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  • Balthasar Kaltner. Kanonist und (Erz-)Bischof an der Schwelle einer folgenschweren Wendezeit (1844–1918)
  • Jeremy Roethler
Balthasar Kaltner. Kanonist und (Erz-)Bischof an der Schwelle einer folgenschweren Wendezeit (1844–1918). By Gerlinde Katzinger. [Wissenschaft und Religion: Veröffentlichungen des Internationalen Forschungszentrums für Grundfragen der Wissenschaften Salzburg. Band 17.] (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 2007. Pp. 309. $79.95. ISBN 978-3-631-56634-3.)

Gerlinde Katzinger offers an overview of the remarkably multifaceted career of the Reverend Balthasar Kaltner. As a professor of theology at the University of Salzburg from 1886 to 1891, Kaltner established himself as an authority on church history and church law. In 1891, Kaltner left the university to take up full-time service in the diocesan administration of Salzburg. Through the next three decades, he demonstrated a number of diverse talents. He oversaw the construction of the Antonius Parish Church in Itzling and the St. Andrä Parish Church in Salzburg. These were no easy tasks, given the financial constraints faced by the diocese. For his work at St. Andrä, Kaltner was awarded the Iron Crown by the emperor in 1898. In the last decade of his life, Kaltner served as Prince Bishop of Gurk (1910–14) and finally, archbishop of Salzburg (1914–18). [End Page 163]

After completing her biographic overview (roughly the first third of the book), Katzinger makes her case for Kaltner’s historical significance. In 1904, Pope Pius X resolved to fulfill a long-sought goal to consolidate the mosaic of overlapping laws and legal pronouncements that had served as its makeshift canon law for centuries. In 1906, under the leadership of Cardinal Johannes Katschalter (Kaltner’s predecessor), the Archdiocese of Salzburg held a provincial synod—its first and only such synod of the twentieth century—to offer its input (p. 55). Recognized as the foremost expert on church law in his diocese, Kaltner was seen as ideally situated to play a key role in the subsequent discussions.

The legacy of Pius X and his Codex Iuris Canonici (completed and implemented by his successor, Benedict XV, in 1917) is not without controversy. On the one hand, it has been charged that Pius sought to isolate the Church defensively, rather than constructively, from the intrusions of modernity and secularism. Alternatively, Pius has been lauded by his defenders for systematizing the Church’s canon law and clarifying its lines of authority, thus stabilizing the Church’s institutional foundations and paving the way for the international posture adopted by later pontiffs, most notably John Paul II. An attempt to explain how Kaltner’s story informs this broader controversy would have been desirable. Katzinger admits that Kaltner and his contemporaries did not see the CIC as a new formulation, but rather, as a clarification of existing juridical norms (p. 120). For his own part, Kaltner took a seemingly conservative position on morally charged issues such as confessionally mixed marriages (pp. 141–47). He “shied away” from the recommendation that vernacular be used to supplement the Latin Mass, worrying that a multiplicity of languages would erode the unity of the Church (p. 182). He did, however, take seemingly assertive and strongly informed positions on clarifying the hierarchical lines of authority (for instance, separating justice from administrative matters) and strengthening church oversight over its subordinate offices. Through his service, Kaltner tried to call attention in his pastoral letters and other pronouncements to alcohol abuse and the sanctity of marriage. Much of this (and the CIC more broadly) was put to the test by the stresses of World War I.

Katzinger’s study touches a number of broader interests. The circumstances under which Kaltner came to be Prince Bishop of Gurk (after his predecessor had been declared mentally incompetent against the backdrop of a scandal) underscore tensions between spiritual and temporal authority in the Hapsburg domains at the turn of the century. Likewise, the protests that rang out from the minority Slovenian Catholic population (one-third of the diocese) over the appointment of the non-Slovenian-speaking Kaltner at Gurk in 1910 reveal conflicting ethnic and confessional loyalties in an increasingly unsteady empire. [End Page 164]

Jeremy Roethler
Rio Grande College, Sul Ross State University

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