or spiritual guide, was practically the head. His first works in
Mayence were, on a wider scale, the repetition of those in Hopsten. He
instituted reforms and amendments in every department; gathered the
clergy together in yearly retreats, during which the exercises of St.
Ignatius, which he held in high esteem, were made the basis of
instruction; founded several Capuchin convents for the purpose of
giving missions, especially in the country, and one Jesuit college, on
the occasion of whose establishment he had to bear the brunt of a
determined journalistic opposition; set up schools and an orphanage for
girls under the care of the Sisters of Mercy, an asylum for repentant
women under the nuns of the Good Shepherd, a refuge for servant-maids
out of employment, a community of Poor Clares to visit and relieve the
poor in their own homes, a Boys’ Orphanage, Boys’ Reformatory, and
Boys’ Refuge, several unions and brotherhoods to keep the people
together and preserve them from the snares of irreligious
associations—notably a Working-men’s Catholic Union—and last, not
least, a school taught by the Christian Brothers, which soon won such
golden opinions that Protestants by scores withdrew their children from
the communal schools and placed them under the new teachers. With rare
liberality a Lutheran clergyman was allowed free access to the school
to teach these children the religion of their parents. The bishop’s
care for, and personal visitation of, the hospitals also reacted on the
management of these institutions, so that they were more than ever well
conducted during his episcopate. Though his enemies, despairing of
finding other sins to lay to his charge, accused him of undue harshness
as a taskmaster in the things he required of his clergy, this body
itself never found fault with his zeal for discipline and austerity. He
counselled nothing which he did not perform and, indeed, far surpass;
for, unlike many bishops, estimable and even holy men, he did not
consider his rank as exempting him from the most ordinary duties of a
priest; he sat as many hours on regular days in the confessional as any
country curate, and his daily Mass at five o’clock was always said in
the cathedral instead of a private house-chapel—that is, until the last
four or five years of his life, when old age made this indulgence
necessary. He preached almost incessantly; the Sundays in Lent and
Advent always in his own cathedral, other Sundays alternating with his
clergy, and in the evenings of Sundays and week-days alike in any
church, chapel, or even hall, where he was asked to further any good
cause. His confirmation and church-visitation journeys were remarkable;
he returned to the rightful custom of confirming, no matter how few the
candidates, separately in each parish, instead of lumping many parishes
together in one central ceremony, and this in order that he might gain
a personal knowledge of each place, its needs and workings. On these
occasions he would give a preliminary introduction on the eve of the
confirmation, then hear confessions far into the night or morning, say
Mass early, and confess again till he preached the sermon and
administered the sacrament; in the afternoon inspect the schools,
catechise the children, and visit any sick persons there might happen
to be; conduct the evening service himself and preach a second time,
the intermediate moments being passed again in the confessional or in
private intercourse with any one who asked for special advice or
comfort.
His daily life at home was as simple, hardy, and frugal as it had been
at Beckum: he rose at four and worked incessantly, yet finding time,
besides his Breviary, to say the rosary and the office of the Third
Order of St. Francis every day. Add to this his writings, his minute
supervision of the ecclesiastical machinery of his diocese, his
conferences with political leaders, his necessary journeys or
excursions, besides his frequent undertaking of the duties of the
archbishop of Freiburg after the latter grew too infirm to go on long
confirmation rounds, and it will be easily seen that he was far from an
ordinary man. In virtue of his office he was entitled to a seat in the
Upper House (in the grand-duchy of Hesse), with the right of sending a
representative, if he chose, which he did, sending one of his canons,
Dr. Monsang, who, among other things, distinguished himself by voting
for the freedom of the Jewish religious bodies, in the matter of
internal reform, from state interference, and for their right to
receive state aid, provided they themselves solicited it. In the German
Reichstag, however, where Bishop Ketteler represented the borough of
Tauberbischofsheim, he sat in person, and was numbered among the
members of what was known as the Fraction of the Centre, of whom
Windthorst, his friend, was and is the leader. During the two German
wars, 1866 and 1870, he, though deploring the civil nature of the
first, according to the tradition of the greater part of the
Westphalian nobility, leaned to the side of Prussia, in whose mission
to unite Germany his belief never wavered, and whose influence in
things purely political he always upheld. His very patriotism and
enlightened views in this direction made his firm stand against the
Prussian aggression on the church of more weight and importance—a fact
which his enemies fully appreciated and often tried to make capital of,
dubbing him as inconsistent with himself. Every one will see how
one-sided this view was.
