“Disrupted ecclesial internationality”

Abstract

The Internationale Kirchliche Zeitschrift (International Church Journal: IKZ) was founded in 1893 under the name Revue Internationale de Theologie as an academic Old Catholic journal with a focus on the “reunion of the churches” as proposed by Dollinger, drawing on Old Catholic, early church principles. With the outbreak of the First World War, the journal, which was active in both belligerent and neutral countries, came under pressure. The IKZ, which was published in Bern, in neutral Switzerland, committed itself to a position of strict neutrality; this policy, combined with the tireless striving of the editor-in-chief Adolf Kury to draw in theologians and potential subscribers in neutral countries, not only made possible the continued existence of the IKZ through the war, but led also to the deepening of the journal’s ecclesiastical ideal and the strengthening of its ecumenical profile, and allowed the IKZ to become integrated into the Faith and Order movement established in 1910. The IKZ became the most important European source of information about the Faith and Order movement; it also provided a link between the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht at a time when other church fora and structures could no longer function. The bishops’ wartime pastoral letters played a similar linking role, and many of these were discussed in the IKZ in 1917. The German bishop Moog’s pastoral letters corresponded to some of the usual patterns of interpretation of the war, but they did not further the war; those of the Swiss bishop Herzog were were in a good sense exercises in apologetics for Christianity as a cultural power that could not be easily destroyed by the war. Both bishops sought to foster communion.