Kulturkampf (German: [kʊlˈtuːɐ̯kampf] (listen), 'culture struggle') was the conflict that took place from 1872 to 1878 between the government of Prussia led by Otto von Bismarck and the Roman Catholic Church led by Pope Pius IX. The main issues were clerical control of education and ecclesiastical appointments.
Yet, in spite of strong Catholic representation in the Reichstag, the political power and influence of the Church in the public sphere and its political power was greatly reduced. Although Germany and the Vatican were officially at peace after 1878, religious conflicts and tensions continued.
See Article History. Kulturkampf, (German: “culture struggle”), the bitter struggle (c. 1871–87) on the part of the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck to subject the Roman Catholic church to state controls.
The assassination attempt led to an intensification of the Kulturkampf measures. 5 February: The encyclical Quod Nunquam declared that the May Laws were invalid, "insofar as they totally oppose the divine order of the Church."
The earliest relief was the result of legislation originally intended to do great damage to the Catholic cause. The Prussian Civil Marriage Law of March, 1874 (extended to the German Empire, February 6, 1875), withdrew from the clergy their former right of keeping the civil registers, and made civil marriage obligatory.
The Kulturkampf, or "struggle for civilization," was an episode of firstrate importance in modern German history in which Otto von Bismarck (Germany's chancellor and Prussia's minister-president; 1815–1898) and his political allies attempted to weaken the German Catholic church's ties to the papacy, to bring that ...
"The Kulturkampf ultimately failed, however, because it was backed by political institutions and managerial arrangements that were inappropriate for effective enforcement" (p. 186f.).
The Kulturkampf was an anti-catholic program, "for culture struggle." Laws controlled the clergy and the schools . They forbade Catholic political expression, and required that all clergy be German and German educated. Many Jesuit priests were expelled from Germany.
To deal with the Catholic church, Bismarck launched the Kulturkampf. His goal was to make Catholics put loyalty to the state above allegiance to the church. Bismarck had laws passed that dissolved socialist groups, shut down their newspapers, and banned their meetings.
Definition of Kulturkampf : conflict between civil government and religious authorities especially over control of education and church appointments broadly : a conflict between cultures or value systems.
Answer: Martin Luther Biography. Martin Luther was a German monk who forever changed Christianity when he nailed his '95 Theses' to a church door in 1517, sparking the Protestant Reformation.
He passed laws that gave the state the right to supervise Catholic education and approve the appointment of priests. Bismarck's moves against the Catholic Church backfired because Catholics rallied behind the Church and the Catholic Center Party became more powerful.
He believed that a war would give the people of Germany a strong sense of nationalist pride. Why did Otto von Bismarck believe a war with France would help unify Germany? Lombardy should be an independent nation-state because it had a strong national identity.
Why is ram mohun roy called the founder of Indian nationalism? In what ways did he adopt Western culture? He condemned some traditions such as child marriage, but he also set up educational societies that allowed natives to be prideful of their culture.
Although an arch-conservative, Bismarck introduced progressive reforms—including universal male suffrage and the establishment of the first welfare state—in order to achieve his goals. He manipulated European rivalries to make Germany a world power, but in doing so laid the groundwork for both World Wars.
The term came into use in 1873, when the scientist and Prussian liberal statesman Rudolf Virchow declared that the battle with the Roman Catholics was assuming “the character of a great struggle in the interest of humanity.”.
The Roman Catholics, who were represented politically by the Centre Party , distrusted the predominance of Protestant Prussia within the empire and often opposed Bismarck’s policies. Read More on This Topic. German Empire: Bismarck’s liberal period and the Kulturkampf.
German Empire: Bismarck’s liberal period and the Kulturkampf. Bismarck had been on bad terms with the Prussian Junkers, represented by the conservative parties, since 1866, and the estrangement was... The conflict began in July 1871, when Bismarck, supported by the liberals, abolished the Roman Catholic bureau in the Prussian Ministry of Culture ...
Bismarck had been on bad terms with the Prussian Junkers, represented by the conservative parties, since 1866, and the estrangement was...
Roman Catholics, however, strongly resisted Bismarck’s measures and opposed him effectively in the German parliament, where they doubled their representation in the 1874 elections. Bismarck, a pragmatist, decided to retreat.
Bismarck, a staunch Protestant, never fully trusted the loyalty of the Roman Catholics within his newly created German Empire and became concerned by the Vatican Council’s proclamation of 1870 concerning papal infallibility.
