Numerous past review articles by scholars of German history share ideas produced by the religious turn in historiography since the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 1 Although highlighting a still growing groundswell of work focused on the German Catholic minority, these essays typically express discomfort with the relation of their subspecialty to the rest of the discipline. Bemoaning the marginalization of Catholic history and the self-inflicted ghettoization of research narrowly focused on regional traditions, past reviewers have worried about the integration of Catholicism within a larger framework. These past articles summarize phases of research on German Catholicism that produced much scholarship and multiple conceptual frameworks through which to understand the enduring impact of the church. Scholars of the 1970s and 1980s pushed against the grain of Hans-Ulrich Wehler's Bielefeld School to prove that Catholicism contributed more to the liberal democratic development of Germany than had been previously assumed, and by the 1990s German Catholic research focused primarily on the social history of Catholicism.Footnote 2 The field of German Catholic history underwent a period of uncertain change during the early 2000s. Many of the German-language monographs on the topic remained wedded to the milieu model, but some younger scholars responded to critiques of German Catholic history by studying women's history or deploying poststructuralist analysis.Footnote 3
The most recent set of monographs about twentieth-century Catholicism set any fears about the marginalization of this subfield to rest. Through the contributions of young and veteran scholars alike, it has become possible to connect closely the most tumultuous moments of the twentieth century to the impact of the Catholic Church and its adherents on politics, ideas, and society. The most influential recent studies analyze intellectual history and Catholic elites. They explore the fall of political Catholicism and the rise of Christian democracy after World War II while tracing the pathway from Catholic social justice to the social market economy. In the process they demonstrate the centrality of Catholicism both to the downfall of the Weimar Republic and to the stability of the Federal Republic, making religion part of the central narrative of German history.Footnote 4 Furthermore, some of the relevant academics write transnational histories. Often comparing German and Austrian contexts and following the papal pathway toward the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), their work no longer exclusively emphasizes the specifically Catholic regions of Germany, but rather the larger importance of Central European Catholics to events in the Vatican and politics in their respective political systems. In addition to these studies of Catholic elites and Christian democratic politics, other trends have emerged.Footnote 5 In particular, increasing research about women and gender within Catholicism has appeared, albeit in books that have received far less attention. Several very important monographs illustrate the vital role of elite Catholic women to German politics, debates about sexuality, and the professionalization of social work. These publications dealing with social and women's history offset the narrow focus on powerful religious patriarchs and provide balance to the field.
This essay will introduce readers to recent literature on the intellectual and political history of Catholicism in Austria and Germany during the twentieth century. It contends that the publications with the highest profile have been those about male elites, which have successfully thrust Catholicism into the middle of Central European history. Illustrating the Catholic ideas that shaped politics, the economy, and social policy, these monographs establish how grappling with totalitarianism during the 1930s and 1940s helped the most influential Catholic men advance modernity, democracy, and capitalism after the two world wars. They converge thematically through their shared understanding of the National Socialist period as an era of catalytic trauma that introduced new ideas and whose total defeat shuffled the political deck sufficiently so that liberal democracy could succeed where it so recently had failed. In reviewing this work about the contributions of religious figures to the modernization and democratization processes, I probe the possibilities and limits of intellectual and political history as tools for analyzing major historical change to religious institutions and state forms. I argue that although the study of ideas forms a stronger basis for transnational comparisons by shrinking the field of possible subjects, major changes to political narratives cannot be accounted for without grass roots analysis of political Catholicism and Christian democracy. Furthermore, this article favors histories that illuminate the muddled process by which Catholics became democrats. Catholics’ self-interested use of elections for the purposes of maintaining a fragile religious coalition messily morphed into a heartfelt commitment to liberalism over the course of decades.
This article also draws attention to works about elite women who receive less exposure but are arguably even more important for understanding modern Catholicism. Given the role played by women in the Center Party and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) as both voters and politicians, it is somewhat unfortunate that this history is only now appearing. It is this literature about female intellectuals and political operatives that now requires deeper integration into the narrative of German as well as Austrian history.
Did the Catholic Church Become Modern?
Research about Catholic male elites in Germany and Austria has built to a crescendo over the last decade. Besides the common methodological focus, authors primarily shine a light on the same age cohort of individuals. They illustrate how the generation born around 1890 was the one that both experienced Nazism as adults and led the reconstruction of West Germany and Austria afterward. These books also show how the experience of the Nazi era forced a transformation in political and economic thinking that formed the basis of a modern liberal democratic era for both countries, showcasing the breadth of research possible when utilizing intellectual history. This combined focus on a range of impactful Catholic thinkers and political actors illustrates how the twentieth century was a Catholic century in Central Europe.
John Connelly's From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 started the wave of publications about Catholic intellectual history.Footnote 6 It traces the shift from an era when Catholics abetted and strengthened the racial anti-Semitism of National Socialism to one when such hatred became discouraged through the 1968 encyclical Nostra Aetate (In Our Time). This book contains a blueprint for the new interest in Catholic ideas. Like many of the other books under review, Connelly focuses his analysis on a handful of thinkers. By exploring some of the anti-Semites of interwar Europe, including Karl Adam and Hermann Muckermann, he demonstrates the level of Catholic intellectual complicity with fascism and even the Holocaust. However, much of this study scrutinizes the evolution of several writers who initially accepted a degree of religious anti-Semitism but gradually endorsed a platform in favor of anti-racism. Tracking the eventual advocacy for change by Waldemar Gurian, Johannes Oesterreicher, and Karl Thieme, Connelly shows how a group of seemingly peripheral figures, marginalized because of their status as converts and their unorthodox theologies, paved the way for a repudiation of anti-Semitism during Vatican II.