He was so far modern in his ideas that he claimed not to have lost any
of the rights of a citizen by becoming a priest; but the way in which
he used those rights, civic and parliamentary, roused the anger of men
whose interpretation of the same principle led them to see in a priest
nothing more than a military serf of the empire. He never claimed for
the church any privilege or any exemption, only the full meed of
liberty due to any other corporation; the exception need not be in her
favor, but should not be directed specially against her. The state and
the church were separate bodies, indeed, and well for the latter that
such a doctrine could be conscientiously held; but the very separation
involved perfect autonomy for the church, and forbade any interference
on the part of political authorities, while her influence in social
questions was to be exerted only through her direct influence on
individuals; for a state under bondage to the church never occurred to
him as desirable. Meanwhile, he labored to carry out his ideal of
internal church government, a noble and primitive one, based upon the
importance of parish organization and of the thorough efficacy of the
parish clergy, to whom the religious orders, in his view, were to act
as helpers and subordinates. To the disuse of ancient church laws and
customs he attributed the troubles that have often come upon the church
in all times; for he held her discipline, and even her ritual, to be no
less than her doctrine under the direct guidance of the Holy Ghost.
This alone would have made him a reformer in a lax and lukewarm age,
when it was the fashion for Catholics themselves to join in mild or
witty reflections upon their own faith, and to remain outwardly in
conformity with that faith only by habit and by intellectual
sluggishness. But this, joined to his powerful zeal in matters more
prominent and public, made him specially the leader of a spiritual
revival among the people of his city, his diocese, and Germany at
large. It was not in vain that he sat in the see of St. Boniface; and
when he encouraged the celebration of his predecessor’s eleventh
centenary, it was fully as much to stir up the zeal of his people for
church liberty as to honor the memory of the great missionary. His five
journeys to Rome on various solemn anniversaries, and notably that on
the occasion of the Vatican Council, were the only other incidents of
his life that remain to be noticed; on his way back from the last, in
1876, when the Holy Father received him with special marks of esteem
and rejoiced to have him as a witness of his “golden” anniversary,
Bishop Ketteler fell ill at Alt-Oetting, a shrine where he had
encouraged and taken part in many a pilgrimage. He could get no farther
than the Capuchin convent of Burghausen, where he died on the 13th of
July, of typhoid fever; on the 18th he was buried in his own cathedral
amidst the lamentations of his clergy and people. The country people,
to whom he had always had a special leaning, and who knew him as
familiarly as his own canons did through his frequent presence at and
ministry in the great Rhine pilgrimages, were loud in their expressions
of grief; all felt that they had lost a father, but those whose chief
concern was in temporal matters felt also that a great speaker and
thinker had departed. Of his style, his mode of thinking, and the zeal,
always burning yet never intemperate, which he brought to his work even
so early as 1848, one can judge by the famous passage of his speech at
the funeral of Lichnowsky and Auerswald at Frankfort: “Who are the
murderers of our friends? Are they the men who shot them through the
breast, or those who clove open their heads with their axes? No, these
are not the murderers. Their murderers are the principles which produce
both good and evil deeds upon the earth, and the principles which
produced this deed are not born of our people. I know the German
people, not, indeed, by the experience of conventions, but by that of
its inner, daily life.... I have devoted my life to the service of the
poor people, and the more I have learnt to know them the more have I
learnt to love them; I know what a great and noble character our German
people has received from God. No, I repeat it: it is not our noble, our
honest German people who are answerable for this wicked deed.... The
true murderers are those who, before the people, seek to bring into
contempt and to soil with their low ribaldry both Christ, Christianity,
and the church; those who strive to efface from the heart of the people
the healing message of the redemption of mankind; those who do not look
upon revolution as a sad necessity under certain circumstances, but
erect revolution into a principle, and hurry people from revolution to
revolution; ... those who would take from the people the belief in the
duty of man to command himself, to curb his passions, and to obey the
higher laws of order and of virtue, and would, on the contrary, make
laws of those passions and therewith inflame the people; those men who
would set themselves up as lying gods over the people, in order that it
may fall down before them and worship them.”
