§ 192.1. The Imperial Commission’s Decree, 1803.—The significance of this for church history consists not merely in the secularization of the ecclesiastical principalities and corporations, but even still more in the alteration caused thereby in the ecclesiastical polity of the territorial governments. With the ecclesiastical principalities the most powerful props of the Catholic church in Germany were lost, and Protestantism obtained a decided ascendency in the council of the German princes. The Catholic prelates were now simply paid servants of the state, and thus their double connexion with the curia and the state brought with it in later times endless entanglements and complications. On the other hand, in states hitherto almost exclusively Protestant, e.g. Württemberg, Baden, Hesse, there was a great increase of Catholic subjects, which attracted but little serious attention when the confessional particularism in the consciousness of the age was more unassuming and tolerant than ever it has been before or since.

§ 192.2. The Prince-Primate of the Confederation of the Rhine.—Baron Carl Theod. von Dalberg, distinguished for his literary culture and his liberal patronage of art and science, was made in 1802 Elector of Mainz and Lord High Chancellor of the German empire. When by the recess of 1803 the territories of the electorate on the left of the Rhine were given over to France and those on the right secularized, the electoral rank was abolished. The same happened with respect to the lord high chancellorship through the creation of the Rhenish Confederation. Dalberg was indemnified for the former by the favour of Napoleon by the gift of a small territory on the right of the Rhine, and for the latter by the renewal of the prince-primacy of the Confederation of the Rhine with a seat in the Federal council. He still retained his episcopal office and fixed its seat at Regensburg. The founding of a metropolitan chapter at Regensburg embracing the whole domain of the Rhenish Confederation he did not succeed in carrying out, and in 1813 he felt compelled to surrender also his territorial possessions. His spiritual functions, however, as Archbishop of Regensburg, he continued to discharge until his death in 1817.

§ 192.3. The Vienna Congress and the Concordat.—The Vienna Congress of 1814, 1815, had assigned it the difficult task of righting the sorely disturbed political affairs of Europe and giving a new shape to the territorial and dynastic relations. But never had an indispensably necessary redistribution of territory been made more difficult or more complicated by diplomatic intrigues than in Germany. Instead of the earlier federation of states, the restoration of which proved impossible, the federal constitution of June 8th, 1815, created under the name of the German Confederation a union of states in which all members of the confederation as such exercised equal sovereign rights. Their number then amounted to thirty-eight, but in the course of time by death or withdrawal were reduced to thirty-four. The new distribution of territory, just as little as the Luneville Peace, took into account confessional homogeneity of princes and territories, so that the combination of Catholic and Protestant districts with the above referred to consequences, occurred in a yet larger measure. But the federal constitution secured in Article XVI. full toleration for all Christian confessions in the countries of the confederation. The claims of the Romish curia, which advanced from the demand for the restoration of all ecclesiastical principalities and the return of all impropriated churches and monasteries to their original purposes, to the demand for the restoration of the holy Roman-German empire in the mediæval and hierarchical sense, as well as the solemn protest against its conclusions laid upon the table of the congress by the papal legate Consalvi, were left quite unheeded. But also a proposal urgently pressed by the vicar-general of the diocese of Constance, Baron von Wessenberg (§ 187, 3), to found a German Catholic national church under a German primate found no favour with the congress; and an article recommended by Austria and Prussia to be incorporated in the acts of the confederation by which the Catholic church in Germany endeavoured to secure a common constitution under guarantee of the confederation, was rejected through the opposition of Bavaria. And since in the Frankfort parliament neither Wessenberg with his primacy and national church idea nor Consalvi with a comprehensive concordat answering to the wishes of the curia, was able to carry through a measure, it was left to the separate states interested to make separate concordats with the pope. Bavaria concluded a concordat in 1817 (§ 195, 1); Prussia in 1821 (§ 193, 1). Negotiations with the other German states fell through owing to the excessiveness of the demands of the hierarchy, or led to very unsatisfactory results, as in Hanover in 1824 (§ 194, 1) and the states belonging to the ecclesiastical province of the Upper Rhine in 1837 (§ 196, 1). In the time of reaction against the revolutionary excesses of 1848 the curia first secured any real advance. Hesse-Darmstadt opened the list in 1854 with a secret convention (§ 196, 4); then Austria followed in 1855 with a model concordat (§ 198, 2) which served as the pattern for the concordats with Württemberg in 1857 (§ 196, 6), and with Baden in 1859 (§ 196, 2), as well as for the episcopal convention with Nassau in 1861 (§ 196, 4). But the revived liberal current of 1860 swept away the South German concordats; the Vatican Council by its infallibility dogma gave the deathblow to that of Austria, and the German “Kulturkampf” sent the Prussian concordat to the winds, and only that of Bavaria remained in full force.

§ 192.4. The Frankfort Parliament and the Würzburg Bishops’ Congress of 1848.—As in the March diets of 1848 the magic word “freedom” roused through Germany a feverish excitement, it found a ready response among the Catholics, whose church was favoured in the highest degree by the movement. In the Frankfort parliament the ablest leaders of Catholic Germany had seats. Among the Catholic population there were numerous religio-political societies formed (§ 186, 3), and the German bishops, avowedly for the celebration of the 600th anniversary of the building of Cologne cathedral, set alongside of the Frankfort people’s parliament a German bishops’ council. After they had at Frankfort declared themselves in favour of unconditional liberty of faith, conscience, and worship, the complete independence of all religious societies in the ordering and administering of their affairs, but also of freeing the schools from all ecclesiastical control and oversight, as well as of the introduction of obligatory civil marriage, the bishops’ council met in October at Würzburg under the presidency of Archbishop Geissel of Cologne with nineteen episcopal assistants and several able theological advisers. In thirty-six sessions they reached the conclusion that complete separation between church and state is not to be desired so long as the state does not refuse to the church the place of authority belonging to it. On the other hand, by all means in their power they are to seek the abrogation of the placet of the sovereign, the full independence of ecclesiastical legislation, administration and jurisdiction, with the abolition of the appellatio tanquam ab abusu, the direction and oversight of the public schools as well as the control of religious instruction in higher schools to be given only by teachers licensed for the purpose by the bishops, and finally to demand permission to erect educational institutions of their own of every kind, etc., and to forward a copy of these decisions to all German governments. The main object of the Würzburg assembly to secure currency for their resolutions in the new Germany sketched out at the Frankfort parliament, was indeed frustrated by that parliament’s speedy overthrow. Nevertheless in the several states concerned it proved of great and lasting importance in determining the subsequent unanimous proceedings of the bishops.