TEDESCO-CATTOLICI. – The spiritual climate in which this sect arose was the rationalism of the Enlightenment type, still fairly widespread in certain circles
of German Catholics during the first half of the nineteenth century, and capable of provoking broad waves of discontent against the forms in which the Catholic revival of Germany was then making itself felt among the clergy and the people.
The fusion of the schismatic communities founded shortly beforehand (1845) ROSONE (v.) and Czeraki (v.), to which other groups soon joined, was the concrete origin of the new sect, which initially took the name « Allgemeine christliche Kirche ». On 23 March 1845 it celebrated its first « council » at Leipzig, also changing its name to « Deutschkatholische Kirche ».
In the Confessio fidei adopted by the new sect on that occasion, the rationalistic tendency prevailed completely. Its principal points were: Scripture as the sole norm of faith (with the consequent denial of ecclesiastical teaching authority and of the Primacy), abolition of sacramental Confession and indulgences, of ecclesiastical celibacy, of the veneration of the saints, relics, and sacred images, and abolition of fasts and pilgrimages; of the Sacraments, only Baptism and the Supper (under both species) were retained, while the Mass was replaced by a German-language liturgy without a Canon. More than this confusion, what held the movement together was its anti-Roman and nationalistic spirit. The movement, which always had its largest nucleus in Silesia, reached its peak in 1847: at the « Council » of Berlin (25–29 May), 259 communities were represented, with approximately 60,000–80,000 adherents. In 1846 it also spread among Germans living in North America, and after 1848 in Bavaria and Austria.
At the same time, however, its internal unity was disintegrating; various circles, dissatisfied with Ronge’s excessively liberal orientation, broke away, founding the group of the « Protestkatholiken » on 15 July 1846. Ronge’s movement, increasingly reduced in numbers and more devoid of religious content, joined in 1859 the atheist organization « Bund freier religiöser Gemeinden Deutschlands », which in turn merged in 1921 with the « Freidenkerbund », forming the « Volksbund für Geistesfreiheit », and continued within it the struggle against all positive Christianity and, in particular, against the Catholic Church. The history of the t.-c. is interesting less in itself than because it presents the characteristic features and typical evolution of the sects that separated from the Church in the nineteenth century: rationalism and nationalism, ending in free thought and the struggle against all positive Christianity.