Abstract
On the eve of the Kulturkampf the Catholic Jesuit Fridolin Piscalar summarizes the impending angst and frustration sensed by so many Catholics as Otto von Bismarck began to forge the Second German Reich into a Protestant nation. Piscalar’s posture exudes a sense of persecution that abounded especially among German Catholics during the era, and rightly so as Bismarck embarked on a hard-line legal harassment of the Jesuits and their institutions during the 1870s. Though Piscalar’s aims were radically different than those of the Anglo-German Aryanist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, with whose impassioned vision German Visions of India began, Piscalar too gazes across the Red Sea—a striking symbol of Jewish liberation from Egyptian captivity—to a heathen land, India, for Catholic reprieve from Protestant assaults. Both Chamberlain’s and Piscalar’s India become constructed as two different “Jewels in the Crown”—as the root of German Aryan heritage in Chamberlain’s mind and as a cultural prototype of exemplary regard for Catholic tenets in Piscalar’s view. We will return to Chamberlain and his Aryan vision for German cultural renewal in Chapter 6. For now, I want to explore how the intense anti-Catholicism that confronted German Catholics in the Kaiserreich influenced their readings of India and how they provide an insightful illustration of Catholic strategies for redefining and reasserting their social and political agency. Yet the convenient alliance of religious and political objectives, as we have thus far examined, among Germany’s Protestants proved to be far more complex in the case of Catholics than often assumed.
It is at the present time greatly reassuring for once to turn one’s eyes away from the constant agitation against the Catholic Church, and to gaze across the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to a heathen land, in which the fundamental principles of equity and justice toward the Catholics are more familiar, at least better followed than in our modern Europe.
Fridolin Piscalar, S. J., Stimmen aus Maria-Laach (1871)1
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Notes
Fridolin Piscalar, “Indisches,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 1 (1871): 466. Piscalar was a Jesuit, who departed for India on September 12, 1867, according to the Annalen der Verbreitung des Glaubens zum Vortheil der Missionen (1868): 198. In Alfons Väth’s Die deutschen Jesuiten in Indien: Geschichte der Mission von Bombay-Puna (1854–1920) (Regensburg: Verlag Jos. Kösel & Friedrich Pustet, 1920): 242 cites Piscalar’s date of birth as 1841, but no date of death is given. Piscalar departed India in 1870.
On Catholic missions in India, see Christopher Becker, History of the Catholic Missions in Northeast India, 1890–1915 (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1980); and Kenneth Ballhatchet, Caste, Class, and Catholicism in India, 1789–1914 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1998).
Anon., “Das Colleg des hl. Franz Xaver in Bombay und seine Bedeutung für die indische Mission,” Die katholischen Missionen. Illustrirte Monatschrift 23 (1895): 7. The authors of many of the essays in this journal, which began publication in 1873, and Stimmen aus Maria-Laach are unidentified. In some cases the journals present translated essays written by non-German Catholics. I have avoided using these texts and have concentrated on sources written explicitly by German authors or at least approved by the journal’s German editors.
Pesch, “Christlicher Staat und moderne Staatstheorien,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 16 (1879): 428.
See Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) for an excellent study of caste during the Raj; also Ballhatchet, Caste, Class, and Catholicism in India.
Anon., “Indische Kasten und ihre Bedeutung für die Mission,” Die katholischen Missionen 4 (1876): 8.
Ibid., 10.
On Lord Thomas Macaulay’s school reforms, see Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), especially 81–83.
Anon., “Colombo, die Hauptstadt Ceylons,” Die katholischen Missionen 18 (1890): 214.
Fridolin Piscalar, “Indisches II,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 2 (1872): 243.
Anon., “Das apostolische Vikariat Bombay (Puna),” Die katholischen Missionen 10 (1882): 163.
Anon., “Nachrichten aus den Missionen: Vorderindien,” Die katholischen Missionen 27 (1898–99): 208.
Ibid., 208. Here the “Nachrichten” are citing statistics from the Bombay Catholic Examiner (1899), page 143.
Ibid., 210.
Gerhard Schneemann was born in Wesel, in today’s North-Rhein Westphalia, to a wealthy Catholic family. He studied law, then theology in Bonn, and later joined the Society of Jesus in 1851. In 1856, Schneemann took his vows as a priest in Paderborn and then after 1860 served as professor of Church history in Bonn, Aachen, and later at the Benedictine abbey Maria-Laach. During the early 1870s, like so many other Jesuits, Schneemann fled to Holland where he spent the remainder of his life until his death in 1885. Schneemann was one of the founders of Stimmen aus Maria-Laach. Based on his many essays in Stimmen aus Maria-Laach and other venues, Schneemann was known as an ardent defender of papal infallibility. For more information, see the Deutsche Biographie, http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz78788.html; and in volume 30 (1886) of Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, 167–89, there is a longer obituary of Schneemann.
Schneemann, “Unsere Erfolge im Culturkampfe,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 19 (1880): 316.
Ibid., 317.
Anon., “Die apostolischen Vikariate von Vorderindien,” Die katholischen Missionen 8 (1880): 7.
Anon., “Die buddhistische Ruinenstadt Anuradhapura,” Die katholischen Missionen 7 (1879): 188.