Ketteler’s first well-known speech on social subjects was delivered on
the 4th of October, 1848, at the original meeting of the Catholic Union
at Mayence—a body whose “congresses” have been held yearly since that
time, and have been distinguished by speeches such as those of
Montalembert, Dupanloup, Manning, Döllinger, before 1870, and others
whose names are public property. His subject was “The Freedom of the
Church, and the Social Crisis”; and says one of his biographers, “It is
no mean testimony to his far-sightedness that he already foresaw and
took part in the importance of the social question.” His lectures in
the cathedral took in such themes as these: “The Catholic Doctrine of
Property,” “Rational Freedom,” “The Destiny of Man,” “The Family, based
on Christian Marriage,” “The Authority of the Church, based on Man’s
Need of Authority.” Of the impression these discourses made on all
classes we have spoken already. To show how liberal were his views on
the form of government, it may be mentioned that it was one of his
axioms that it mattered little _who_ ruled, but much _how_ he ruled.
All forms of legitimate government were practically alike to him,
though his own ideal for Germany was a revival of the old unity of
confederation, with the equal representation of the burghers and of the
peasantry by the side of the clergy and nobility; but the manner in
which the government, no matter what it called itself, dealt with
weighty questions of morals was in his view a touchstone. It will be
seen from this that if his foes delighted in calling him the most
ultramontane of ultramontanes, they had no reason, politically
speaking, to call him retrograde, absolutist, or even monarchist. In
fact, it seems as if one might sum up his political character thus: a
citizen of a free imperial city of the middle ages, imbued with the
keenness of sight and the versatility of tongue peculiar to the modern
European politician.
In 1851 and 1852 a new phase of unbelief, dubbing itself “German
Catholicism,” did its best to bewilder the mind of Catholic Germany,
and the bishop plainly warned his people against it, saying: “Though I
should incur hereby the reproach of intolerance, I must warn you
against ‘German Catholicism,’ for it denies the Godhead of Christ,
revelation, and redemption, and makes itself a god according to its own
fancy.” In 1852, in his Lenten pastoral, he touched upon the connection
between this belief and political radicalism; also upon the common
reproach of rebellion against authority or of flattery towards princes
which these new philosophers were constantly bringing against the
church. “When the church,” he says, “advises the people to submit to
the civil power, she is thus attacked: ‘See the flatterer of princes,
the protectress of all abuses, the willing instrument of the oppression
of the people.’ When, on the other hand, she reminds the state of its
obligations, and, under certain circumstances, proclaims that God is to
be obeyed rather than man, the spirit of deception cries out: ‘See the
rebel, the seeker after undue authority.’” In 1873, when a new attack
was made on religion by the establishment of communal schools, he
resisted, by writing and preaching, “these institutions which
contradict all the principles of religion, disturb Christian education,
contradict and confuse the understanding and the nature of childhood,
and damage all the interests of the Christian family.” In 1851, when
every government in Germany had been more or less remodelled, and many
fetters of old prescription and prejudice had been shaken off by the
revolution of 1844, the bishops of the Upper Rhine province came
together at Freiburg, and presented a memoir on church relations with
the state to the neighboring rulers of Hesse, Würtemberg, Baden, and
Nassau. No notice was taken of it, and two years later it was repeated
with almost the same result, save that in Hesse the grand-duke and his
prime minister, Dalwigk, called a convention in 1854, and established
the liberty and autonomy of the church upon a legal basis. Ketteler’s
pamphlet in the same year, three months previous to the convention, had
some influence on the course of affairs; it was on “The rights, and the
right to protection, of the Catholic Church in Germany, with special
reference to the claims of the episcopate of the Upper Rhine and the
present struggle,” and may be summed up in this quotation from it: “The
rights of sovereignty are doubtless holy. They belong to God’s
ordinances, and are therefore of God; but those indefinite, boundless,
unhistorical, unfounded rights of sovereignty stand exactly on a level
with the equally indefinite, boundless, unhistorical, unfounded rights
of humanity. They are distorted images of lofty truths, and are born of
the same fallacy as absolutism. Once face to face with them, the church
must either allow herself to be ravaged or must begin a struggle for
life and death.”
