The Churches: The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Northern Europe, 1780-1920

Internal Church Reform in Catholic Germany

Internal Church Reform in Catholic Germany 159 Internal Church Reform in Catholic Germany Claus Arnold Reform at the Time of the Secularisation, 1780-1803/15 During the last decades of the Holy Roman Empire the Catholic Church with its 23 prince bishops and its 44 imperial abbeys constituted not only a political force of cohesion and a career market where the younger sons of the nobility could live in style, but showed remarkable efforts in the field of internal ecclesiastical reform. The absolutism of the prince bishops was combined with a renewed sense of their episcopal dignity and relative independence from Rome.1 These episcopal ideas, which were in part similar to French Gallicanism, went in Germany under the label of ‘Febronianism’, named after the pseudonymous author Febronius - Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim (1701-1790), auxiliary bishop in Trier - whose De statu ecclesiae et legitima potestate Romani pontificis liber singularis had appeared in Frankfurt in 1763. Furthermore, the Catholic version of late Enlightenment influenced many of the last prince bishops. The archduke Maximilian Franz of Austria (1756-1801) for instance, who became Archbishop of Cologne in 1784, not only went as far as receiving the higher orders of priesthood and episcopate very quickly and actually fulfilling liturgical functions himself things unheard of in the older generation of prince bishops who relied for these things mainly on their bourgeois auxiliary bishops - he also tried to enforce an Enlightenment programme of church reform that was similar to the so-called Josephinism of his elder brother, Emperor Joseph II (1741-1790). Although holidays, processions, confraternities , festive liturgies and the activities of mendicant and contemplative orders were reduced and ‘popular’ pieties like the rosary viewed with suspicion, the enlightened 1. Cf. the ‘Punctation of Ems’ of 1786; English translation in Maclear, ed., Church and State, 28-31. Claus Arnold 160 reforms were only partly at odds with the former post-Tridentine confessionalisation and the resulting baroque piety. Their core element was the strengthening of pastoral care and education on the parish level, e.g. by regulating the size of parishes. Thus, although the reformist reduction of some elements of Baroque Catholicism caused many conflicts, the overall post-Tridentine trend of social control and religious intensification persisted in the years after 1780 and well into the nineteenth century.2 The papal suppression of the Jesuits and their colleges in 1773 paved the way for a reorganisation of the training of priests. On the orders of Empress Maria Theresa (17171780 ), the Benedictine Abbott Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch (1734-1785) developed a new plan of studies with a typical ‘Jansenist’ character: an anti-scholastic emphasis on biblical studies and ecclesiastical history was combined with a decidedly practical orientation, institutionalised in the new subject of Pastoral Theology. In contrast to the strictly centralised but short-lived ‘General Seminaries’, introduced by Joseph II, Rautenstrauch’s plan had lasting effects and parallels in other German states. Here, a consecutive model was favoured, which was fundamental for the formation of a modern diocesan clergy in Germany: university studies in theology were followed by the immediate preparation for ordination in the episcopal seminary. In the diocese of Münster, for instance, the Vicar-General and Minister Franz von Fürstenberg (17291810 ) prepared the foundation of a new university and a seminary in 1773. German Catholic theology in these years was partly ‘rationalist’ and tried to integrate historical criticism. Johann Lorenz Isenbiehl (1744-1818), professor at Mainz University, had studied Oriental languages at the Protestant university in Göttingen (with the approval of his enlightened Archbishop-Elector Emmerich Joseph von Breidbach zu Bürresheim (1707-1774)). In his Neuer Versuch über die Weissagung von Emmanuel (1778) he contested the messianic interpretation of Isaiah 7,14 and reaped the most solemn form of ecclesiastical censure, a special papal Breve against his book in 1779. Franz Berg (1753-1821), professor of ecclesiastical history at Würzburg University , tried to explain the entire development of Christianity from the standpoint of an immanent human psychology. At Ingolstadt, the ex-Jesuit Benedikt Stattler (1728-1797) demonstrated the rational character of Revelation by using the philosophy of Christian Wolff. But on the whole a moderate religious Enlightenment prevailed. For example, in the case of Johann Michael Sailer (1751-1832), who taught at Ingolstadt, Dillingen and Landshut, a biblical and patristic, anti-scholastic re-orientation was combined with a strict Christocentrism and a pietist interiorisation of religion. Sailer’s pastoral theology was implemented as a concrete programme of reform in the Constance...