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Updated: May 6, 2025
The May Laws were rescinded in 1886 and the religious orders, the Jesuits excepted, were permitted to return in 1887. Civil marriage, however, remained obligatory in Prussia. Ever since the Kulturkampf the Centrum has held the balance of power in Germany, acting sometimes with the Conservatives and sometimes with the Social Democrats.
Of the Roman Catholic Church it is hardly necessary to speak. Non ragionar di lor, ma guarda e passa. The history of German Catholicism proves once more that the Church is never more admirable than when she is persecuted. During the Kulturkampf the Catholics stood for political liberty, whereas the so-called National Liberals stood for State centralization and political despotism.
Man would not accommodate himself to rationalism; the Kulturkampf did not suffice him; he sought to give a final finality to life, and what I call the final finality is the real hontôs hon.
They are both alike characterized by hatred of the Christian faith and all religious institutions. This feeling impels them to war against everything connected with Christianity, and to substitute what the Germans of the same school call Kulturkampf, or, a struggle for culture, on principles the very opposite of those on which is founded the high civilization of the nineteenth century.
Since the inauguration of the much vaunted Kulturkampf, socialism has increased to such a degree in Germany as to appal even Chancellor Bismarck, whilst Italy, at the same time that it closed its convents and Catholic colleges, was obliged to multiply not only its military barracks, but also its prisons.
This Catholic party is the result in Germany of the Kulturkampf or War for Civilisation, as it was called by Bismarck, a contest dating from 1870 between the State in Germany and the Roman Catholic Church.
He had counted on accomplishing his purpose by some six months of persecution. Generations would not suffice. The endurance of the Church is unconquerable. It is as an anvil which wears out many hammers. That which Chancellor Bismarck applied, so vigorously, will prove to be no exception. Southern Germany, it is a pleasure to record, abhors the ridiculous Kulturkampf of Chancellor Bismarck.
But among the people in general, if there was not optimism, there was at least a sort of resigned indifference, and so things went ahead in the old stupid Spanish way and the structure of society, despite a few gestures of liberalism, remained as it had been for generations. In Spain, of course, there is always a Kulturkampf, as there is in Italy, but during these years it was quiescent.
Louis II., of Bavaria, would fain follow in his wake. But, as is shown by the large Catholic majorities at the elections, he is not seconded, even passively, as in Prussia, by the Bavarian people. The persecution, attended by its essential results, is rendering all Germany more Catholic than ever. When its work shall have been accomplished, what will remain? The Church or the Kulturkampf?
The Kulturkampf had the effect of setting a small number of ancient Prussian ultramontane families against the Government. Not much that is complimentary can be said of the German aristocracy as a whole. "Serenissimus" is to-day as frequently the subject of bitter, if often humorous, caricature in the comic press as ever he was.
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