Klerus und abweichendes Verhalten. Zur Sozialgeschichte katholischer Priester im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Erzdiözese Freiburg by Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen

Abstract

Klerus und abweichendes Verhalten. Zur Sozialgeschichte katholischer Priester im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Erzdioezese Freiburg. By Irmtraud Goetz von Olenhusen Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft, Band 106. (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1994. Pp. 503. DM 78,-.) Scholars of modern German Catholicism have long viewed the clergy as the chief architects of the tightly integrated confessional milieu that arose in the latter nineteenth century. The functionaries of a rigidly hierarchical, authoritarian church who yet retained a populist identification with the common people to a much greater extent than their Protestant counterparts, the clergy enraged or enthralled contemporaries with their power to control the religious and political behavior of the Catholic laity. All the more striking, then, is the dearth of studies that directly address the basic questions raised by such assumptions: who became a Catholic priest, and why? How and why did the German clergy become the pliant instrument of the ultramontane church? What was their function in the rise of the confessional milieu? (p. 17) Irmtraud Goetz von Olenhusen attempts to fill this void through an ambitiously conceived and innovatively executed social history of the Catholic clergy in nineteenth-century Baden. Drawing upon the personnel records of the Archdiocese of Freiburg, Olenhusen bases her study upon a content analysis of the files of 627 priests who were disciplined either by the church authorities or the Badenese state. Taking an equally sized control group, Olenhusen analyzes the records for a total of 35.8 percent of all priests ordained in the archdiocese between 1853 and 1899. She further employs statistical data from 4680 files which span the period from the 1820's to 1914. Such a rich source base allows Olenhusen successfully to combine quantitative and qualitative analysis. The focus throughout remains on the clergy as active subjects, emphasizing their human thinking, feeling and action (p. 17). Olenhusen's use of behavior as the basis for a social history of the clergy has merit in at least three important respects. First, the documentation produced by the official investigations provides valuable information, otherwise unavailable, concerning the clergy's social background, training, attitudes, and behavior. Secondly, Olenhusen correctly argues that what a society or institution defines as says much about itself (p. 15). Thus, examining the nature and the frequency of the charges raised against deviant clergy enables the historian to understand better the norms, assumptions, goals, and anxieties central to the ultramontane hierarchy's conception of the Church and the clergy's role in it. Finally, the unique nature of the sources allows Olenhusen to construct a richly textured narrative, one in which the effects of the broad trends revealed by the empirical data are illustrated and anchored at a local level through numerous, often fascinating case studies of individual priests. Chief among Olenhusen's findings is that the rise of the ultramontane clergy in the late nineteenth century was by no means the natural outcome of a generational change, as has been previously believed, but was instead the conscious creation of the conservative hierarchy (p. 393). The latter, in the context of the failed revolution of 1848-49 and the increasing conflicts with the liberal Badenese state in the 1850's and 1860's, instrumentally used its disciplinary powers against supporters of the liberal, enlightened beliefs that had been prevalent among the lower clergy in the first half of the century. …