Besides offering an explanation for a stunningly fast shift, Connelly anticipated several avenues pursued by other scholars and displays the vast potential in studying a handful of thinkers spread across national borders. First, he writes a genuinely Central European history of the church through his focus on figures in Germany and Austria and how their ideas circulated across Europe. Second, Connelly identifies the importance of converts to twentieth-century Catholicism. By choosing men such as Gurian and Oesterreicher who departed the Jewish faith for Catholicism, he illustrates how newcomers made a greater impact due to their unique viewpoints. Finally, this book shows the importance of the Catholic encounter with fascism. Although much previous historiography assessed the extent of Catholic collaboration during the 1930s and 1940s, Connelly started a fresh trend of seeing how the crucible of these authoritarian years led to intellectual evolution and postwar renewal.
Janek Wasserman's Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918–1938 utilizes a similar methodology to Connelly in his intellectual history of the interwar Austrian right.Footnote 7 Most of the book explores the cultural influence of Catholic and nationalist thinkers who opened the path toward fascism by 1938. Although not primarily concerned with religion, this study is an example of how research about Catholicism has used intellectual history as an entry point to become integrated into grand narratives of Central European history. Wasserman's most revisionist claim is that there were two rather than three Lager or divisions within interwar Austrian politics.Footnote 8 Although previous analyses understood the political spectrum as containing a nationalist camp, a Christian social-conservative camp, and a socialist camp, Wasserman claims that the German nationalists and Christian social movement formed one radical right-wing block. For example, he illustrates how the Catholic writer Joseph Eberle overcame past divisions with nationalists through anti-Semitism, anti-socialism, and anti-capitalism, while Othmar Spann did the same by promoting an elitist and corporatist state. By highlighting the importance of the Austrian context and showing that seemingly apolitical or moderate Catholic groups actually participated in an increasingly radical nationalist vision, Wasserman clarifies how religious elites facilitated the rise of fascist violence. Despite this contribution, this book exhibits some of the shortcomings possible when intellectual history is used to make claims about politics. Unlike Connelly, who limits his analysis to changes in church teaching, Wasserman revises the history of Austrian political alignments based exclusively on the ideas of a handful of men, leaving it to other scholars to test his thesis against case studies of grass roots politics.
A third foundational study that features the role of Catholic political rather than intellectual elites is Maria Mitchell's The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany.Footnote 9 Focused on post-1945 West Germany, this book provides an authoritative analysis of the first two decades of Europe's most influential Christian democratic party. Frustrated by previous histories that often overlooked the role of Christianity in post-1945 conservative politics, she shows how Catholic and Protestant elites cautiously overcame their differences to forge an interconfessional movement with values that appealed to a wide swath of voters. In a departure from the intellectual histories of Connelly and Wasserman, Mitchell analyzes a wide range of prominent politicians and political rhetoric. Mitchell demonstrates how leading representatives of the Catholic milieu moved on from their past attachment to the narrowly Catholic Center Party and appealed to Protestants by positioning their new party as anti-materialist and thus against both fascism and communism. Although this created tension, especially as the party shifted toward the leadership of Protestant Minister of Economics Ludwig Erhard, it also produced enough unity throughout the 1950s to get the party off the ground. Mitchell provides an especially strong account of the Abendland (Occident) concept that animated CDU foreign policy. Christian democrats imagined themselves as creating a West German bulwark against the existential threat from the communist east and the internal challenge of socialism. Furthermore, Mitchell demonstrates how the desire to restore patriarchy and traditional gender roles bound previous confessional enemies together as allies.
Although scholars like Connelly, Wasserman, and Mitchell created momentum for the linkage of Catholicism to mainstream politics through the study of either elected representatives or bookish theologians, James Chappel ambitiously attempts to redefine the political narrative through his provocative arguments in Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church.Footnote 10 Looking at numerous highbrow figures from Austria, Germany, and France, Chappel contends that Catholics resisted modern state forms prior to 1930. Supporters of a “medievalist premodernity” in favor of monarchical restoration battled with advocates of “prophetic ultramodernity” who would infuse the modern state with a greater sense of Christianity.Footnote 11 In this classification of Catholic ideas, the so-called premoderns and ultramoderns both rejected church-state separation and liberalism. Political Catholicism was a pragmatic negotiation with secular forces rather than a heartfelt commitment to parliamentarianism and plurality. The encounter with totalitarian communism and fascism starting in 1930 reoriented this division into a clash between “paternal” Catholics who embraced anti-communism and the patriarchal family, and who tended toward fascist accommodation, and “fraternal” Catholics who engaged in anti-fascism, promoted interconfessional cooperation, and viewed marriage as a means to love rather than reproduction.Footnote 12 According to Chappel, both factions accepted religion's relegation to the private sphere during the 1930s. Although paternalism became dominant over fraternalism after the war, the two models made peace and blended their values during the high point of Christian democracy and the social market economy before fierce intra-Catholic debate reignited during the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.
Chappel's monograph consolidates the progress made by other scholars, and its best parts highlight the promise of the intellectual history of religion. Analyzing some of the same figures as Connelly and Wasserman, including Joseph Eberle, Waldemar Gurian, and Karl Thieme, the study confirms that the Catholic encounter with totalitarianism was indeed formative and marked by widespread accommodation of fascism. Chappel also supports Mitchell in her focus on gender as a mobilizing force in Catholic and Christian democratic politics. Finally, his incisive reading of papal encyclicals and other prominent texts leads to a transnational and conceptually innovative monograph. His labels of fraternal and paternal as shorthand for European Catholicism's internal factions are likely to influence future scholarship.
