We Catholics already constitute, so long as Germany exists on the scale of the German Confederation, only a small majority; should Austria really leave the new Reich, then we would find ourselves very much in the minority in "Small Germany," and should we nonetheless be able to rightly demand of our Protestant fellow citizens that the head of the new nation could never belong to their confession, but only to ours? That would be an advantage that, at this moment, when all privileges and especially all preferential treatment of one confession over another are supposed to cease once and for all, would once more assume the form of a confessional privilege, and it would not fail to elicit ill-feeling and the spread of retaliation.
And, more particularly, a Kaiser vested with stewardship over the Catholic Church! Would the Protestants then not demand for their part that an imperial protector also be appointed for their church, in other words, that a Protestant Kaiser be set up alongside the Catholic one? You can see that, if we proceed along this path, we will certainly arrive at having two Kaisers and two kinds of imperial German rule. So dubious is the naked vulnerability we would allow ourselves with such demands, and so hard would it be to dismiss the accusation that we ourselves are now once more injuring, yes, even trampling upon, the legal equality of the denominations in Germany that we have only just achieved and that we believed to have made into reality.
But this conclusive example shows us on what slippery and dangerous territory the Catholic associations would inevitably fall as soon as they undertake to draw the political affairs of the day into their sphere of activity. Each departure from one's own territory and infringement upon a foreign one takes its revenge; but the Pius Associations are, by their nature and original program, church-related; politics is not their field.
To be sure, it has been said that the Pius Associations may only place solid principles rooted in the soil of the church at the top of their political activity in order to be on the safe side here as well and to operate fruitfully. Actually, though, it is right and proper to give precedence to principles; but the application of these principles in individual circumstances is usually not as clear and reasonable as the principle itself, and even in the political field struggles tend to be carried out not so much over the principle as over the consequences that are drawn from the principle. Where is there more doubt, wavering, and uncertainty as in the field of recent German politics? If anywhere, then it is necessary here and now to let everyone have his convictions, to permit everyone to draw his own conclusions from commonly accepted principles.
If the Pius Associations become intolerant here and grant, within their bosom, only a quite specially developed political creed and mode of operation corresponding to that creed, then great dissatisfaction will be the immediate consequence; from this schisms will develop, which will then lead to the dissolution of the associations. To be sure, one has been talking about a Catholic policy [politics] while entertaining the opinion that the associations only need to make this their guiding principle in order to remain united and develop flourishing activities; I confess, however, that I cannot form any clear view about this Catholic policy, that I do not believe I am capable of determining, on every given important political question, what is the Catholic and what is the non-Catholic solution.
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