In this expansion of his doctoral dissertation, Printy treats Church reform proposals of urban, literate German Roman Catholics active between the end of the Seven Years' War (1763) and the dissolution of the old German empire in 1803–1806. His thesis is that these people, typically professional servants of state or Church, promoted a Catholicism informed by German customs and conditions, conversant with Enlightenment thought and German Protestantism, and seeking greater autonomy from Rome. It was a German Catholicism able, he contends, to survive the loss of its legal underpinnings in the empire's demise, and remain an important political force in the German states and universal Church.
By the opening of the period Printy examines, the international peace treaties of 1648 and a few weak imperial institutions had held together the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, a welter of almost entirely sovereign states, for over a century. The Prussian Hohenzollern kingdom and the Austrian Habsburg empire had emerged as chief rivals, while “the third Germany” of smaller states was trying to maintain the old balance of powers. Rationalization and centralization of state institutions were well underway. Soon the French Revolution and French imperial expansion would transform the German political scene convulsively.
In the first part of his book, Printy treats German Catholic rethinking of Church laws and institutions. Since the state church had been Roman Catholic in much of western and southern Germany, particularly the Rhineland, Bavaria, and the Austrian Habsburg dominions, political change here included strengthened state oversight and control of Catholic seminaries, monasteries, and foundations. In some territories, of course, the bishop was also the prince. Printy describes German Catholic writers and dignitaries throwing their weight behind state consolidation of power over such traditional areas of Church life as taxation, jurisdiction, and education; and also behind greater independence of the German bishops from the Roman Curia. In 1763 the suffragan bishop of Trier, Niklaus von Hontheim, wrote an especially influential treatise on canon law under the pseudonym “Justin Febronius,” unintentionally bequeathing the name of Febronianism to the German national Catholic movement. By applying historical critical methodology to Church law, Hontheim and others tried to substantiate that the Roman Curia had made steady incursions, sometimes by the use of fraudulent documentation and especially by influence over the training of canon lawyers, into the arena of bishops' rightful authority in their own dioceses. Such reflections on the place of the German Church in the universal communion with Rome inspired the three Rhineland archbishops, also formally the leading prince electors of the empire and the prince-archbishop of Salzburg to meet at the so-called Ems conference of 1786 to organize opposition to interventions by the papal nuncio. These and similar developments competed with Rome's renewed attempts to tighten its own authority in Church life, as had occurred during the papacy of Benedict XIV (1740–1758). The result offered a striking German parallel to the struggle in France between Rome and the so-called Gallican movement promoting national control of Catholic institutions, including episcopal appointments. The key difference was Germany's political and confessional fragmentation.
Printy devotes the second part of his book to the project of increasing the influence of the Catholic Church in Germany by making it, in the view of the reformers, more intellectually serious and morally forceful. Appropriately, Printy is careful to remind readers that the reformers were an urban literate minority, “bourgeois” Catholics, not representative of the more rural “baroque” piety typical of the majority of German Catholics. The former were far more in tune with the Enlightenment movement, emphasizing critical evaluation and pragmatic reform of traditions to serve the purposes of universal spiritual and moral elevation and religious tolerance. Clearly they had their hands full in moving the mass of Catholic faithful. The obvious place to begin was education. Reformers supported the removal of Jesuits, who owed direct obedience to Rome and emphasized Latin, from their dominant role as teachers; and monasteries from their role as educational institutions. Instead, they encouraged German vernacular training for secular occupations, as in state academies. Reformers also engaged in publishing pamphlets and journal articles dealing with Church and public affairs. In conversation with enlightened Protestants, they promoted more effective preaching, limitations on monasticism, and standardization of clergy education, compensation, and supervision. Some reformers gave consideration to the abolition of clerical celibacy. One writer, Michael Ignaz Schmidt, wrote a path-breaking multi-volume national history that emphasized Catholic contributions to the moral and political formation of the German people.
Since the early nineteenth century, German-language scholarship has given occasional attention to this topic of German Catholicism in the generation of 1763–1806. Broad chronological and geographical studies of the Roman Catholic Church in early modern times have included surveys of the German story. Many works have treated particularly the reforms of Joseph II in the Habsburg territories. Some have examined similar developments in other German Catholic territories, from the duchy of Bavaria to the prince archbishopric of Cologne. Comprehensive book-length treatment of late eighteenth-century German Catholicism has been infrequent, notably Eduard Hegel, Die katholische Kirche Deutschlands unter dem Einfluss der Aufklärung des 18. Jahrhunderts (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1969) and Harm Klueting, ed., Katholische Aufklärung (Hamburg: Meiner, 1993).
Printy has added important substantiation to these efforts, in this, the first comprehensive examination of the subject in English. Part of his contribution in bringing balance to our understanding of the German Enlightenment and German nationalism is resurrecting, clarifying, and interpreting German Catholic writers who had slipped into obscurity. His summaries of key works should be welcome to anyone faced with eighteenth-century juridical and academic German. He could have offered more help in establishing how these works were reacting to immediate political events of the time, such as, in some cases, the French Revolution and Napoleonic takeover. Nevertheless, Printy makes a persuasive case that Catholic intellectuals shared fully in the German Enlightenment and the rethinking of church and state in the late eighteenth century.