Many of Chappel's ideas about widespread antimodern Catholic philosophies prior to 1930 fit Austria's political circumstances better than those in Germany. Despite a rise in Christian social populism in Austria starting in the late 1890s, an older Catholic establishment with monarchical nostalgia and a desire for linkages to Hapsburg successor states rather than German nationalism still wielded much power during the 1920s. The existence of this persistent faction supports Chappel's notions about premodern Catholics and connects his coverage of Georg Moenius's neo-medievalism to the book's claims about politics. Wasserman's analysis of Othmar Spann as a member of this older establishment who supported radical nationalism, an elitist state, and corporatism by the 1930s also confirms Chappel's depiction of the transition of such elites from premodern to paternal Catholicism. Chappel's sections about Austria contribute important context to the recent historiographical trend of highlighting the Catholic role in Austrofascist rule prior to the Anschluss with Germany in 1938, but his application of these conclusions to Germany weakens the book's argument.Footnote 13
A fine example of intellectual history, Chappel's book also highlights the method's shortcomings when used as a pathway to rewrite German political narratives. Using textual analysis of a small number of mostly male thinkers across three countries, Chappel challenges much of the consensus about political Catholicism and Christian democracy.Footnote 14 This is most apparent in his divergence from Mitchell, who provides a very different chronology for how West German Catholic elites transitioned from political Catholicism to Christian democracy. First, she places more emphasis on the wing of the Center Party committed to liberal democracy since the late nineteenth century. Mitchell points out the importance of “Rhenish-Westphalian liberal Catholicism” of the late nineteenth century and the segment of the Center Party who were “democrats of the heart” during the Weimar Republic.Footnote 15 Her depiction of a Center Party divided into several factions but with a clear and powerful liberal-democratic wing contradicts Chappel's claims that Catholic dalliances with democracy prior to 1930 were pragmatic maneuvers by a group that opposed modernity. Mitchell and Chappel clash in their views of the post-1945 period as well. According to Chappel, the long 1950s constitute a phase in which all wings of European Catholicism embraced the separation of church and state. Yet Mitchell's description of the fights over schools and her emphasis on anti-materialism, re-Christianization, and the Abendland concept suggest that elite Catholics were not willing to overlook the issues that had animated them since the ultramontane nineteenth century.Footnote 16 Due to his focus on intellectuals without much reference to grass roots politics, Chappel comes up short in arguing that Catholicism lacked all forms of modernity and heartfelt parliamentary governance prior to 1930.
This strain of analysis oversimplifies the work multiple scholars have done to assess Catholics and democracy in Germany. Lisa Zwicker's book about student life at the end of the empire shows that Catholic students had already embraced liberal values before World War I.Footnote 17 As Margaret Lavinia Anderson argued about Imperial Germany, “practicing democracy,” even by Catholics opposed to some of its principles, created long-term habits and mentalities.Footnote 18 Such trends became more pronounced among many elites after World War I. Although a tragically divided political block, German Catholics possessed a wing of undoubtedly pro-republican leaders coming from the middle and working classes who outnumbered the mostly aristocratic Catholics who actively doomed the Weimar Republic.Footnote 19 As a diverse and internally conflicted group, Catholics displayed much practicality regarding the modern nation-state from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s and developed heartfelt if fragile commitments to parliamentary rule along the way.
A recent book that highlights prominent fraternal Catholics exclusively in their German context is William L. Patch's Christian Democratic Workers and the Forging of German Democracy, 1920–1980. Primarily a political history with an even narrower focus than that of Mitchell, it asserts that the Federal Republic of Germany succeeded where the Weimar Republic had failed due to the history of German labor. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Center Party lacked incentives to cooperate rather than confront each other during the 1920s. This changed after the war when the veterans of the Christian trade unions founded the Social Committees of Christian Democratic Workers and took on leadership roles within the larger German Labor Federation (DGB). Although former Christian trade unionists lost the power struggle to shape the CDU in the late 1940s, which Mitchell argues diminished their importance, the Social Committees and the presence of blue-collar workers in the Christian democratic coalition created overlap between the SPD and the CDU and stimulated compromise on labor issues.Footnote 20 Over the long haul, this resulted in the “German model” for labor relations in the Federal Republic, where workers had autonomy in management decisions, strikes became infrequent, and spending on welfare programs became permissible. Through the passage of codetermination laws of the 1950s and 1970s, Patch proves the importance of Catholic labor leaders to the legal framework for worker participation in management.
