THE ANCIENT CONSTITUTION OF THE GERMAN CHURCH

“Scholars,” the Trier Auxiliary Bishop Nikolaus von Hontheim proclaimed in his 1763 legal broadside against the papacy, “ought to be considered the natural defenders of both the church and state.” This sentiment underpinned the German Catholic rethinking of the church and was in many ways its leitmotif. From the outset, the Catholic reform program of the eighteenth century combined pious concern for religious renewal with intellectual engagement. Educated German Catholics did not see religion and reason as opposed – instead they sought to strengthen the bonds between them by rethinking and adapting the church to new times. In this, we can see how a relatively small group of German Catholics laid claim to the mantle of Christian humanism (a claim made explicit by Michael Ignaz Schmidt toward the end of the century) to express their sense of responsibility for the church. Given the ways in which the Church was embedded in the Old Regime culture of rights, privileges, and liberties – of law, in short – the initial phase of the German Catholic rethinking occurred largely through jurisprudence.

The political universe of German Catholics in the eighteenth century was shaped by the consequences of the Peace of Westphalia. Indeed, the German commitment – Protestant and Catholic alike – to the “constitution” (Verfassung) of the Empire may to a large degree be traced the success of the Westphalian treaties in preserving, more or less, confessional peace.