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Anti-Catholicism in Germany, Britain, and the United States: A Review and Critique of Recent Scholarship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Extract
The past two decades have seen an efflorescence of works exploring cultural anti-Catholicism in a variety of national contexts. But so far, historians have engaged in little comparative analysis. This article is a first step, examining recent historical literature on modern British and American anti-Catholicism, in order to trace the similarities and distinctiveness of the turn-of-the-century German case. Historians are most likely to be acquainted with American nativism, the German Kulturkampf, continental anticlericalism, and the problems of Catholic Emancipation and the Irish Question in Britain. Many of the themes and functions of anti-Catholic discourse in the West transcended national and temporal boundaries. In each case, the conceptualization of a Catholic ‘other’ is a testament to the tenacity of confessionalism in an age formerly characterized as one of inexorable secularization. Contemporary observers often agreed that religious culture—like history, race, ethnicity, geography, and local custom—played a role in the self-evident distinctiveness of peoples and nations, in their political forms, economic performance, and intellectual and artistic contributions. We will see how confessionalism remained a lens through which intellectuals and ordinary citizens, whether attached or estranged from religious commitments, viewed political, economic, and cultural change.
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References
1. This survey will draw primarily from the following works: Colley, Linda, Britons, Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Bath, 1992);Google ScholarRomani, Roberto, “British Views on Irish National Character, 1800–1846: An Intellectual History,” History of European Ideas 23 (1997): 193–219;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFranchot, Jenny, Roads to Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);Google ScholarMcGreevy, John T., “Thinking on One's Own: Catholicism in the American Intellectual Imagination, 1928–1960,” Journal of American History (1997): 97–131;Google ScholarAnderson, Margaret, “The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic Revival in 19th century Germany,” Historical Journal 38 (1995): 647–70;CrossRefGoogle ScholarAnderson, , “Piety and Politics: Recent Works on German Catholicism,” Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 681–716;Google ScholarBaumeister, Martin, Parität und katholische Inferiorität (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1987);Google ScholarBlackbourn, David, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);Google ScholarBlackbourn, , Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German History (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987), chaps. 7 & 9;Google ScholarHübinger, Gangolf, “Chapter 7: Confessionalism,” in Imperial Germany, A Historiographical Companion, ed. Checkering, Roger (London: Greenwood, 1996), 156–84;Google ScholarLoth, Wilfried, ed., Deutscher Katholizismus in Umbruch zur Moderne (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1991);Google ScholarMergel, Thomas, Zwischen Klasse und Konfession: Katholisches Bürgertum im Rheinland, 1794–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994);Google ScholarMooser, Josef, “Christlicher Beruf und ‘bürgerliche’ Gesellschaft: Zur Auseinandersetzung über Berufsethikund wirtschaftliche ‘Inferiorität,’” in Deutscher Katholizismus im Umbruch zur Moderne, ed. Loth, W. (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1991), 124–42;Google ScholarMunch, Paul, “The Thesis before Weber: An Archaeology,” in Weber's Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts, eds. Lehmann, Hartmut and Roth, Günther (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1993), 51–71;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMünch, , “Welcher Zusammenhang besteht zwischen Konfession und ökonomischem Verhalten?,” in Konfession-eine Nebensache?, ed. Hans-Georg Wehling (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1984), 58–74;Google ScholarNipperdey, Thomas, “Max Weber, Protestantism and the Context of the Debate around 1900,” in Weber's Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts, 73–81;Google ScholarNipperdey, , Religion im Umbruch: Deutschland, 1870–1918 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988);Google ScholarSchloβmacher, Norbert, “Der Antiultramontanismus im wilhelminischen Deutschland,” in Deutscher Katholizismus im Umbruch zur Moderne, 164–98;Google ScholarSmith, Helmut Wasler, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995);CrossRefGoogle ScholarSperber, Jonathan, “Bürger, Bürgerrum, Bürgerlichkeit, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Studies of the German (Upper) Middle Class and Its Sociocultural World,” journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 271–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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64. The phrase is Blackbourn's; on the proliferation of Catholic Vereine, see Loth, Wilfried, Deutscher Katholizismus and Jonathan Sperber, “Bürger, Bürgertum, Bürgerlichkeit, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft.”Google Scholar