With a focus confined to West Germany, Patch views the Christian trade unionists as committed democrats who laid important groundwork for post-1945 democratic success. In an example that underscores their divergent opinions about the Weimar era, Patch and Chappel part ways in their interpretation of Heinrich Brauns, the powerful Center Party labor minister of the Weimar Republic. Placing this veteran of multiple Weimar cabinets in a more transnational context, Chappel views him as an antagonist to the social democrats who empowered Catholic organizations to administer welfare in place of a centralized state. Patch depicts Brauns as a figure who supported many socialist ideas, aroused deep suspicion within the business community, and expanded the power of the government.Footnote 21 This difference over Brauns indicates a larger disagreement. Chappel describes the progressive Catholics of the 1920s mostly as disillusioned ultramoderns who viewed democracy and capitalism as “lamentable steps” on the way to something better.Footnote 22 Patch views the commitment to democracy by labor activists as heartfelt. It is the embrace of corporatism by Heinrich Brüning and Adam Stegerwald after 1930 that he designates as merely pragmatic.Footnote 23
Although diverging from Chappel in analyzing the 1920s, Patch also constructs a different postwar narrative. According to Chappel, this was a period of relative Catholic consensus where paternal and fraternal Catholics agreed upon a shift away from Catholic charities and associations and toward state-centric solutions to social justice questions.Footnote 24 Patch depicts a deep conflict over this matter. Although Patch's protagonists from the labor movement wanted codetermination and cooperation with both Protestants and non-Christians through the DGB, the bishops and many conservative Catholics stood by the model of the 1920s. Cardinal Joseph Frings, the most prominent of Germany's postwar bishops, mobilized a refounding of the Catholic Workers’ Club (KAB) as an insular and confessionally specific alternative to the social committees and their integration into the social-democrat dominated DGB. Although Frings and the KAB ultimately relented to the strategy of the trade unionist Jakob Kaiser and his successors, this battle unfolded throughout the 1950s and was first resolved during the 1960s.Footnote 25
Mark Edward Ruff's The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945–1980 stands out among these books with its careful blend of intellectual and political history, at the cost of a more geographically restricted focus on West Germany. The book tracks seven major controversies over how the Catholic Church responded to Nazism from the late 1940s to the 1970s and reconstructs the biographies of approximately twenty male elites who both criticized and defended the institutional church. Furthermore, Ruff takes on the matter of Catholicism and modernity. He queries why the relationship between Catholicism and National Socialism received intense scrutiny in West Germany in the years after the war, when it was the German Protestants who had the greater rate of collaboration. He argues that the intellectual conflicts about the Nazi past were actually proxy wars over the place of the Catholic Church in the modern world. Even though on the surface there were academic and journalistic debates about the Reich Concordat (1933) and the actions of Pope Pius XII, every episode was actually tied to contemporary concerns about the role of the church in a democratic state, the existence of confessional schools, and the rearmament of Germany during the 1950s. Because Catholics made up a greater proportion of the population of West Germany after the war than in previous years and wielded disproportionate influence through the politically dominant CDU/CSU, Protestants, liberals, socialists, and fraternal Catholics utilized the Nazi past to diminish their power and influence.Footnote 26
In contrast to the narrative of Chappel, Ruff's book depicts the postwar era as one in which Catholic elites struggled largely in vain to consolidate influence and extend religion as far into the public sphere as possible. The fight over the Catholic past became most intense when the state of Hesse, led by a social democratic state minister, attempted to make state-funded public schools interfaith rather than separated by denomination. Eager to defend confessional schools, the CDU and Catholic leaders cited the Reich Concordat of 1933 as still binding. This led to a fierce public debate over the Concordat and whether Catholics had traded their votes in favor of Hitler's Enabling Act in exchange for this diplomatic coup. The courts ruled that the Reich Concordat was indeed a valid diplomatic agreement, but the West German Basic Law gave states autonomy over their schools. Church aggression led to unwanted attention focusing on its past with Nazism and to victory for its secular and Protestant opponents in Hesse. The church also fought furiously against critiques by nonconformist Catholic intellectuals, such as Ernst Wolfgang-Böckenförde, who thought the church had traded concessions over confessional schools for support of the authoritarian Nazis in 1933 and envisioned a West German society where the church would embrace pluralism. This led to the founding of the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte to publish research from the church's perspective and to highlight the errors of those who advanced the so-called “linkage thesis” positing a connection between the Reich Concordat of 1933 and the decisive center votes for the Enabling Act. Ruff's research suggests the postwar era was one when the institutional church fought bitterly for a central spot in the new West German state only to have the ferocity and insularity of the older generation's outlook cause younger Catholics, Protestants, liberals, and social democrats to scrutinize and obsessively criticize their track record.
Monographs with a broad thematic focus are starting to include Catholicism as an influential agent of change in German history, which is evidence of the subject's breakthrough into major historical debates. In this context, Noah Benezra Strote's Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany shows that both Catholic and Protestant elites shaped the contours of political history.Footnote 27 Explaining West Germany's democratization, Strote suggests that the Federal Republic prevailed when political groups that were antagonists during the 1920s became cooperative partners after the war. Although social democrats play an important role in the book, he follows the lead of Mitchell and identifies the relationship between Catholics and Protestants as central to the fatal political divisions of the Weimar Republic as well as the willingness to compromise during the 1950s. For example, Strote cites competing economic viewpoints that broke along confessional lines as particularly responsible for the fall of democracy after 1930. Depicting Chancellor Heinrich Brüning as a “Christian politician,” he suggests that the theory of solidarism animated Brüning's entire ideological milieu. This idea, also emphasized by Chappel, encouraged a brand of Christian ethics to be inserted into the economy in the face of relentless capitalism. In the eyes of Brüning and his circle, the crisis of the Great Depression demanded not only anti-Marxism but an interventionist approach in a market that could only be partially free. Numerous Catholic thinkers and politicians strove for solidarity between workers and business owners within certain economic sectors in an economic approach known as corporatism. They met stiff resistance from liberal, Lutheran intellectuals, such as Wilhelm Röpke, who defended the free market. This dissonance created an unbridgeable chasm between Catholic and Protestant elites, aiding the downfall of the republic. Strote believes the shift from interconfessional conflict to partnership started under Nazism in 1937, when pockets of elites on all sides of the denominational divide became more disillusioned with Nazism and blossomed after the war. Although Catholic thinkers demonstrated significant continuity of ideas from the Weimar Republic, Strote sees a pragmatic and fragile coming together after 1945, which created the social market economy and an era of democratic stability under Christian democratic rule. Although analyzing one of Chappel's historical subjects, Oswald Nell-Breuning, Strote supports Micthell's view that German Catholic economic policy was inspired by its previous commitment during the Weimar years to the pursuit of social justice through political legislation. Despite tension with neoliberals such as Ludwig Erhard, Catholics in the CDU successfully pursued a humane capitalism that balanced the market liberalization desirable to probusiness Protestants with a dedication to social programs.Footnote 28
These recent works on modern Catholicism converge by depicting influential Catholic men, especially those born at the end of the nineteenth century, as crucial agents in the downfall of the Weimar Republic, the accommodation of the Third Reich, and the success of the early Federal Republic. Nonetheless, historians differ over how much continuity existed between the Catholic ideas of the Weimar Republic and those that succeeded in the Federal Republic. At issue is whether it was Catholic thinkers or their environment that produced greater democratic success and interconfessional cooperation in the later period. When accounting for both the intellectual and the political contexts in Germany, most prominent Catholics remained committed to their institutions and core beliefs about the role of church and state and the economy after World War II. However, the postwar era included more incentive to compromise and cooperate with Protestants, liberals, and social democrats. Always pragmatic, German Catholics learned to work within the confines of political reality as a religious minority in a rapidly modernizing nation-state. The same self-serving desire for power and survival that had driven inter- and intra-confessional divisions in the Weimar years motivated a readiness for interconfessional alliance and the creation of the social market economy after the war.
