THE BERLIN CATHOLIC CHURCH, 1871-1918: ITS SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ENDEAVORS

INGRID MARIANNE KRAUS, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Abstract

This study asks the question "How did the Catholic Church of Berlin respond to political and social problems of the city and the nation during the Wilhelmine Empire?" It analyzes the teachings of popes and bishops, describes the numerous charitable and social activities of the Berlin Church and focuses on the conflict between the Federation of Catholic Worker Associations, Berlin and the more numerous Christian Trade Unions. The Trade Unions were not strictly catholic in membership but admitted protestant workers as well and desired to have little if any supervision from the Catholic Church and its clergy. They believed that the "social question" was an economic, not a religious and moral one as the Catholic Worker Associations, Berlin, were insisting. The latter organization, believing it was adhering strictly to Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum, did not permit the strike as an economic weapon to gain higher wages, better working conditions, or improve their station in life. Fearing violence and economic disruption, to them the strike was permissible only if physical or spiritual life was in danger. The Worker Associations' clerical advisors taught it was better to persuade the employers by means of the Gospel voluntarily to share his profits with the workers. The Christian Trade Unions taught instead that workers have the right to struggle for justice by means of the strike. This study, based on the papers of two of the mentors of the Berlin associations, Josef Baron, a priest, and Franz von Savigny, a lawyer, analyzes the reasoning that undergirded the Berlin position. This dispute, carried on approximately between 1899 and 1914, was paralleled in the Center Party of the Reichstag. The right wing of the party, a small minority, echoed the thinking of the Catholic Worker Associations, Berlin, in that it believed that the Church and the clergy should play a leading role in politics and that the party should be kept "pure" in its ideology by restricting its membership to Catholics. The right wing also preferred a strong monarchy over parliamentary government while some members of the left wing favored further parliamentarization of Germany. By 1914 the trade union and the Center Party disputes had been decided in favor of the more secular factions, the Christian Trade Unions and the left wing of the Center Party. The right wing members of the Center had either been ousted or had left the party, and the Catholic Worker Associations, Berlin, dissolved, and most of its members joined the Christian Trade Unions. The thinking of the times did not permit the narrowly confessional orientation of the Berlin associations and the conservative Centrists. Moreover, their leading supporter, Georg Cardinal Kopp, prince bishop of Breslau, whose jurisdiction included the city of Berlin, had died in March of 1914. Kopp, who shepherded the Berliners for over a quarter of a century, is responsible for the rather conservative stance of the clergy of the Berlin Catholic Church and of its work. Yet this "ultramontane" thinking also contained a certain amount of evangelical purity that cannot easily be dismissed. A central question of the study is whether and how far the Church authorities can give binding directions for the solution of political and social questions. The Berlin Church tried to give such directions in all areas of life but with considerable opposition in a secular, material age.

Subject Area

European history

Recommended Citation

KRAUS, INGRID MARIANNE, "THE BERLIN CATHOLIC CHURCH, 1871-1918: ITS SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ENDEAVORS" (1981). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8118064.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8118064

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