But to return to the clergy.While the monasteries and nunneries are going to the ground in superstition-saturated Spain; while eager workmen are demolishing the last hiding-places of monkery, and letting the daylight into places that have well kept the frightful secrets of three hundred years, and turning the ancient cloister demesne into public parks and pleasure-grounds,--the Romish priesthood here, in free Bavaria, seem to imagine that they cannot only resist the progress of events, but that they can actually bring back the owlish twilight of the Middle Ages.The reactionary party in Bavaria has, in some of the provinces, a strong majority; and its supporters and newspapers are belligerent and aggressive.A few words about the politics of Bavaria will give you a clew to the general politics of the country.
The reader of the little newspapers here in Munich finds evidence of at least three parties.There is first the radical.Its members sincerely desire a united Germany, and, of course, are friendly to Prussia, hate Napoleon, have little confidence in the Hapsburgs, like to read of uneasiness in Paris, and hail any movement that overthrows tradition and the prescriptive right of classes.If its members are Catholic, they are very mildly so; if they are Protestant, they are not enough so to harm them; and, in short, if their religious opinions are not as deep as a well, they are certainly broader than a church door.They are the party of free inquiry, liberal thought, and progress.Akin to them are what may be called the conservative liberals, the majority of whom may be Catholics in profession, but are most likely rationalists in fact; and with this party the king naturally affiliates, taking his music devoutly every Sunday morning in the Allerheiligenkirche, attached to the Residenz, and getting his religion out of Wagner; for, progressive as the youthful king is, he cannot be supposed to long for a unity which would wheel his throne off into the limbo of phantoms.The conservative liberals, therefore, while laboring for thorough internal reforms, look with little delight on the increasing strength of Prussia, and sympathize with the present liberal tendencies of Austria.Opposed to both these parties is the ultramontane, the head of which is the Romish hierarchy, and the body of which is the inert mass of ignorant peasantry, over whom the influence of the clergy seems little shaken by any of the modern moral earthquakes.Indeed I doubt if any new ideas will ever penetrate a class of peasants who still adhere to styles of costume that must have been ancient when the Turks threatened Vienna, which would be highly picturesque if they were not painfully ugly, and arrayed in which their possessors walk about in the broad light of these latter days, with entire unconsciousness that they do not belong to this age, and that their appearance is as much of an anachronism as if the figures should step out of Holbein's pictures (which Heaven forbid), or the stone images come down from the portals of the cathedral and walk about.The ultramontane party, which, so far as it is an intelligent force in modern affairs, is the Romish clergy, and nothing more, hears with aversion any hint of German unity, listens with dread to the needle-guns at Sadowa, hates Prussia in proportion as it fears her, and just now does not draw either with the Austrian Government, whose liberal tendencies are exceedingly distasteful.It relies upon that great unenlightened mass of Catholic people in Southern Germany and in Austria proper, one of whose sins is certainly not skepticism.The practical fight now in Bavaria is on the question of education; the priests being resolved to keep the schools of the people in their own control, and the liberal parties seeking to widen educational facilities and admit laymen to a share in the management of institutions of learning.Now the school visitors must all be ecclesiastics; and although their power is not to be dreaded in the cities, where teachers, like other citizens, are apt to be liberal, it gives them immense power in the rural districts.The election of the Lower House of the Bavarian parliament, whose members have a six years' tenure of office, which takes place next spring, excites uncommon interest; for the leading issue will be that of education.The little local newspapers--and every city has a small swarm of them, which are remarkable for the absence of news and an abundance of advertisements--have broken out into a style of personal controversy, which, to put it mildly, makes me, an American, feel quite at home.Both parties are very much in earnest, and both speak with a freedom that is, in itself, a very hopeful sign.
The pretensions of the ultramontane clergy are, indeed, remarkable enough to attract the attention of others besides the liberals of Bavaria.They assume an influence and an importance in the ecclesiastical profession, or rather an authority, equal to that ever asserted by the Church in its strongest days.Perhaps you will get an idea of the height of this pretension if I translate a passage which the liberal journal here takes from a sermon preached in the parish church of Ebersburg, in Ober-Dorfen, by a priest, Herr Kooperator Anton Hiring, no longer ago than August 16, 1868.It reads: "With the power of absolution, Christ has endued the priesthood with a might which is terrible to hell, and against which Lucifer himself cannot stand,-a might which, indeed, reaches over into eternity, where all other earthly powers find their limit and end,--a might, I say, which is able to break the fetters which, for an eternity, were forged through the commission of heavy sin.Yes, further, this Power of the forgiveness of sins makes the priest, in a certain measure, a second God; for God alone naturally can forgive sins.And yet this is not the highest reach of the priestly might:
his power reaches still higher; he compels God himself to serve him.