Joseph Dahlmann, Indische Fahrten, 2 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1927). Dahlmann was undoubtedly a progeny of the Kulturkampf. Still in his teens during the confessionally turbulent 1870s, Dahlmann was forced to leave his native Germany for Feldkirch, Austria, to pursue his intellectual interests and complete his Catholic education. Dahlmann eventually became a well-known Sanskritist, producing important texts on the Maharabata. For a more elaborate analysis of Dahlmann’s impressions of India and his Catholic mission, see my essay, “Making Invisible Empires: Joseph Dahlmann’s India and His Catholic Vision during the Wilhelminian Era,” in Mapping Channels between Ganges and Rhein: German-Indian Cross-Cultural Relations, ed. Jörg Esleben, Christina Kraenzle, and Sukanya Kulkarni (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2008): 160– 87; also Rabault-Feuerhahn, “Wer spricht im Text? Literarischer und wissenschaftlicher Reisebericht Bonsels’ Indienfahrt und Dahlmanns Indische Fahrten,” Cahiers D’Études Germaniques 38 (2000): 201–14.
See Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996): 97–100, for a succinct description of the cultural prerogatives of the French prime minister, Jules Ferry, who coined the term “mission civilisatrice” (civilizing mission) in the late 1880s. On the civilizing mission in the German colonies, see Nina Berman’s Impossible Missions? German Economic, Military, and Humanitarian Efforts in Africa (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). One of the most abusive cases of the link between colonial and religious prerogatives is of course the Belgian Congo, in which millions of Congolese died during the Belgian obsession with rubber. See Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
Franz Xavier (1502–52) was an important Catholic missionary in Asia. Born in Spain, Xavier devoted his professional life in service to the Catholic missions, a significant portion of which he spent in India. His renown among Catholic Jesuits in India receives frequent mention in their writings. The well-known Franz Xavier College in Poona is named in his honor. See Gordon Johnson, C. A. Bayly, and John F. Richards, eds., The New Cambridge History of India, vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987) for a more thorough account of the early Catholic missions in India under the Portuguese.
Adolph Müller, “Eine Pilgerfahrt nach Goa zum Grabe des hl. Franz Xaver,” Die katholischen Missionen 19 (1891): 103.
Vasco da Gama was a Portuguese explorer during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, who discovered the sea route to the East Indies. Da Gama is the subject of many works and background information on his life and travels is abundant. See especially Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Th. Hauser, “Bombay und seine Umgegend,” Die katholischen Missionen 5 (1877): 133.
Ibid., 133.
Georg Weniger, “Der katholische Soldat in der britischen Armee Indiens,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 28 (1885): 372.
Ibid., 370.
Otto Pfülf (1856–1946) was born and grew up in Speyer. After gymnasium (secondary school) he began to study Church history in Würzburg in 1875, but he left for Holland after one year in the midst of the Kulturkampf. Once there he joined the Society of Jesus. He completed his studies in Holland and later England. He became a lecturer of Church history from 1886 to 1888 at the Jesuit College in Ditton, England. From 1889–1913, Pfülf served as editor of the important Catholic journals Stimmen aus Maria-Laach and Stimmen der Zeit, in which he published over 300 essays. Only in 1913 did Pfülf return to Mainz, Germany, later Münster, and then eventually moved to Rome, where he played an important role in the training of priests at the Vatican. Toward the end of his life he returned again to Germany, where he survived World War II in a hospice for priests in Neuburg/Donau. He died there in 1946.
Pfülf, “Das britische Kolonialreich und seine Bedeutung für die Gegenwart,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 39 (1890): 281–82.
Ibid., 287.
Ibid., 288–89.
Ibid., 299.
After the 1857 mutiny in India the British were obviously extremely sensitive to any potential insubordination regardless of its source. See Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny: India, 1857 (New York: Viking, 1978).
Hauser, “Bombay und seine Umgegend,” 83.
Anon., “Arumugan, der standhafte indische Prinz,” in Beilage für die Jugend (supplement), Die katholischen Missionen. Illustrirte Monatschrift. 12 (1884): n.p.
Ibid., n.p.
As Portuguese power gradually declined in the seventeenth century in India, and in turn its support for the supply of missionaries there, the Holy See in Rome began to send missionaries to India through the Congregation of Propaganda, which worked independently from the Portuguese crown. The Holy See also began to appoint its own apostolic vicars in formerly Portuguese jurisdictions in western districts, but also in other parts of India. This eventually generated conflicts between these appointed vicars and Portuguese clergy over Church authority that came to a head in the nineteenth century, especially in Bombay, which in 1794 was divided into two rival Catholic jurisdictions— Padroado and Propaganda. This “Indo-Portuguese Schism,” the “double-jurisdiction,” was finally resolved only in 1886. See the online Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06602a.htm; also see Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India, 1757–1808 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). A broader but highly important work on this topic is Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History (London: Longman, 1993).
Educational mandates played a prominent role in the Kulturkampf. For an assessment of education during the era, see Nipperdey’s chapter, “Das Bildungswesen,” in Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918, bd. 1, 531–601; and Christa Berg, ed., Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, bd. 4, 1870–1918, Von der Reichsgründung bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs (München: C. H. Beck, 1991).
On education in India, see Judith E. Walsh, Growing Up in British India: Indian Autobiographers on Childhood and Education under the Raj (New York: Homes & Meier, 1983); and Clive Whitehead, Colonial Educators: The British Indian and Colonial Education Service, 1858–1983 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003).
Anon., “Das Colleg des hl. Franz Xaver in Bombay und seine Bedeutung für die indische Mission,” Die katholischen Missionen 23 (1895): 7.
Ibid., 8.
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© 2013 Perry Myers
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Myers, P. (2013). Catholic Visions of India and Universal Mandates. In: German Visions of India, 1871–1918. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316929_3
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