Tension also exists within this new historiography over how much consensus actually existed during the 1950s. While Chappel sees peace among Catholics in this era, Mitchell, Patch, and Ruff depict much struggle over the place of the church in society. Most of these studies illustrate how the early years of the Federal Republic involved turmoil beneath the veneer of Catholic and Christian Democratic political dominance. Despite Konrad Adenauer's firm grip on the chancelldery, factions within the Catholic Church battled over the nature of their political vision, and the institutional church waged public battles with non-Catholics over their role in the public sphere.
Finally, these monographs suggest a divide between the German and Austrian contexts. Chappel's narrative about a church fundamentally opposed to modern church-state separation before 1930 suits Austria best. Driven by their emphasis on intellectual history in more transnational contexts, Connelly, Wasserman, and Chappel all uncover deep anti-Semitism, monarchal loyalty, and ultranationalism in the leaders of the Austrian church. German Catholics, on the other hand, were motivated by their historic marginalization into more practical political and intellectual postures as well as factionalized understandings of what it meant to be both Catholic and modern. If future intellectual historians ground their analysis in nuts-and-bolts politics, while political historians strive for comparisons between West Germany and the rest of Europe, even more light will be shed on Catholic modernization and democratization as well as the impact of the Catholic faith on European history.
Catholic Women: Ideas, Politics, and Society
The English-language scholarship reviewed up to this point has done much to make Catholics central to the political narrative of modern Germany and Austria. These books, however, focus overwhelmingly on male public figures. With the exception of the studies by Maria Mitchell and James Chappel, many recent monographs exclude women as agents of historical change. The work of other historians has shown how Catholic history changes when viewed from a woman's perspective. In fact, the history of the Catholic women's movement occurred at the nexus of intellectual and political history as many women leaders both theorized about the pressing issues of the day and ran for office. Nonetheless, the women's history of Catholicism currently occupies an undeservedly marginal space similar to the one that Catholic history as a whole filled in the past. Furthermore, even these histories of elite women stretch the limits of what intellectual and political history can tell us about both gender and sexuality.
Research about women and gender has never been entirely absent from the historiography of Catholicism. Multiple studies used the “feminization of religion” concept in order to describe increased participation of women in Catholic rituals during the nineteenth century and efforts by women to use religious spaces for their own autonomy.Footnote 29 This pioneering work on women's history illustrates why gender is so central to understanding Catholic history. In the realm of religious practice, much evidence indicates that women did indeed practice their faith more consistently and publicly than their male counterparts, hence preventing a decline in Catholic influence before the 1960s. Women's associational life also remained just as active in the public sphere as that of their male counterparts, and their groups remained influential long after the memberships in exclusively male organizations declined. Finally, women were the lynchpins to Catholic success at the ballot box. Women's suffrage saved the Catholic Center Party from becoming obsolete during the Weimar Republic, and the “women's bonus” of Catholic housewives’ votes drove Christian democratic success from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. Furthermore, several prominent women who led the Catholic women's movement and a small contingent of female politicians shaped policy and political outcomes during the same era of transformational change.Footnote 30
Several scholars reviewed in the previous section have in fact paid attention to gender. Although his most recent book focuses on prominent men, Mark Edward Ruff's first monograph illuminated how young women became disenchanted with the Catholic milieu after 1945.Footnote 31 Maria Mitchell's book is perhaps the only one I have discussed that both takes gender seriously as an analytical category and spotlights the influence and agency of individual female politicians. Finally, James Chappel thoughtfully explores ideas that Catholic men had about women's sexuality. He argues that when paternal Catholics withdrew their complaints about the separation of church and state in the public sphere, they changed their focus to protecting Catholicism in the private sphere via the “reproductive family.”Footnote 32
The German-language historiography of Catholic women is growing too. In previous decades, scholars focused on the primary organizations and leaders of the Catholic women's movement through 1933, such as the Katholischer Deutscher Frauenbund (Catholic Women's League) founded in 1903 and the Frauen- und Müttervereinigungen (Women's and Mother's Associations), which united its many branch groups in 1928. These studies laid the groundwork for a recent wave of biographies of prominent Catholic women.Footnote 33 One example is Gunda Holtmann's Ellen Ammann—Eine intellektuelle Biographie.Footnote 34 Although centered around one individual life, this book shows the benefits of including female intellectuals in the narrative. A Swedish-born Catholic who lived in Bavaria after her marriage in 1890, Ammann distinguished herself as one of the prominent early leaders of the Catholic Women's League, the founder of Munich's Mädchenshutzverein (Association for the Protection of Young Women), and one of the only women to serve as a Bavarian People's Party (BVP) deputy in the Bavarian Landtag during the Weimar Republic. Holtmann argues that Ammann's life proves that the Catholic women's movement as a whole sought more autonomy for women in the public sphere than has been previously depicted.
