Religious toleration

During the 1870s, Bismarck’s Germany embarked on a legislative program that aimed among other things at secularizing education and resulted in a religiously pluralist Germany. This might look like progress in liberty and toleration, but the whole process was driven by anti-Catholic hatred and prejudice, and by fear about clerical dominance of the state. It was a move expanding state power under the cover of the liberal goal of freedom.

In December 1871, the “pulpit law” that made it illegal for any preacher to criticize the Reich was overwhelmingly passed. The May Laws of 1873 required that candidates for ordination “be German citizens and graduates of state grammar schools and theology faculties at state universities; moreover they had to pass ‘cultural examinations’ in history, literature and philosophy, after they had completed their theological training, examinations designed to test patriotic commitment” (Michael Burleigh). The state was also given the right to veto church appointments, and Catholic bishops who ignored or circumvented the law were imprisoned. Some Catholics were expelled from Germany, and the fate of five Franciscan nuns was made famous by Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “The Wreck of the Deutchland,” which described the Catholics as “Loathed for a love men knew in them/ Banned by the land of their birth.”