However well known and widely spread were Ketteler’s influence and
writings, the latter partook of the local and circumstantial nature
of most political writings: they were not solid, dignified, technical
treatises of theology, nor popular and “taking” books of devotion,
but the outcome of present necessities, quick and vigorous protests
against injustice, weapons specially adapted to the ever-shifting
warfare between socialism and religion. His pamphlets were mostly
short, terse, and to the point; he slept in his armor and was always
on the watch. He speaks of his work in this direction with great
simplicity to Prof. Nippold, of Heidelberg: “Besides my spiritual
ministry in my diocese, I follow and observe all the movements of my
time, and cannot help meeting with all the injustices which men do to
one another, not always, indeed, of malice prepense, but often
through misunderstandings, prejudices, and false representations.
Then, if I can spare time from my work, I make an effort towards
clearing up those unfortunate misunderstandings....” But though he
spoke and felt thus modestly about his important part in the
questions of the day, we know how impossible it is for a man of his
stamp not to rise to his natural level. He was born to be a leader,
and neither necessity nor humility could block the path to political
prominence. Such a man, weighted with even more absorbing work than
his, would have made time for occupations so naturally fitted for
him; such a mind, even had it been in a less robust body, would have
overcome disease and weakness, and wrested from them the power to
make itself known. A list of a few of his writings will show how
universal was his watchfulness: _Can a believing Christian be a
Freemason? The True Foundations of Religious Peace. The Defamation of
the Church by the Tribune. The Right of Free Election of the
Cathedral Chapter. Germany after the War of 1866. The Fraction of the
Centre at the First German Reichstag. Catholics in the German Empire.
Freedom, Authority, and the Church, considerations upon the Great
Problem of the Day. The Labor Question and Christianity. Liberalism,
Socialism, and Christianity. The General Council and its Influence on
Our Time. The Doctrinal Infallibility of the Pope after the
Definition of the Vatican Council._
What he has said and written on the social question, including the
subjects of marriage, the family, education, and the relations between
capital and labor, even most of his opponents judge to belong to the
quota of wisest utterances extant on the subject. His gift of
opportunity, or of speaking always to the point, has been noticed
already. Here is what a German contemporary says of it: “The bishop did
not devote himself to journalism as a profession, for he looked upon
his ministry as immeasurably more precious and higher than political
influence. But he used it as a weapon at every important turning-point
of contemporary German history, when dangers threatened the moral order
of German society, and when the rights of the church were violated and
her institutions hampered; and precisely because his writings sprang
from instant necessities or the peculiarities of the day, they were, in
the noblest sense of the word, _timely_—not productions of labored
pulpit-wisdom, but the forcible words, piercing through bone and
marrow, of a powerful voice sounding the battle-cry of a mind-conflict;
of a man whose keen and far-sighted look measured the heights and
depths of the mind-disturbances of his day, and shared heartily in the
joys and sorrows of his time.”