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76. Hübinger, , “Chapter 7: Confessionalism,” 166.Google Scholar
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83. Quoted from Hoensbroech, in Schloβmacher, , “Der Antiultramontanismus im wilhelminischen Deutschland,” 164; in a similar vein, the Protestant pastor from Dresden, Johannnes Forberger, recalled the Sun King when he said of Pius IX, “Die Kirche binich.” His proclamation of infallibility in 1870 was, according to Forberger, nothing less than an attempt to revive “Roman caesarism.”Google ScholarSee Forberger, , Der Einfluβ des Katholizismus und Protestantismus auf die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung der Völker in Flugschriften des Evangelischen Bundes, Leipzig: 21. Reihe 241–252): 245/246, 1906, 54. Forberger's several publications with the Bund are, I suspect, among the more cautious anti- Catholic works coming from this quarter.Google Scholar
84. Nipperdey, Thomas explains that while nationalist interpretations began to overshadow such analyses, in France for example, “in Germany this type of reasoning survived among Protestants.” In large measure this continued influence could be traced to the impact Laveleye's 1870's publications had on the later German debate.Google ScholarSee “Max Weber,” 77–78. See also Münch, Paul, “The Thesis before Weber: An Archaeology”; Baumeister, Parität und katholische Inferiorität, 76–77. Indeed, there evolved something of a circular relationship between the older discussion, Laveleye, and the polemics of the Evangelical Alliance. The Alliance was eager to avail itself of theories, not only from Laveleye, but from eighteenth-century participants in the discussion of religion and political economy, especially when anti-Catholic conclusions had been drawn by Catholics. Thus, Johannes Forberger, in his introduction to Einfluβ, defers to the Catholic Aufklärer Johann von Ickstatt, whose own anonymously published “Warum ist der Wohlstand der protestantischen Staaten so gar viel gröβer als der katholischen?” (1772) was republished by the Alliance in 1900.Google ScholarSee Munch, , “Welcher Zusammenhang besteht zwischen Konfession und ökonomischem Verhalten?,” 62 (see fin. 1); Baumeister, Parität und katholische Inferiorität, 102 n. 287. Throughout his analysis Forberger also makes frequent reference to Laveleye.Google Scholar
85. Nipperdey, , “Max Weber,” 77–78;Google ScholarForberger, and Laveleye, passim; summing up the late-nineteenth-century Protestant view, Catholic nations were simply ‘under a narcotic,’ Mausbach, Catholic Moral Teaching and its Antagonists, 306.Google ScholarThe resonance of such arguments over time is indeed striking; for a recent treatment see Landes, David, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).Google Scholar
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87. Laveleye, argues that Catholicism left men morally unfit to govern themselves, Protestantism and Catholicism, 19ff.Google Scholar
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89. On the demonization of the Jesuit order, see Anderson, , “Piety and Politics,” 698. As in the case of antebellum America, the frightful power of the Jesuits was located in their caste-like organization. Celibate and devoted entirely to Rome, they were viewed as an occupying army in their own country, ‘uninvested’ in the nation, without property or family responsibilities. Living among the citizenry while eschewing all patriotic attachments, there was no question of where their loyalty lay.Google ScholarSee Laveleye, , Protestantism and Catholicism, 19, 47, 55–57;Google ScholarBaumeister, , Paritüt und katholische Inferioritüt, 82; on the “deficiency in personality” that allegedly afflicted the celibate, see Mausbach, Catholic Moral Teaching and its Antagonists, 291. The most disastrous results of Jesuit infiltration could be found, according to Forberger and others, in Iberia. There, the hypnotic power of Jesuit fanaticism had transfomed “a once blossoming land full of heretics into a desert” (Forberger, Einfluβ, 35).Google Scholar
90. For Laveleye, , France's rejection of the light of the Reformation went a long way toward explaining its subsequent political chaos and moral decadence. He compares the Revolutions of 1789 and 1776: the rank corruption of the ançien Regime, the cynical irreligion propagated by Voltaire, and the misguided fanaticism of men like Robespierre were the results of Catholic oppression; in Laveleye's view, these wither in the face of colonial America's Puritan traditions and the “incomparable moral tone” that inspired the American revolutionaries, and indeed endured, not in spite of, but precisely because of, the separation of church and state (Protestantism and Catholicism, 24–40).Google Scholar