Otto von Bismarck was the person most responsible for inaugurating the Kulturkampf. His motives were both religious and political. He misunderstood and disliked Catholicism as a religion, and a number of political considerations reinforced his opposition. Catholics were the chief opponents to his plans for uniting Germany, but excluding Austria. During the Franco-Prussian War some Catholics in southern Germany sympathized openly with France. In Alsace-Lorraine many of the Catholic clergy opposed incorporation into the new German Empire. Catholic nostalgia for a "Great Germany" did not disappear in 1870. Catholics throughout Germany showed themselves wary of a Protestant emperor. Bavarians voiced suspicions that unification under the Hohenzollerns aimed to convert all Germans into Prussians and Lutherans.
The Conflict. The Kulturkampf began with the abolition of the Catholic bureau in the Prussian ministry of education and public worship (July 8, 1871).
It became known as the Kulturkampf (struggle for civilization) after Rudolf Virchow, an atheist and materialist scientist, thus described it (Jan. 17, 1873) in the Prussian Landtag, where he represented the German Liberal party. The term is misleading because the struggle developed from a complex of causes.
An attempt by a Catholic to assassinate Bismarck (July 1874) was utilized by the chancellor to try to discredit the Center party and to justify further measures against Catholics. Civil marriage was made obligatory in Prussia (February 1875), and later in other German states.
German liberalism became very hostile to Catholicism. After the revolution in 1848, liberalism in Germany developed along lines more philosophical than political and fell under the influence of hegelianism and its views on the unlimited power of the state. The liberal outlook was materialistic and antiecclesiastical. To speed the process of laicizing society, secularizing education, and eliminating all religious influences from public and private life, the liberals advocated a return to Prussia's former practices of state control over religion. Middle-class financial and industrial interests, strong supporters of liberalism, objected also to the progressive social views of Bp. Wilhelm von ketteler and the center party. The naturalistic liberal view of the world and of man was so diametrically opposed to the Catholic one that the struggle between them could be regarded, in part at least, as a Kulturkampf. The syllabus of errors (1864) served to widen the gulf between liberals and Catholics.
Part of it was confessional.
Archbishop Mieczyslaw led Ó chowski was arrested and exiled for opposing the teaching of the catechism in German to Polish children. The archbishop of Cologne and the bishop of Trier were also arrested. A second set of May Laws, in 1874, made recalcitrant bishops and priests liable to deposition and exile.
The atmosphere between Catholics and German liberals had already been adversely affected by the publication in 1864 of the Syllabus of Errors, which condemned many of the tenets of nineteenth century liberalism, such as freedom of speech and religion.
Kulturkampf and the Gospel. It is something of a truism that the ideological needs of a society inevitably affect the way that its literature is interpreted. Things get looked at in the light of a whole set of presuppositions that put the society in question in a favorable light. There is generally no need for conspiracy on the part ...
Whatever response Catholics might make about Bismarck's theological knowledge in the light of this, it is clear from what was being said that Bismarck was under no illusions about what was at stake here and the theological consequences of what Pius IX was referring to.
In addition, it is clear that in the field of German history the way of teaching the subject in German universities certainly changed radically from 1870 onwards. After that date there was only one way in which German history might be taught, and that was from the point of view of Germany as a nation state.
On July 18th, 1870 , the Church Fathers, assembled at the Vatican Council, had promulgated the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ, Pastor Aeternus, setting out, inter alia, the Catholic teaching on the primacy and infallibility of the pope. This teaching was based on Christ's famous words in the Gospel of St. Matthew:
This investigates the issue of whether and, if so, how the three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are dependent upon each other from a literary point of view. They certainly seem to be, because they say basically the same things in roughly the same order.
Marcan priority theory was simply a theory whose time had come.
The term came into use in 1873, when the scientist and Prussian liberal statesman Rudolf Virchow declared that the battle with the Roman Catholics was assuming “the character of a great struggle in the interest of humanity.”
Bismarck, a staunch Protestant, never fully trusted the loyalty of the Roman Catholics within his newly created German Empire and became concerned by the Vatican Council’s proclamation of 1870 concerning papal infallibility. The Roman Catholics, who were represented politically by the Centre Party, distrusted the predominance of Protestant Prussia within the empire and often opposed Bismarck’s policies.
Bismarck's long mistrust of the Church was only exacerbated by the definition of papal infallibility by the Vatican Council (1869-1870) which to a pragmatic politician seemed to suggest supremacy for the pope that outweighed loyalty to the state among the Catholic faithful. As a point of statecraft, then, Catholic influence had to be subjugated to the new imperial order.