It is worth while to notice his usual method in these earnest
pamphlets. It consisted, as a rule, of taking his opponents’ own
arguments or “accomplished facts” nakedly as they stood, and carrying
them on to their strictly legitimate but startling consequences. Yet,
in the whole course of his polemical writings, he carefully abstained
from the least personality. In this he might with advantage be taken as
a model by most schools of political pamphleteering. Soon after his
speech at Frankfort his fame as an orator was already held so high that
it suggested the following poetical portrait of him by Bede Weber, in a
work entitled _Historico-Political Sketches_. This is almost a literal
translation:
“The parish priest of Hopsten has a tall and powerful figure, with
sharply-cut features, in which speak a fearlessness impelling him
irresistibly to ‘do and dare,’[163] joined to an old Westphalian
tradition of loyalty to God and church, to emperor and realm. To his
discerning spirit the German nation, in its unity, its history, and its
Catholic traditions, is still living and strong. Luther and
Melanchthon, Charles the Fifth and Napoleon, the Peace of Basle and the
cowardly Pillersdorf, are nothing in his eyes but passing shadows over
the black, red, and gold shield of the German people. From the blood of
General Auerswald and of Prince Lichnowsky, from the murder of Lamberg
and Latour, the roses of hope spring only more obstinately for him, and
his tears hang on them only as the pearly dew of the dawn of German
freedom, German loyalty to the faith, and German order. He bears the
great, brave German people, with the everlasting spring of its virtues,
in the innermost depths of his heart, and from this union, or rather
identification, flows the peculiar pride of his address, which, in the
evil seething of elements in the ‘days of March,’ still points out the
means of building up the cathedral of the German Church sooner and more
beautifully than the cathedral of Cologne. Therefore was it that his
words impressed his hearers with a resistless might. When I think of
the orator Ketteler, I see before me a thorough man, who can awake fear
in many a heart, but whose individuality is in itself a right to do
so.”
Most of his bitterest opponents in the Reichstag acknowledged his power
in speaking, and respected the fearless use he made of his position to
remind them of their duties as men, Christians, and lawmakers; and when
circumstances made it impossible for him to combine his duties as
deputy with his dignity as bishop, and caused him to retire from his
place, his party felt the loss of his voice as much as his adversaries
rejoiced in their deliverance from a parliamentary “Son of Thunder.”
His lectures and sermons, even on ordinary days and stereotyped
subjects, were always startling and mind-compelling by the manner in
which old truths were handled and new meanings brought out therefrom;
while his open-air preaching at pilgrimages, where he was often heard
by ten thousand people, bore an equally powerful and peculiar stamp,
and, though his thoughts were then clothed in simpler language, they
lacked none of the breadth which distinguished his more finished
speeches.
In a monthly magazine edited at Mayence by the bishop’s friends
Heinrich and Monsang, both dignitaries of his cathedral chapter, is a
review of his life which gives a prominent place to his opinion on the
importance and seriousness of social questions:
“He was deeply and firmly convinced that political and social problems
are so inseparably connected with religious questions that any one
aiming at defending religion from a high stand-point and in a
comprehensive manner cannot indifferently pass by these problems.”
A newspaper generally opposed to his political views, the _Catholic
Voice_ (or “Opinion”),[164] speaks in the same sense:
“One of the most noteworthy traits in the life and works of Bishop
Ketteler is the lively interest which he took, by deed, word, and
writing, in the social question. It is precisely in this direction that
most misunderstandings take place. But we would remind the public that
the attitude of the bishop towards this problem was wholly shaped by
his Catholic principles and his priestly duties. Nothing was further
from his mind than the wish to use the needs of the laborer as a basis
for political agitation, or to carry out any chimerical theories of a
general millennium. He took a part in the labor question, because he
saw in working-men the victims of so-called liberal lawgivers, and
because he found it his duty as a pastor to care for the poor. These
high and noble motives were not always appreciated, but working-men
themselves have repeatedly testified their confidence in him, and after
his death were published many gratifying tributes from the same
source.”
The sense in which he took part in this question is again impressed on
the German public by means of the article from which we have quoted
before—namely, that it was determined by personal experience and a
sensitive consciousness of his duties as a priest.
“What he wrote and did concerning this subject proceeded not from mere
theoretical interest, still less from political reasons, but from
Christian love and brotherly feeling towards the people, especially the
poorer classes, and from the ardent wish to further their eternal and
temporal welfare, as well as to save them, together with the whole of
society, from the terrible chaos towards which we are being hurled, if
the old maxims and practice of Christian charity and justice do not
prevail against the principles of modern liberalism and
pseudo-conservatism.”