91. Blackbourn, , Populists and Patricians, 144, 145–48;Google ScholarAnderson, , “Limits of Secularization” and “Piety and Politics,” the latter of which helps to clarify the controversy over when precisely the revival of Catholic piety occurred and includes a review of Jonathan Sperber's Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth Century Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984);Google ScholarSchieder, Wolfgang, “Kirche und Revolution: Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte der Trierer Wallfahrt von 1844,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 14 (1974): 419–41;Google Scholarsee also Busch's, Norbert recent analysis of the evolution of the Sacred Heart cult in Katholische Frbömmigkeit und Moderne: Die Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschkhte des Herz-Jesu-Kultes in Deutschland zwischen Kulturkampf und Ersten Weltkrieg (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlaghaus, 1997).Google Scholar
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93. On the “strongly elitist thrust” of this discourse, see also Blackbourn, , Populists and Patricians, 149–59.Google Scholar
94. Blackbourn, , Populists and Patricians, 149ff. and Helmut Wasler Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 25ff., 65ff., which includes a look at the Protestant cultural assumptions informing nationalist German scholarship and the concomitant intellectual limitations and academic marginalization of Catholic historical and literary works in imperial Germany. Compare Allitt's analysis of the dearth of scholarly contributions coming from British Catholic circles; despite his conversion to Catholicism, Cardinal Newman nevertheless “lamented that the great classics of English literature were Protestant to the core and that English was in effect a Protestant language” (Catholic Converts, 12).Google Scholar
95. Smith, Helmut Wasler, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 25ff.Google Scholar
96. On Protestant Innerlichkeit vis-à-vis the “visibility of Catholic kitsch,” see Smith, Helmut Wasler, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 21; Forberger underscores both the spiritual and economic inefficiency of the “throng of external Catholic customs” and holydays, Einfluβ, 47, 41ff.; the well known Protestant theologian Adolf von Harnack equated the administration of sacraments with “conjuring tricks,” “like medicine” (Mausbach, Catholic Moral Teaching and its Antagonists, 312, 318); In his discussion of “puerile Catholic ceremonies,” Laveleye refers to the account of a visitor to Brazil, where the people were “nourished exclusively on grotesque processions, with coloured saints, lighted tapers, and cheap nosegays,” (Protestantism and Catholicism, 49);Google Scholaron the British mockery of Catholic relics, see also Colley, , Britons, 36.Google Scholar
97. As quoted by Mausbach, , Catholic Moral Teaching and its Antagonists, 41.Google Scholar
98. Hübinger, , “Chapter 7: Confessionalism,” 172; Sperber describes Bildung as a “secularized version of German Protestant ideals,” (“Bürger, Bürgerrum, Bürgerlichkeit, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft,” 276); As a unique and integral part of German conceptions of cultural Protestanism, Bildung was an important conduit for that survival of religious sensibility in post-Christian culture illuminated by Nipperdey in Religion in Umbruch, 124–53.Google Scholar
99. The intention was, as Hübinger explains, a kind of “reconciliation between faith and knowledge,” (“Chapter 7: Confessionalism,” 174). By contrast, the dogmatic and anti-intellectualist trends in Catholic teaching and culture, according to critics, hampered the development of the morally autonomous personality. The Roman Church demanded what the Protestant theologian Herrmann described as an “absence of conscience,” (Mausbach, , Catholic Moral Teaching and its Antagonists, 4–5);Google ScholarForberger, , in his Moralstatistik und Konfession (Halle: Verlag des Evangelischen Bundes, 1911, pamphlet 315/317), offered the following analysis: the individual Catholic was lamentably prone to “moral helplessness,” for “the Catholic principle is not the development of the Christian personality, but rather its integration within the organism of the Church. The highest religious virtue for the Catholic is not faith but obedience” (39).Google Scholar
100. Mausbach on the suggestion of Strauβ, David Friedrich, (Catholic Moral Teaching and its Antagonists, 290–91); similar conflations of art and religion were advanced, for example, by Goethe (Hübinger, “Chapter 7: Confessionalism,” 172).Google Scholar
101. For many critical observers, the interrelationship between Catholic spiritual immaturity, lack of industriousness, and uncivilized behavior was self-evident. Laveleye informs his readers that the Catholic herdsmen of Appenzell gathered “only at mass, at wrestling match, and at public house” (Protestantism and Catholicism, 13). As with stereotypical criticisms of the Irish, it seemed that lower-class German Catholics were only to be found getting brainwashed, getting violent, and getting drunk.Google Scholar
