Rome Determined to Rule

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 16, 1913

Rome Determined to Rule

In the New York Times, Dec. 2, 1912, was this cable despatch:—

“BERLIN, December 1.—Germany’s twenty-four million Roman Catholics are on the threshold of a controversy with the kaiser’s government, which, according to their official spokesmen, presages a bitter renewal of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf crisis, and is pregnant with the most vital consequences to the security of Bethmann-Hollweg’s chancellorship. [Bethmann-Hollweg, the German chancellor, has died since this despatch was printed.—ED.]”

“The Roman Catholic Center party, together with the Conservatives, constitutes the only reliable parliamentary majority at the chancellor’s disposal. If the Centrists, as they now openly threaten, declare war on Bethmann-Hollweg, his position will be perilous in the extreme.

“The chancellor has promptly taken up the Catholic challenge, according to an ‘inspired’ manifesto, and an outbreak of open hostilities would seem to be imminent.

“Matters have been brought to a climax by the action of the federal council, under the leadership of Prussia, in rejecting the application of Bavaria for a more liberal interpretation of the anti-Jesuit laws. The council not only frowned upon the Bavarian government’s independent construction of the laws, but adopted a resolution which amounts to sharpening them.

“The Cologne Volks Zeitung, the official Catholic organ, and Germania, the Berlin organ, declare that the ‘Pope’s suspects in Germany will never tolerate the police régime of a Prussianized Germany, which now essays to impose upon them an anti-Jesuit propaganda, and are

prepared to resort to political extremes such to annihilate it.’ The chancellor expects to address the Reichstag on Tuesday on home affairs. The Jesuit situation will figure prominently in his exposé. Meantime he is quoted by the well-informed Frankfurter Zeitung as having notified a prominent Catholic parliamentarian that ‘German patience with the dictatorial practises of the Vatican was approaching the point of exhaustion.’

“Prussian diplomatic relations with the Holy See, he affirmed, would be absolutely broken off the next time the Pope attempted to interfere with the sovereign rights of the state, as was recently the case in the encyclical relating to trade-unions.

“The chancellor warned the Catholic deputy that it was ‘the last papal intervention in the independence of interdenominational labor organizations which Prussia will tolerate.’

“It is not at all certain that Bethmann-Hollweg can unite the remainder of the Reichstag against the Catholic party. The great Radical classes oppose class legislation on principle, and have already given an indication of their readiness to join the Centrists in bringing about a repeal of the Jesuit laws.”