GERMAN-CATHOLICS. - The spiritual climate in which this sect arose was the Enlightenment-style rationalism, still fairly widespread in certain circles of German Catholics in the first half of the 19th century, which provoked widespread waves of discontent against the forms in which the Catholic revival of Germany was then being announced in the clergy and the people.
The fusion of the schismatic communities founded shortly beforehand (1845) by the two rebel priests Ronge (q.v.) and Czerski (q.v.), to which other groups soon joined, was the concrete origin of the new sect, which at first took the name “Allgemeine christliche Kirche.” On 23 March 1845 it celebrated its first “council” in Leipzig, also adopting the name “Deutschkatholische Kirche.”
In the Confessio fidei that the new sect gave itself on this occasion, the rationalist direction prevailed completely. Its main points were: Scripture as the sole norm of faith (consequent denial of ecclesiastical magisterium and the Primacy), abolition of sacramental confession and indulgences, of clerical celibacy, of the veneration of saints, relics, and sacred images, abolition of fasts and pilgrimages; of the Sacraments only Baptism and the Supper (under both kinds) were retained, replacing the Mass with a German-language liturgy lacking a Canon. More than this confession, what held the movement together was its anti-Roman and nationalistic spirit. The movement, which always had its largest concentration in Silesia, reached its peak in 1847: at the “Council” of Berlin (25–29 May) 259 communities were represented with about 60–80,000 adherents. In 1846 it also spread among Germans residing in North America, and after 1848 also in Bavaria and Austria.
At the same time, however, internal unity was crumbling; various circles, dissatisfied with Ronge’s excessively liberal direction, broke away, founding on 15 July 1846 the group of “Protestkatholiken.” Ronge’s movement, increasingly reduced in numbers and emptier of religious content, joined in 1859 the organization “Bund freier religiöser Gemeinden Deutschlands,” which in turn in 1921 merged with the “Freienderbund” to form the Volksbund für Geistesfreiheit and continued in it the struggle against every positive Christianity and in particular against the Catholic Church. The history of the German-Catholics is more interesting for what it reveals about the typical characteristics and evolution of the sects that broke away from the Church in the 19th century: rationalism and nationalism, ending in free thought and in the struggle against every positive Christianity.