102. Busch; review by Weichlein, Siegfried, for H-Soz-u-Kult Digest, 07 1998.Google Scholar
103. Blackbourn, , Marpingen, 164; Blackbourn argues that “key sections” of the Catholic educated middle classes were “desperately embarrassed” by the excess of ultramontane devotionalia (Populists and Patricians, 203). Indeed, contemporary critics also doubted the appeal of popular piety for educated Catholics. Laveleye theorized that Catholicism “produces such complete indifference in religious matters, that even the requisite strength honestly to leave the Church is wanting” (Protestantism and Catholicism, 50). That few Catholics did leave the church, especially during the heightened solidarity of the Kulturkampf period, see for example Nipperdey, Religion im Umbruch, 23. This theory from Laveleye seems to gain a certain credibility when one considers the biographical evidence uncovered by Thomas Mergel, who argues that a “creeping secularization” was occurring within the cultural milieu of the Rhenish Catholic patriciate; see Part I, chaps. 5 & 7; Part ÜI, chap. 4 in Zwischen Klasse und Konfession (see fn. 1).Google Scholar
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105. Mausbach, , Catholic Moral Teaching and its Antagonists, 3.Google Scholar
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133. Blackbourn, , Populists and Patricians, 201.Google Scholar
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135. Nipperdey, , “Max Weber,” 5. The Protestant theologian Karl Sell's views on the papal Index were typical: the policing of scholarship made it “absolutely impossible for educated Catholics, with few exceptions, to form an independent opinion regarding others,” (Mausbach, Catholic Moral Theology and its Antagonists, 34);Google ScholarSchell, Herman understood the predicament all too well, complaining that it was entirely unnecessary for “a research conclusion to first be certified by a Jesuit” (Schlofimacher, “Der Antiultramontanismus im wilhelminischen Deutschland,” 178). Despite the logical overlap of both participants and themes, however, the “reform Catholic” movement was primarily a theological discussion; the larger issues surrounding the problem of the Catholic socio-economic lag focused above all upon the everyday conduct of Catholics and the practical consequences of a Catholic cultural climate shaped by both explicit church teachings and implicit maxims and attitudes.Google ScholarSee Baumeister, , Parität und katholische Inferiorität, 86ff.;Google ScholarBlackbourn, , Populists and Patricians, 203.Google Scholar
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141. Rost, , Katholiken im Kultur- und Wirtschaftsleben, 61–62;Google ScholarBlackbourn, , Populists and Patricians, 201.Google Scholar
142. See note 52.Google Scholar
143. Baumeister, , Parität und katholische Inferiorität, 50, 40–59;Google ScholarNipperdey, , “Max Weber,” 75.Google Scholar
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146. Rost, , Katholiken im Kultur- und Wirtschaftsleben, 20, 36–38, 54–56, 57ff.;Google Scholaron the climate of mistrust, Baumeister, , Parität und katholische Inferiorität, 49.Google Scholar
147. Rost, , Katholiken im Kultur- und Wirtschaftsleben, 20;Google ScholarBaumeister, , Parität und katholische Inferiorität, 96. Baumeister asserts that Rost's understanding of the origins of the problem is limited almost entirely to “external” factors and refers only to “internal” circumstances in passing; though I would not assign too much weight to a single remark, I do believe that Rost's several critical observations about Catholic attitudes give his work in its entirety a self-reflective tone that deserves greater consideration.Google Scholar
148. Rost, , Katholiken im Kultur- und Wirtschaftsleben, 62.Google Scholar
149. Rost, , Katholiken im Kultur- und Wirtschaftsleben, 60.Google Scholar
150. Rost, , Katholiken im Kultur- und Wirtschaftsleben, 61Google Scholar
151. Rost, , Katholiken im Kultur- und Wirtschaftsleben, 65;Google Scholarcompare his analysis to that of Forberger, , Moralstatistik, 6, 38 and Einfluβ, 41ff.Google Scholar
152. See also Baumeister, , Parität und katholische Inferiorität, 91.Google Scholar
153. Rost, , Katholiken im Kultur- und Wirtschaftsleben, 66.Google Scholar
154. Rost, , Katholiken im Kultur- und Wirtschaftsleben, 80–85.Google Scholar
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157. Sowell, Thomas, Race and Culture, xii, 3, 7–10;Google ScholarSowell, , Markets and Minorities; Landes, Wealth and Poverty of Nations, where Landes argues that cultural receptivity has played a significant role in the progress of nations and peoples throughout world history.Google Scholar
158. The phrase is from Landes, Wealth and Poverty of Nations, 15. Sowell has observed that elite members of lagging minorities the world over often have been persuaded by outside criticisms of the “unprogressive attitudes” of their cultural group (Race and Culture, 13).Google Scholar
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