predecessor organizations and founding groups of the CDU and CSU had in the early summer of 1945 some clear socialist and social reform tendencies. They did not change to today's bourgeois and conservative party until the end of 1945, when Adenauer visibly intervened in post-war politics and after the Protestant-influenced North German CDU associations had organized themselves. Adenauer was an avowed opponent of such socialist, social reform ideas. His early contacts with North German Protestant politicians were of great importance for the further political orientation of the CDU. The aim of the alliance between Adenauer and the Protestants was not least to combat the socialist tendencies of political Catholicism.

A socialist character were u. a. undoubtedly the program ideas of the Cologne founding group of the CDP, the later CDU. This was almost the spiritual center of left-wing Catholicism, although it was precisely in the Rhenish Catholic Cologne that the politician Adenauer achieved his most significant successes in the twenties.

The initiators of the Cologne Circle were among others the publisher Theodor Scharmitzel , the teacher Leo Schwering and the legal advisor and mayor of Krefeld-Uerdingen am Rhein Dr. Wilhelm Warsch . The political and content controversy reached its climax with the election of the CDU state chairman in the Rhineland at the beginning of February 1946 in Uerdingen , where Adenauer ran against the provisional chairman Schwering and won a controversial election. After that, none of the Cologne district made a political career. Only Warsch became district president of Cologne in March 1946. Their program fell into oblivion, which Schwering said was “the original program for all Christian politics in all of West Germany”. These “Cologne guidelines” were written down in 1945 by Warsch, Schwering, Scharmitzel with the help of Father Eberhard Welty from the Albertus Magnus Academy of the Dominican Monastery of St. Albert near Bonn.

They were almost socialist: “Common property may be expanded as far as the common good requires. Post and railways, coal mining and power generation are basically a matter of public service. The banking and insurance industry is subject to state control. ”At around the same time, the Hessian CDU founding group around Heinrich von Brentano , Eugen Kogon and Walter Dirks developed the“ Frankfurt guiding principles ”:“ We want the economy on a large scale to be uniform and systematic will be steered because only in this way ... a reconstruction according to social and macroeconomic and not just private profitability principles can be secured. "

The first program of the founding group of the CSU in Franconia was just as socialist. The initiator for founding the party in Würzburg was Adam Stegerwald , who was a Christian trade union leader during the Weimar Republic. The original aim was to found the “Christian Social Workers and Peasants Party”. Stegerwald later decided to use the less provocative party name “Christian Social Union” (CSU), with the adjective “social” in the party name being the only thing that remained of his socialist initiative. In the first program of the Stegerwaldschen (Würzburg) founding group it was said: "The key industries, natural resources, mining, the energy industry and all monopoly-like enterprises are either to be transferred to state ownership or to the influence of public authority."

When, in the summer of 1947, the leading Catholic CDU politician in Berlin, Jakob Kaiser, and the Rhenish Catholic and CDU man Karl Arnold united in the project to socialize the Ruhr industry, Adenauer was able to seek the help of the North German CDU in defending against these efforts - Associations be sure. Until the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, Adenauer succeeded in pushing back the socialist developments within the CDU / CSU.

The Christian Democratic Workforce was founded as early as 1946 . The CDA was founded primarily by former Christian trade unionists in the working-class strongholds of North Rhine-Westphalia . The official establishment of the CDA took place in 1946 in the Kolping House in Herne. In the early years, the CDA was primarily concerned with the social question , i. H. the material security of workers and their position in the factories, in the foreground with which the left Catholic wing was largely integrated into the party.

It was different with the SPD . In the post-war period up to around 1960, political involvement of German Catholics in German social democracy was a rare exception because the official Catholic Church had a clearly anti-Marxist position, but at the same time developed strong social engagement.

Even today, only a few prominent Social Democrats are Catholic; They included or include Wolfgang Clement , Georg Leber , Wolfgang Thierse , who left this party in 2008 , as well as the former party chairmen Hans-Jochen Vogel , Franz Müntefering , Kurt Beck and Oskar Lafontaine and the former party chairman Andrea Nahles .

During the Adenauer era, the isolated left-wing Catholics of the post-war period criticized the Federal Republic's ties to the West as well as its rearmament and were pacifist . The mouthpieces of the left-wing Catholics were publications such as Ende and Anfang about Franz Josef Bautz and Theo Pirker , the Frankfurter Hefte about Walter Dirks and Eugen Kogon and the werkhefte about Christel Beilmann and Gerd Hirschauer .

Left Catholicism, however, was predominantly articulated within the political spectrum of the Christian Democratic parties. Prominent examples of the recent past are about Norbert Blüm , Heiner Geißler and Rita Süssmuth , who also came out with statements critical of the church.

