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$29 RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA BeoWarlmtion

volve the destruction of the organization of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany. The severest blows were struck at the authority of 6. Effect on the pope, who was not even consulted

Papal Au- in the matter, and with the suppresthority and sion of the monasteries he lost a host

Property. of devoted adherents. The mingling of Protestant and Roman Catholic populations opened a way to Protestantization which was checked only by the infiltration of ultra montanism into the Roman Catholic laity and later into the clergy, and by the weakening of the State Church and the concessions of the government; while the erection of a German primacy fostered the schismatic tendency which characterized the Ger man episcopate in the time of Joseph II. Against all this the Curia could only protest, and with so little effect at the time that the spiritual estates hitherto spared were quickly secularized. Far more perilous was the fact that the promised reorganiza tion of the dioceses and chapters was not realized, despite the exertions of the primate, Prince Dal berg. Pending this delay vacant sees remained un filled, and the old bishops died one by one, until in 1814 there were but five bishops in Germany. The dioceses were administered by vicars general, and, as the number of suffragans was likewise dimin ished, the sacraments of confirmation and ordina tion could no longer be performed. Cathedral chap ters were also unfilled, and countless parishes were empty or impoverished, while temporal dignitaries, on the basis of the estates they had received through sequestration, alleged the right of succession to the prerogatives of presentation and collation which had been granted to bishops and monasteries.

In this general trouble Protestantism also shared. In Wurttemberg the property of the Church was declared to belong to the State; and in Prussia war expenses led to the confiscation of the property of those monasteries and spiritual foundations which still survived, only the chapter of Brandenburg escaping suppression, while in Westphalia the secularization even of Protestant foundations was accomplished within a few years.

In considering the legal aspects of secularization in Germany a distinction must be drawn between the various reasons underlying it. The abolition of the temporal lordship of imperial dio7. Legal As- ceses and prelacies involved no inva-

pects of the sion of church property, for this secular Process. power was due to purely political, not religious, causes, and originated under the conditions in which the Church, as the great civilizing factor of the West in the Middle Ages, had been forced to discharge many purely secular functions if all the higher culture of the Greco-Roman world was not to disappear amid the wild struggles of the ruder northern nations. Thus the Church opposed to the factions of the secular State the marvelous ideal of the spiritual universal State. But the days had passed when kings must reign through their bishops because they could not reign through temporal princes, counts, and lords, and by the end of the thirteenth century the political states had passed their period of disability, having become able to dispense with ecclesiastical guard-

and since the bishops could not, by the provisions of the papal brief, take any independent action, the secular authorities everywhere seized the Jesuit estates, even though the imperial councilor deemed this property to be essentially that of the Church.

The French Revolution was especially fateful for church property, for the financial needs of France were deemed too great to be satisfied by merely taxing such property. The excuse

5. Conse- alleged by the revolutionists formed quences of but the counterpart to the theory the French which gained supremacy in the Gal-

Revolution. lican Church, as well as among seventeenth-century Roman Catholic canonists in general, that the church property of the clergy consisted in their associations. This encountered Protestant opposition by its basal hierarchic identification of clergy and Church, and from the alleged usurpation of church property by the clergy the Encyclopedists (q.v.) argued that, since the clergy as a corporation was dependent on the State, the State could confiscate the estates of the clergy. The National Assembly declared, on Nov. 2, 1789, that all ecclesiastical property was at the disposal of the nation, at the same time guaranteeing the salaries of the clergy. The suppression of all monasteries soon followed, and in quick succession came the fall of the church organization and of the Church itself. Even on its restoration by the concordat of July 15, 1801, it was forced to submit to the sale of its property, although the government pledged itself to pay the clergy a suitable salary; and even when a portion of the Church's belongings were again returned to its own control, these were held to be not its property, but to appertain to the State and the communes. No less ominous for the possessions of the Roman Catholic Church were the consequences of the French Revolution in Germany. Here an important factor was the theory of " the law of nature," which had been evolved in the eighteenth century, largely on the basis of the legal tenet of eminent domain-a theory which by some writers was carried so far as to make the Church a mere society subserving the interests of the .State. In the second half of the eighteenth century the idea of secularization was widespread, and was exemplified not only by Joseph II. of Austria and the elector of Mainz, but even by the course proposed by a Roman Catholic canon, Friedrich Karl von Moser, in 1787. By the secret provisions of the peace of Campo Formio (Oct. 17, 1797) the emperor agreed to cede to France the greater part of the region to the left of the Rhine, including Mainz. This implied not only the secu,larization of this region, but also, since Austria claimed compensation on the right bank of the Rhine, the devotion, and consequent secularization, of church estates in the empire. Only the quondam prince elector of Mainz (now electoral archchahcellor) and the heads of the Maltese and Teutonic Knights remained spiritual estates; all other imperial spiritual principalities and dignities were declared secularized and apportioned among secular estates, chiefly Protestant.

The effect of these secularizations and the regulations accompanying them was so great as to in-