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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74.3 (2000) 609-612



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Book Review

Geschichte des Kirchlichen Lebens in den deutschsprachigen Ländern seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts: Die katholische Kirche. Vol. 5. Caritas und soziale Dienste


Erwin Gatz, ed. Geschichte des Kirchlichen Lebens in den deutschsprachigen Ländern seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts: Die katholische Kirche. Vol. 5, Caritas und soziale Dienste. Freiburg, Switzerland: Herder, 1997. 528 pp. DM 98.00.

The Catholic Church and its orders can lay claim to the oldest unbroken tradition of organized charity care among European institutions. Given this tradition, it is easy to ignore the substantial regional variety that existed over time, and across territories and social structures, leading to very different outcomes despite the overarching unity of formal church commitment to the poor, the sick, and the marginalized. Readers of this volume of Erwin Gatz's encyclopedic history of the life of the Catholic Church in German-language countries can follow the evolution and differentiation of charity and social services from the end of the eighteenth century to the present--a period in which the monopoly of Catholic charitable institutions was increasingly challenged by the state.

Gatz and his collaborators address this evolution in the thirty-one chapters of volume 5 of this series, which celebrates the centenary of the German Caritasverband. In regional terms, their focus encompasses developments in [End Page 609] areas ranging from the northeastern enclaves of largely Protestant Prussia to the German-speaking Swiss cantons and Austria, where the Catholic Church maintained its bishoprics and its orders despite the progressive waves of secularization during the latter part of the eighteenth century and particularly after the French Revolution.

In terms of historical period, after a summary overview of social and medical charity as a basic function of the church throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, parts 1 and 2 assess the attempts of the various nineteenth-century German states to push clerical charitable institutions into a role of dependency and subservience to secular goals. In response to these demands and their own agendas, the evolving Caritas agencies continued many traditional tasks and initiated new ones, servicing a wide range of populations during decades of mass poverty, unprecedented labor mobility, the inclusion of women in the formal workforce, and extraordinary and new needs and opportunities in education and the care of the sick. Parts 3 and 4 deal with the period up to and after the Second World War until the end of the 1980s. A final part summarizes official Catholic charities organized in the Caritasverband in terms of their particular and separate place in the web of voluntary nongovernmental institutions, including their financial underpinnings, their place within the labor laws of the German Federal Republic, and the extent and usefulness of statistics compiled on agencies and clients. Reflecting the reputation of the Herder Verlag, the major German Catholic publisher, there is a wealth of technical resources, including matter-of-fact footnotes, source notes, a summary bibliography, and several indexes.

In all, the book offers a basic and rich resource for those interested in the comparative history of social and community services under clerical auspices, of the evolution of teaching and nursing orders in German-language areas, and of the persistence and perseverance of male and female Catholic orders and hierarchies slowly but surely stripped of their previous monopoly of services and resources. The latter aspect in particular is of specific and generic interest for the history of nursing, both in an overall Catholic perspective and in terms of the new breeds of women who headed the new nursing orders of the nineteenth century. In chapter 6 in particular, Gatz shows that the evolution of nursing orders under the auspices of the Catholic Church was largely a phenomenon of the French Counter-Reformation and was only slowly adopted in a Germany divided between Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics. After 1789, the French Revolution evened the playing field for a...

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