This intellectual biography captures a tension central to the small but growing field of Catholic women's history. On the one hand, Ellen Ammann advocated for women's equality. She promoted equitable partnerships in marriage, insisted on women's pursuit of careers in the public sphere, wrote about the ways single women could pursue professional fulfillment without marriage, and fought in favor of repealing state laws that regulated female sex work. Ammann professionalized Catholic social work, forged tentative relationships with Protestant and secular sectors of the women's movement, and argued that feminine influence in the public sphere was necessary to curb the worst excesses of the modern age. On the other hand, she repudiated the use of the term emancipation with regard to women. She embraced Catholic patriarchy, insisted that a woman's primary role was as a mother, and became a fierce culture warrior on matters of sexuality. Although she maintained a progressive stance against fellow Catholic women's leader Agnes Neuhaus on the matter of state regulation of sex work, she spent much of her political capital in the Weimar Republic fighting for the traditional family. Ammann openly opposed sex reformists, such as Helene Stöcker, who called for sexual liberation, easier legal pathways to divorce, and reform of Paragraph 218 of the legal code that criminalized abortion. As early as 1922, Ammann spoke out against the “epidemic of abortion,” opposed the voluntary sterilization of women, and promoted policies that would encourage women to have families with many children. Participating in racist attacks on the sexual relationships of German women and African soldiers occupying the Rhineland on behalf of France as well as the Catholic eugenics movement centered on Hermann Muckermann, Ammann represented what Holtmann depicts as typical of the Catholic Women's League.Footnote 35
By ignoring such elite women in their study of intellectual history, historians overlook important aspects of the Catholic narrative. First, few scholars capture the deep paradox at the heart of the faith's most devoted core of support. Middle-class Catholic women wrestled in often contradictory and ambiguous ways with their simultaneous embrace of essentialist views of gender and a women's movement encouraging careers and alternate paths to vocational fulfillment outside of the domestic sphere. Second, Holtmann's work shows that the professionalization of charitable work and the defense of traditional models of reproductive sexuality became a focal point for women very early in the twentieth century and not for the first time in 1930 as Chappel contends. Ammann's efforts in favor of professionalizing Catholic social work confirms that the church became somewhat more modern by shifting away from confessionally insular charitable organizations. Furthermore, her ambivalent and yet ultimately conservative sexual politics were evident both before and after World War I despite her support for the deregulation of sex work. Catholic women embraced neither modernization of social work nor a rigid approach to sexual morality as a result of authoritarianism, but rather in confrontation with industrialization and urbanization in the late nineteenth century. Finally, Ammann's life sheds further light on how Catholics became democrats. A nationalist and monarchist at heart, Ammann became a pragmatic democrat by 1923 at the latest. Opposed initially to women's suffrage, she eventually used public spaces that opened up to women in Weimar to seize the rare opportunity for women to achieve political leadership. Her pragmatism shifted to something deeper as she practiced democracy because she played an outspoken part in foiling both the Kapp and the Hitler putsch attempts of the early 1920s.
The historian Regina Illemann extends the analysis of the Catholic Women's League to the period between 1945 and the start of the Second Vatican Council in Katholische Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 1945–1962. Politik, Geschlecht und Religiosität im Katholischen Deutschen Frauenbund.Footnote 36 She provides an extensive history of important female Catholic leaders, including Helene Weber, Gerta Krabbel, Gertrud Ehrle, and Josepha Fischer-Erling, but also of the group's institutional work in politics, marriage counseling, and professional support for women. One of two major Catholic women's organizations, the Catholic Women's League catered to a smaller middle-class group, when compared with the Women's and Mother's Associations. The more progressive of these two national associations, it retained influence through its well-regarded journalism, political activism, and positions of influence within various church institutions. In alignment with Holtmann, Illemann's book argues that the Catholic Women's League used its unique position within the church and the broader women's movement to promote emancipatory aims.
Illemann's historical subjects encountered the same ambiguities after 1945 as Ellen Ammann did at the start of the century. They distinguished themselves among Catholic women in their determination to have lay women run the group with little interference from the clergy. They fought to protect the jobs of single women and war widows after the war, and they advocated that both single and married women gain access to education. Fischer-Erling in particular led the group's work in the field of marriage counseling and sought to spread ideas about equality in marriage that she learned through exposure to the Catholic youth movement in previous decades. She displayed flexibility regarding church morality in marriage counseling, and some of the group's elites called for legal changes that would facilitate the replacement of patriarchy with loving and equal partnerships between men and women, making her values similar to those of James Chappel's fraternal Catholics. Nevertheless, the group retained the church's traditional teaching on gender. Even Fischer-Erling dared not publicly challenge official Catholic teachings about birth control, abortion, and divorce. In fact, the Catholic Women's League backtracked from their opposition to patriarchal family law in the early 1950s under pressure from the bishops and other women in the Women's and Mother's Associations. Although the Catholic Women's League advanced the independence of women and democratic values to a greater extent after the war than during the era of Ellen Ammann, the group still struggled to reconcile the desire for greater autonomy with the acceptance of religious patriarchy and normative family ideals.