In the conflict between the spirit of optimism of the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965 and the retarding reform process in German Catholicism, two left-wing Catholic intellectual groups in particular articulated themselves: the somewhat more established academics of the Bensberger Kreis and the critical Catholicism , which was shaped by the 1960s and which is also expressively expressed in publications and discussion forums reported to speak at the Catholic Days. Personal continuity can finally be seen in the establishment of the Church from Below Initiative from 1980. The students, who had become critical and self-confident, tried to exercise a general political mandate in the working group of Catholic student and university communities founded in 1973 together with their national interest group; this led to a permanent conflict with the Catholic bishops and in 2000 to their dissolution.

The theological left - insofar as one can include liberal tendencies, such as Hans Küng - was increasingly called "progressist" by conservative representatives. In contrast, traditionalism - for its part a remnant of the right-wing extremist French catholiques à droite - describes the “Council Church” as a whole as having fallen into modernism .

From the point of view of the Catholic teaching profession, the Marxist-inspired variant of liberation theology , which was pushed back in the 1980s, posed a particular problem . A well-founded criticism of capitalism on the basis of Catholic social doctrine has so far received little public attention, since the church social doctrine does not argue directly politically, but aims to strive for principles of a just social order within the horizon of natural law- inspired categories of reason (cf.Encyclical Benedict XVI. , Deus Caritas Est , No. 26 ff. With further references).

In the 1970s and 1980s, the majority of the younger generation of German Catholics tended towards the moderate left , while before that the Catholic youth were closer to the center- right . In contrast to the Central Committee of German Catholics - which represents the Catholic lay associations - and its members who were mostly close to the CSU and CDU and close to the state, these groups were looking for a Christian identity that was remote from the state and opposed to the basic decisions of the "Adenauer era" such as ties to the West, market economy and European Integration behaved critically. As a result of the upheavals since 1989 , German left-wing Catholicism is now less recognizable as a relevant political grouping, although it continues to often speak out in social policy through individuals such as Friedhelm Hengsbach SJ . Since the 1990s, Green politicians have become increasingly known as representatives of left-wing Catholicism. B. Christa Nickels and Winfried Kretschmann , who also represent him in the Central Committee of German Catholics .

In the media, Left Catholicism is still represented by Publik-Forum .

The GDR left no room for the independent engagement of Catholics in politics. Officially, the CDU continued to exist in the east: within the democratic bloc (bloc parties ). In this party, state-affiliated Protestant functionaries predominated. The few Catholic members regarded themselves as left-wing Catholics, even if they did not have any function critical of the state. They grouped around the magazine encounter and organized the Berlin conference of European Catholics up to the turn.

Other countries

Austria

The situation is similar in Austria , but Catholic social teaching plays a somewhat larger role than in the Federal Republic of Germany. It is kept in public awareness by lay organizations , Caritas Austria and the activities of educational institutions , but it is also promoted through regular priorities at the Bishops' Conference .

One representative of the post-war period is Josef Dobretsberger .

As a result of the turnaround towards the center-right government of Wolfgang Schüssel , many left -wing Catholics can now be found on the side of government critics and the Greens , while in the 1990s they appeared to be rather indifferent or uninterested in party politics . The politics of the People's Party is still based on the previous party programs , but since the coalition with a right-wing party it has been perceived more frequently in the area of ​​tension between economic policy and Christian-social positions.

The political interest of young people , which was below 10% before 2000, rose to over 30% for a short time as a result of the long government negotiations in 1999 and 2003, but is now stable at around 20%. The left-wing Catholic side followed the talks on a black-green coalition with interest, which in turn led to a softening of positions critical of the church among the Greens. The criticism of Caritas and the Protestant Diakonie Österreich of some changes to the Aliens Act has led to a more pointed view of right and left Catholic politics.

The inner church progressive initiatives of the popular desire of the church have, however, like in neighboring countries, receded into the background due to a resigned attitude towards neoconservative tendencies.

In the 1980s there were several very conservative bishop appointments , which led to violent protests in large parts of the church. In the course of this, Pastor Rudolf Schermann founded the magazine Kirche intern - on the one hand as an organ for internal church criticism, on the other hand to promote new, community-oriented ways in Catholicism. Today it appears under the title Church in with additional focus on the ecumenical movement .

Italy

In Italy , the spectrum of parties has been much more variable than in German-speaking countries since the Democrazia Cristiana (DC) collapsed in 1994. The former left and right wing of the DC party initially formed independent, medium-sized parties instead of splinter parties (see La Margherita and UnCD or UDC ). Since the change of government in 1995 and 2001, they have entered into alliances on the respective side and are often more distant from each other than under the former mostly Christian Democratic prime ministers.

Switzerland

In Switzerland, left-wing Catholics split off from the Center Party Christian Democratic People's Party (CVP) and founded the Christian Social Party of Switzerland , which is particularly popular in rural cantons, where the CVP is traditionally more conservative.