Having found common ground with the Liberals, Bismarck allowed them to hold many offices in the imperial government, climaxing in 1870 with the role of the Liberals in waging the Franco-Prussian War. When, therefore, Bismarck set out upon the Kulturkampf, the Liberals were his most enthusiastic foot-soldiers.
No longer worried about Austrian influence in Germany, Bismarck determined closer relations with the Catholic Austrian Empire were essential as a counterweight to Russia. To pave the way for diplomacy with Austria, an improved understanding with the Church was needed . Catholic support in the Reichstag was also becoming more crucial as the inevitable rupture with the Liberals took place over their socialist agenda. The Conservatives likewise had grown disenchanted with the anti-Christian tenor of the legislation of the Liberal Minister Falk.
The Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment ushered in a new age of monarchial despotism marked by the promotion of Enlightenment rationalism, the central authority of the crown, and the ruthless suppression of all opposition or democratic tendencies in the population. The period was characterized by a willingness to remove the Catholic Church from all areas of public life, as Church teachings were seen as a hindrance to the formation of national unity and scientific progress. The chief exemplar of such absolutism was Emperor Joseph II, whose program against the Church was dubbed Josephinism — a policy that influenced Bismarck 100 years later. (See "The Roots of the Kulturkampf," page 25.)
Bismarck gave the crown a firm hand in its dealings with the Landtag and soon earned both his reputation as the most feared diplomat and statesman in Europe and his title of "Iron Chancellor.". He took as one of the central objectives for Prussian ambitions the unification of Germany.
Surprisingly, however, Bismarck's strongest supporters in the Prussian Landtag and then in the Reichstag were the Liberals. The Liberal Party in Germany had long opposed absolutism and called for constitutional government, but they were also united in their antipathy for the Catholic Church; many Liberal leaders were anti-clerical and ardent students of the German Enlightenment. This hatred for the Church naturally extended into their calls for a pure German culture freed from the supposed superstitions, dogmatism, and obscurantism of the Church. Their influence in German politics increased in the middle of the 19th century, when they used public sentiment for German nationalism to their advantage. Their presence increased steadily in the Landtag after 1860, and in that year they were permitted to introduce harsh anti-Catholic educational measures in traditionally Catholic Bavaria.
The leader of the Zentrum from 1874, and one of the great forgotten heroes of German Catholic history, was a Hanoverian by the name of Ludwig Windthorst. Windthorst had already proven himself an able opponent to Bismarck in the Landtag, but as leader of the Zentrum, he emerged as the Iron Chancellor's primary legislative nemesis.
The main issues were clerical control of education and ecclesiastical appointments. A unique feature of Kulturkampf, compared to other struggles between the state and the Catholic Church in other countries, was Prussia's anti-Polish component.
The Kulturkampf in Prussia is usually framed by the years 1871 and 1878 with the Catholic Church officially announcing its end in 1880 but the struggle in Germany had been an ongoing matter without definite beginning and the years 1871 to 1878 only mark its culmination in Prussia.
By analogy, the term Kulturkampf is sometimes used to describe any conflict between secular and religious authorities or deeply opposing values, beliefs between sizable factions within a nation, community, or other group.
This legislation was at the heart of the Kulturkampf, abolishing church oversight of the Prussian primary school system (Catholic and Protestant), excluding the clergy from education and eliminating its influence in curricular matters.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Kulturkampf ( German: [kʊlˈtuːɐ̯kampf] ( listen), 'culture struggle') was the conflict that took place from 1872 to 1878 between the government of the Kingdom of Prussia led by Otto von Bismarck and the Roman Catholic Church led by Pope Pius IX .
From 1871 to 1876, the Prussian state parliament and the federal legislature ( Reichstag), both with liberal majorities, enacted 22 laws in the context of the Kulturkampf.
Constitutionally, education and regulation of religious affairs were vested in the federal states and the leading actor of the Kulturkampf was Prussia, Germany's largest state. However, some of the laws were also passed by the Reichstag and applied to all of Germany. In general, the laws did not affect the press and associations including Catholic ones.
The Catholic Church, an outspoken opponent of Liberalism , had opposed German unification under predominantly Protestant Prussian leadership, and the Prussian minister-president and German Chancellor Bismarck accused the Church of promoting nationalism among the Catholic Polish minority. Therefore, he regarded the Church as a threat to the newly founded empire, especially after establishment of a Catholic political party which became a strong opposition in parliament. The Liberals, particularly in light of new Catholic dogmas promulgated under Pope Pius IX at the First Vatican Council (1869-70 ), had always considered the Catholic Church as an enemy of progress.