By sketching out the stances of elite women regarding sexuality, women in the workplace, marriage, and political activism, Illemann argues that the 1950s were an era of cautious progressivism as well as fragile consensus. Just as William L. Patch shows how marginalized members of the Catholic labor movement formed a crucial part of the Federal Republic despite being sidelined by mainstream Christian democrats, Illemann illustrates the dynamics among female intellectuals who led perhaps the most vital part of the CDU's base during the party's period of greatest ascendancy. By highlighting the ambiguity in their support for women's autonomy and their only partial embrace of emancipation, Illemann also proves that there were more than just fraternal and paternal Catholics in modern Europe. There were maternal ones as well.
Kimba Allie Tichenor's Religious Crisis and Civic Transformation: How Conflicts over Gender and Sexuality Changed the West German Catholic Church is the perfect counterpoint and extends Illemann's narrative to the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in West Germany with a focus on women, gender, and sexuality.Footnote 37 Rather than focusing on the Catholic Women's League, Tichenor examines bishops, theologians, and the other more popular women's group in West Germany. Previously a national union of Catholic Women's and Mother's Associations, this group became the Catholic Women's Association (KFD) in the Federal Republic. By examining debates about clerical celibacy, women's ordination, birth control, and abortion, Tichenor demonstrates the ways that the Catholic Church shaped policy in Germany even while it attracted ever fewer worshippers and participants. The book contends that the Catholic Church did not decline with the erosion of its insular subculture. Instead, it became a smaller and more conservative church that used its cultural and institutional influence to shape West Germany's sexual politics.
Unlike Illemann, Tichenor sees little evidence of feminism among Catholic women after 1945. In part, this divergence results from her focus on the Catholic Women's Association, which boasted a larger and more conservative membership, rather than the smaller and more liberal Catholic Women's League. Tichenor also draws a clear distinction between Catholic feminist theologians, who would become most influential during the 1980s, and women's leaders who still accepted traditional church teachings about women's natural inferiority to men. Therefore, the 1950s are largely portrayed as a period of modest change and consensus, matching some of Chappel's conclusions on the subject. Some theologians and bishops allowed for flexibility regarding sexuality leading up to the Second Vatican Council. Due to the shortage of priests after the death of so many seminarians during the war, some married Lutheran pastors were allowed to convert and become ordained. Pius XII's decision to permit Catholic couples’ use of the rhythm method sparked discussion about the role of sex in marriage and the regulation of family size. Some men and women sought leniency from the church when using other forms of birth control. Nonetheless, the Catholic Women's Association did not become a place for activism in favor of contraception, abortion, or the female priesthood.
According to Tichenor, Vatican II changed the perspective of many West German Catholics given they were encouraged to see priests as less authoritative and the church as less hierarchical. West German women, whether Catholic or not, also used the contraceptive pill in rapidly increasing numbers during the 1960s. Some German bishops, such as Julius Döpfner, believed that married couples should be allowed to make up their own minds about whether to use the pill or other forms of contraception as a matter of conscience. Therefore, a firestorm of anger was unleashed after Pope Paul VI upheld the church's condemnation of any form of birth control besides the rhythm method in the encyclical Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life) in 1968. Tichenor describes West German protests against this decision, especially at the contentious Catholic Congress in Essen during 1968, making this encyclical a breaking point between the faithful and their leaders. After initial efforts to appease distraught congregants, German bishops took an increasingly more orthodox stance on both birth control and abortion as progressives were replaced with hardliners in the bishop's residences. In the midst of this turmoil, the German Women's Association was torn by changing sexual politics. Its leaders did not publicly protest Humanae Vitae, and they felt stuck between conservative older members and the young women leaving the church and the association in droves during the 1970s. It was not until the late 1970s that the German Women's Association joined a growing group of feminist theologians to form a small but vocal faction in the church that dissented against conservatism on birth control, abortion, and women's ordination. Tichenor suggests that a Catholic feminist movement emerged later in Germany than in other nations and only after many women already departed from the church due to disagreements over reproductive rights.Footnote 38
Tichenor's monograph provides a divergent chronology by staking out a clear definition of Catholic feminism. Although Holtmann and Illemann never discuss feminism formally, they nonetheless argue that the Catholic women's movement of the twentieth century advanced women's rights even as it embraced essentialism. By contrast, Tichenor views the Catholic Women's Association as an accommodating organization that avoided conflict with the church hierarchy and its conservative membership. A few male and female theologians pioneered new positions on Catholic sexuality while young people simply rejected the church when it failed to innovate quickly enough. The feminist turn of the 1980s came as too little too late for either institutional reform or the creation of a larger dissident movement from within the church. The question of how to define pre-1980s activism by Catholic women remains a thorny theoretical matter. Although not outwardly emancipatory, women such as the KFD leader Marianne Dirks were far from reactionary, and scholarship about them that deepens our understanding of their agency would be most welcome.
These three books show that in order for research on Catholicism to advance further, historians must account for the agency, activism, and power of Catholic women from World War I to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the contributions of Holtmann, Illemann, and Tichenor, even more methodological innovation is necessary. For example, the narrative of Catholic history must be more genuinely gendered through deeper analysis of masculinity. In addition, sexualities and queer experiences within the church must be addressed: such themes cannot be captured with only a top-down history of middle-class women who led associations, shaped Catholic ideas, and ran for office. The intellectual history of women must also be grounded in assessments of social, cultural, and grass roots political realities.
