Article: Dublin Freedman’s Journal [1879]

Donahoe's magazine, Volume 1, p.271 [1879]

Article: Dublin Freedman’s Journal

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   The culturkampf---the legalized persecution of religion in Germany---has wrought disastrous evils for the Protestant Church in the German Empire.  It was mainly of the Catholic Church that Bismarck and Falk, and the rest of the bitter crew who govern Germany, were thinking when they passed their ruthless enactments, and it was the annihilation at which they were aiming.  But in the result, Protestantism has actually been a greater loser than Catholicism, and its complainings are loud and doleful in the extreme.  We find the “Reichsbote,” one of the leading Protestant organs, writing thus:

   “The Evangelical Church has suffered grievously from the culturkampf…Indifference and hatred towards the church and Christianity have increased to an astounding degree, and the unchristianized masses of the humbler classes have ranked themselves in tens of thousands in the ranks of social democracy.  As a result of the putting aside of the church and Christianity, and of the impious doctrine that ‘everything is nature,’ which has become the outcome, immorality has increased, and the number of crimes is being multiplied to an appalling extent.  The bonds of social order are being discovered because the moral factors, authority and religion, have been long since put on one side, and replaced by rationalistic commercialism, so that we find ourselves in face of the most serious complications in the social, moral, and ecclesiastical order.  Of all the promises which were made at the commencement of the culturkampf, not only has not one of them been realized, but the reverse has happened in every direction.  Instead of peace, there are everywhere disorder and disunion.”

    This is a fearfully gloomy picture, and is another revelation to explain the ease and eagerness with which Bismarck entered into negotiations for the appeasement of Catholic consciences in Germany with his Holiness Leo XIII.  The prince-chancellor has clearly a stormy time before him when there is such a combination of discontent in Germany as a persecuted Catholic people, a disappointed and a disintegrating Protestant community, and a ferocious socialism that recognizes no God, scorns all law, and holds life, virtue, order, and authority in contempt.