Provost Döllinger from Munich:
I will appeal only to your reason, gentlemen, not to your emotion, not to your sympathies, as the speaker ahead of me did. If, in addition to the questions immediately related to clerical questions, one also invokes, as he does, political questions having an indirect relationship, then one can almost draw the entire field of politics into the realm of the Catholic associations. It would not be difficult to deduce some kind of connection with church interests regarding every political subject. I should like to challenge the previous speaker to name any contentious issue of high politics that is not at least indirectly connected with religious and church interests.
Gentlemen, I am describing the matter openly, as it is. On every political question the Church is basically participating up close or at a distance, on one side or the other; participation would therefore already constitute sufficient grounds for associations with church-related aims to draw all of the more important questions from daily politics into their sphere of activity if that assertion were founded. But where this would lead, what damaging influence it would exercise upon the entire position, yes, even the existence, of the associations, this we may assess by looking at that very question which is currently claiming the most anxious interest on the part of all Germans, the question of the imperial constitution and the selection of an imperial head of state. There is no doubt that the German nation is divided on this question, and at this hour nobody can yet say with certainty toward which side the overwhelming majority of the people is inclined. According to the remarks of the speaker who preceded me, it would now be the calling and purpose of the Pius Associations to throw their energies and the means they have at their disposal for popular instruction and popular persuasion regarding questions about Kaiser and Empire, and indeed we as Catholics, in the interests of our faith, should work toward the restoration of the old imperial rule, as it thrived during the Middle Ages, and for the return of the imperial crown to the old imperial house, that of the Habsburgs, and then, he says and wishes, the old stewardship of the Kaiser over the Catholic Church should be restored.
If we first take a look at this last point here, it already arouses major reservations for me. Should the duty of a special protective office be made incumbent upon the new Kaiser, then it cannot fail to be the case that he will also, following the rule that the obligation of one party toward another is always linked to corresponding rights and claims, [try to] gain influence over the Church he is protecting and want to participate in the management of its affairs, and one will have neither the right nor power to withhold this participation from the appointed protector of the Church. But then what about the status of that freedom and independence for the Church, which we view as such a fortunate, even if by no means completely secure, achievement of recent times? Will we not be conceding, or even be forced to offer ourselves, that the paragraphs in the [catalogue of] basic rights [from the imperial constitution] and the new Prussian constitution that express this independence will be deleted again?
But, additionally, this restoration of the old imperial rule, and the advocacy for the church to be transferred to it, contains the demand that the Kaiser of the Germans can only be a Catholic. Here, gentlemen, I appeal to your sense of justice: Can we, dare we really make this demand in Germany given the unconditional parity of rights which is supposed to exist for the members of all religions, and specifically for Catholics and Protestants?
print version
return to list
previous document