Conclusion
Most books on women and gender in the Catholic Church repeat the claim made by Ann Taylor Allen more than a decade ago that scholarship on gender and religion is lacking because feminist scholars shy away from writing about conservative women and church historians are largely allergic to feminist theory.Footnote 39 Due to much good work done over recent years, this claim is less true now. Not only have the books reviewed here contributed to the intersection of religion and women's history, but there are signs that the study of Catholicism is becoming central to monographs about sexuality in Germany. Just as Noah Benezra Strote's integration of Christianity into his thesis about how Germany democratized illustrates how intellectual history accepts the religious turn, the work of major figures in the study of sexuality demonstrates that a gendered history of religion is vital to modern German historiography. For example, Julia Roos and Laurie Marhoefer engaged in a well-publicized debate about whether a moral backlash against the Weimar Republic's reputation for sexual progressiveness contributed to the democracy's downfall. In her argument that this backlash existed, Roos takes seriously the flexibility of the Catholic Women's League in the middle years of the republic on the issue of female sex workers as well as the conservative turn of Catholic women by the 1930s. Marhoefer devotes attention to the Center Party when making the case against moral panic having played a major political role.Footnote 40 Dagmar Herzog also has addressed Catholic sexual politics, arguing that associations of Nazism with licentiousness contributed to the CDU's electoral success and to Catholic conservatism in the 1950s, while linkages of National Socialism to sexual repression drove youthful rebellion against the church during the 1960s.Footnote 41 The most recent and influential synthesis of scholarship on German religious history by Thomas Grössbolting also devotes much space to Catholic teaching on sexuality and its diminishing influence after 1968.Footnote 42
Despite such breakthroughs, the gendered history of Catholicism remains marginalized. As Catholic intellectual and political history has left behind the confessional ghetto, the equally important history of women, gender, and sexuality has taken its place. Although scholars have done important work on the history of Catholic women's organizations and prominent women, Catholic women's contributions to politics and society are undervalued despite the reliance of Catholic clergy and politicians on widespread support from women and the influential generation that founded the Catholic women's movement.
There are additional narrative strands not yet covered in the books under review. Chronological gaps exist in the historiography, with no authoritative study of the Catholic Women's League or the Catholic Women's and Mother's Associations during the Nazi years. Although covered in part of Claudia Koonz's pioneering monograph about women in the Third Reich, the failure of other scholars to follow up on this research about Catholic women under Hitler in the decades since its appearance reveals how much work remains to be done.Footnote 43 We also need coverage of the Catholic Women's League during the crucial 1960s and 1970s because it was the more progressive of the two organizations, as well as comparative studies with Austria, where scholarship on Catholic women is also growing.Footnote 44 There is much to be done on how debates about women's autonomy and sexuality played out within parishes and local branch organizations. Currently, a gap exists between thorough archival research on elite women and statistics showing widespread and increasing disillusionment with Catholic moral teaching throughout the twentieth century. The fury of Catholic women at the Catholic Congress in 1968 over Humanae Vitae is well documented, but more work about the path to this crossroads is sorely needed. Furthermore, the history of Catholics and democracy is incomplete without a fuller understanding both of female voters and the handful of women who served in the BVP, Center Party, Christian Democratic Union, and Christian Social Union. Although we have some valuable contributions, the compelling narratives of historians such as John Connelly, Mark Edward Ruff, and William L. Patch remain incomplete without a deeper look at the crucial feminine block upon which Catholic intellectual and electoral success rested. Finally, historians need to examine the crucial question of whether there was any coherent form of Catholic feminism in Central Europe prior to the 1980s in order to fully assess the impact of the Catholic women's movement.
The field of Catholic women's history has also run into the same methodological barriers as historians of male elites. Modes of inquiry must be broadened for a deeper historiography of gender and sexuality to emerge. This step forward would involve a more serious engagement with Catholic masculinity. Although some scholars have started to explore masculine forms of piety, perceptions of the Catholic priesthood, fatherhood, Catholic university students, and ways of imagining a Catholic working-class identity, more work in this area would benefit the field.Footnote 45 Given the powerful role of Catholic men in shaping policy and laws involving education, the family, and reproductive rights, a deeper grasp of competing forms of Catholic manhood would be useful. In addition, Catholic attitudes regarding queer sexualities require deeper archival work. Given the central role of the church, the Center Party, and the CDU/CSU in upholding Paragraph 175 of the penal code until 1969, it seems that a more nuanced grasp of Catholic sexuality as well as queer experiences within the church would help us better understand why the 1960s witnessed largely just a heterosexual revolution in West Germany.Footnote 46
Finally, the field of Central European history about Catholicism is in urgent need of a historicization of the sex abuse scandal. Because public discourse on this issue just started in the last decade, an intellectual history of the topic can provide valuable context. Cases of abuse and press stories alleging clerical assaults have existed across the modern era. The point of such histories is not only to understand why both Austrian and German Catholic clergy contributed en masse to this global scandal from the 1950s into the twenty-first century—we must also grasp how Catholic teachings about sexuality created the context for it and how the Catholic reaction to the sexual revolution of the 1960s has pervaded the church hierarchy's troubling response. Given the high-profile role of several deeply conservative German cardinals and bishops, including the former Pope Benedict XVI himself, in trying to evade institutional responsibility by blaming the increased rights of the LGBTQ+ communities in western Europe and the United States for Catholic sex-abuse scandals, historians have an opportunity to demonstrate how the past has shaped our present moment. The fact that sex threatens to cause a historic schism in the twenty-first century church and several German-speaking Catholics are at the center of the debate is all the more reason for work on the history of Catholic sexualities to drive future research.
