A Catholic Confessor-Bishop prepared the old liberals of yesterday an abrupt, but well-earned end.
By Alexander Bauer
[Kreuz.net] Already 200 years ago -- during the so-called Enlightenment -- starstruck, fashionable German Archbishops were infatuated with schism from the Catholic Church.
At a meeting in Bad Ems -- in the modern state of Rheinland-Pfalz -- the Archbishops of Germany declared their indedependence and pastoral authority from the Pope's in 1786.
They insisted in the principle, that every German Bishop with jurisdiction receives his power from God just as the Pope receives his. For this reason, they would not accept Papal regulations for their diocese.
The Archdiocese put the Pope under pressure, to accept the conclusions of the "Emser Punktation". Otherwise they resolved to put their interests with the general German national council.
Indeed, the rpelats broke then with their plans. Really, it was not appealing to other Church respresentatives to fall further into provincialism.
Now The Old Liberal Horn Grumbles
In the year 1818 a robber-synod of a dozen priests from the Westerwald attempt to establish a "liberal Church Constitution" in the Diocese of Limburg.
The Papal Curia were to be kept out of all legal and liturgical matters.
A Diocesan Synod was to ratify these decisions in future.
The provincial pastor even pushed for the abolition "of the standing priestly celibacy because he found himself unqualified for such a difficult and unreasonable."
Such schismatic tendencies were even spread to episcopal circles in the first half of the 19th Century in German speaking areas.
Crushing Defeat
At the same time the movements of the traditionalists and loyalists -- "Ultramontane" -- Catholics ever stronger.
In the year 1842 the Holy Father sent the Ultramontane Confessor-Bishop Peter Josef Blum (+1884) in position.
Under his forty year long, holy leadership, the Diocese found the Catholic Faith and became once again true to the Holy See.
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