As Roman rule crumbled in Germany in the 5th century , this phase of Catholicism in Germany came to an end with it. At first, the Gallo-Roman or Germano-Roman populations were able to retain control over big cities such as Cologne and Trier, but in 459 these too were overwhelmed by the attacks of Frankish tribes. Most of the Gallo-Romans or Germano-Romans were killed or exiled. The newcomers to the towns reestablished the observance of the pagan rites. The small remaining Catholic population was powerless to protect its faith against the new, ruling, Frankish lords.
One result was the cession of the Rhineland to France by the Treaty of Basel in 1795. Eight years later, in 1803, to compensate the princes of the annexed territories, a set of mediatisations was carried out, which brought about a major redistribution of territorial sovereignty within the Empire. At that time, large parts of Germany were still ruled by Catholic bishops (95.000 km 2 with more than three million inhabitants). In the mediatisations, the ecclesiastical states were by and large annexed to neighbouring secular principalities. Only three survived as nonsecular states: the Archbishopric of Regensburg, which was raised from a bishopric with the incorporation of the Archbishopric of Mainz, and the lands of the Teutonic Knights and Knights of Saint John .
Most of the people in the territory of the German Democratic Republic were Protestants. With exception of the Eichsfeld, a small Catholic region in the northwestern part of Thuringia, which was a former property of the archdiocese of Mainz, Catholics were a small minority right from the start of Communist rule.
Also in 1878, the Augustinus-Verein association was formed, with the objective of supporting and promoting the Catholic press in Germany.
Germany became the main theatre of war and the scene of the final conflict between France and the Habsburgs for predominance in Europe. The war resulted in large areas of Germany being laid waste, a loss of approximately a third of its population, and in a general impoverishment.
Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms justified the confiscation of church property and the crushing of the Great Peasant Revolt of 1525 by the German nobles. This explains the attraction of some territorial princes to Lutheranism. From 1545, the Counter-Reformation began in Germany.
By exalting celibacy, Catholicism threatened the model for progress advocated by the nation-state. Countries like Germany, with unstable, novel, or what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities,” felt this threat keenly. The state needed bodies to “man” factories and a growing population to defend new and porous national boundaries. It needed women’s wombs and domestic care to carry and nurture new citizens. With no corresponding theology of celibacy, Protestantism presented much less of a threat than did Catholicism. And no major social group besides Catholicism presented the slightest challenge to this reduction of women to the national womb until the Third Reich’s ideology of maternity came under scrutiny.
The 1869 event, known as the Moabit Klostersturm, was a key precipitator for the coming Kulturkampf (culture war) that led to a series of laws targeting Catholics from 1872 to 1878.
In the summer of 1869, word got out that the Dominicans were moving in. The locals, stirred up by an anti-Catholic press as tawdry as the worst of Twitter and 4chan in our day, would not stand for this intrusion. They threw bottles, banged drums and made “rough music” with objects like pots and pans ( charivari, or Katzenmusik ), a custom associated with communal disapproval in the sexual realm. These fears did not come out of nowhere. Months earlier in a Polish convent, police discovered a woman, naked and deranged, who had been “walled in” inside a convent. This wall within walls had been constructed both to create solitary confinement and to keep this confinement a secret. The discovery of her imprisonment led to loud and continued outcries from the press. The incident had succeeded in sating the modern imagination about the immorality and backwardness of monastic life, not unlike today’s popular image of the veiled Muslim woman, beaten and abused in her home. The lack of visibility increases imaginative fancy.
Lay organizations, publications like newspapers and books, and devotional practices all witnessed an upsurge. Over a six-week period in 1844, more than half a million pilgrims journeyed to Trier in order to see Jesus’ seamless tunic, representing the largest mass mobilization of citizens in the decade.
This “storming of the cloister” highlighted nearly a century of tension between the dominant Protestant cultural and political powers and minority Catholics in Germany. We would be remiss, however, to conceive of the event through the narrow lens of political power and minority religious rights. The event and surrounding events have much to tell us about modern identity formation.
In the working-class Berlin neighborhood of Moabit—in the heart of Protestant Prussia— a group of Dominicans attempted to open an orphanage for the growing population of neglected and abandoned children until the continued and real threat of violence led them to give up the project.
Liberalism , the philosophy that dictated that markets were to operate "free" from government intervention, was often combined, as in Germany and Prussia and Republican/centrist Democratic USA, with a strong military-industrial government and the existence of at least some social benefit systems.