Summary of the last decades

The representatives of left Catholicism criticizing the church in the 1980s in Germany and Austria did not succeed in getting the younger generation to be more interested in society and the church. Only events that were present in the media, such as the change of government, the Church Congress and the World Youth Day, have kept increasing political fatigue within limits. At the same time, the Second and Third Gulf War, for example, aroused great commitment from young Catholics, while social issues only provoke comparatively little political commitment.

A second development also influences the Catholic left: Since official Catholicism is now taking critical positions in the global context towards the crises of the present, committed but pious young Christians no longer see themselves challenged to an explicitly "left" classification, but find themselves in the statements of the church officials on issues of development policy, social policy and refugee policy.

Church teaching recommends today - introduced by Pope Pius XII. 1944 - the democratic form of government as preferable for the modern state. Anyone who tends towards explicitly authoritarian concepts of society no longer has any support in present-day Catholicism. On the other hand, the political interest of Christians and society as a whole has sunk since around 1970 and is currently only being kept alive by issues related to “aging” and unemployment, such as family policy , paternal months and protection against dismissal .

swell

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Müller, Franz: Franz heat and his work. Hamburg / Berlin / Leipzig 1928. - Klaus Kreppel : Decision for socialism. The political biography of Pastor Wilhelm Hohoff 1848–1923. (Series of publications by the Research Institute of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung 114), Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1974.
  2. ^ Klaus Kreppel: Wilhelm Hohoff - the "red pastor" and the Catholic socialists. In: Günter Ewald (Ed.): “Religious Socialism.” Stuttgart-Berlin-Cologne-Mainz 1977 (Kohlhammer T-series vol. 632), pp. 79-90.
  3. ^ Walter Dirks: Wilhelm Hohoff - a priest and socialist. In: critical Catholicism. Cologne. 4th year 1971. No. 6. Likewise Wilhelm Weber: Priest and Socialist? On the 50th anniversary of the death of Paderborn priest Wilhelm Hohoff. In: Rheinischer Merkur.Bonn. 2nd February 1973.
  4. ↑ See: Klaus Kreppel: In the banishment. In memory of Father Franziskus Stratmann . In: "Critical Catholicism" No. 8 / Cologne 1971, p. 3.
  5. ↑ Klaus Kreppel: Social Catholicism in Germany and the November Revolution 1918. In: “Werkhefte - magazine for problems in society and Catholicism.” 25th year. Munich. Issue January 1, 1971, pp. 15-23. Ders: The discussion of basic socialist terms in social Catholicism. In: “Werkhefte - magazine for problems of society and catholicism.” 25th year. Munich. Issue April 4, 1971, pp. 111-121. Ders: fire and water. Catholic Socialists in the Weimar Republic. In: “Critical Catholicism. Newspaper for theory and practice in society and the church. ”Formerly Rothenfelser Hefte. 4th year Cologne 1971. No. 6, p. 4.
  6. ↑ a b c d e "My God - what should become of Germany". Adenauer and the clergy - Adenauer and the socialists. 5. Continuation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 45 , 1961, pp. 47-60 ( Online - Nov. 1, 1961 ).
  7. ^ The stolen city, Hamburg 2020, ISBN 978-3-7497-3275-3 , pp. 188 ff
  8. ↑ 60 years of the CDU. Responsibility for Germany and Europe. (PDF; 548 kB) Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung , June 3, 2005, accessed on September 22, 2019 .
  9. ↑ The cradle of the CDA is in Cologne. In: cda-bund.de , accessed on May 1, 2019.
  10. ^ Vita Wolfgang Clement ( Memento from June 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive ). Retrieved on May 27, 2010.
  11. ↑ As SPD Vice: Clement flaunted his resignation ( Memento from November 11, 2013 in the Internet Archive ).
  12. ↑ See: https://ld.zdb-services.de/resource/202685-5 .
  13. ^ Martin Stankowski: Left Catholicism after 1945. Cologne 1974.
  14. ↑ Bensberger Kreis (ed.): Antisocialism out of tradition? Memorandum of the Bensberger Kreis on the relationship between Christianity and socialism today. Reinbek 1976. rororo aktuell 4003. - Bensberger Kreis (Hrsg.): Peace - a provocation for Catholics? A memorandum. Reinbek 1982. rororo currently 5114. - critical Catholicism. Newspaper for theory and practice in society and the church. Bochum-Stuttgart-Cologne 1968–1974. Edited by Hermann Böckenförde, Richard Faber, Hans Friemond, Heribert Kohl, Klaus Kreppel, Lothar Kupp, Henrich von Nussbaum, Ben van Onna, Hermann Precht, Ivo Rode, Joachim Stankowski, Martin Stankowski

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