SCHULTE, Johann Friedrich von. - Canonist and legal historian, b. 23 April 1827 at Winterberg (Westphalia), d. at Merano on 19 December 1914. Having obtained his doctorate in utroque iure at Berlin in 1851, he became a Privatdozent at Bonn in 1853, in 1854 extraordinary professor of canon law at Prague, and in 1855 ordinary professor of canon law and of the history of Germanic law at the same university; in 1871 he moved to Bonn and held the same teaching post there until 1906, the year in which he retired to Merano.
A counselor of the ecclesiastical matrimonial tribunal of Prague (1856-71) and a deputy to the German Reichstag (1874-79), he was granted the hereditary noble title of knight by Emperor Franz Joseph in 1869. He was an author of great fecundity. His most important works are the System des allgemeinen katholischen Kirchenrechts (Giessen 1856), Die Lehre von den Quellen des katholischen Kirchenrechts (ibid. 1860), the Lehrbuch des katholischen Kirchenrechts (ibid. 1863 ff.), the edition, together with Richter, of the Canones et decreta Concilii Tridentini (Berlin 1851); his fundamental work is Die Geschichte der Quellen und Literatur des kanonischen Rechts (3 vols., Stuttgart 1875-80), which undoubtedly constitutes the most important fruit of his life as a scholar.
S. was a man of great intellect and great capacity for work: he had a proud, independent character, which sincerely sought the truth, but which could be harsh and partial. Devoted to the Catholic Church until 1870, after the proclamation of the dogma of papal infallibility he passed over to Old Catholicism, of which he was, for Germany, the soul and undisputed head. This movement owes to him its organization: the election of bishops, statutory recognition, the drafting of the trade-union statute, the disciplinary law of the clergy, the abolition of celibacy.
As regards his work as a scholar, it must be affirmed that the Geschichte der Quellen (with the related preliminary researches published in the form of articles) earns him the name of father of the study of classical canonistics, inasmuch as he was the first to study the vast manuscript material scattered throughout Europe, to enumerate and evaluate writers and writings of canon law up to his own time, and thus to create the basis for the broadest studies in this field. He errs, however, often through superficiality and lack of scientific precision. The works written after 1870, even if they are not among his polemical writings, manifest his open, bitter aversion to the Catholic Church and in particular to the Roman papacy.
Bibliography3 works
Alfonso M. Stickler