negotiations of Germany, knows full well that the political struggle was,
for a long time, and particularly for the last three years, a contest
between the religious confessions. Such evolutions of evil possess a
certain life, although it be only that which leads to dissolution. They
spring one from another, and the new growth is always an improvement on
that by which it was preceded. I say it with sorrow. The strife of
political parties comes at last to be civil war, which, in its turn,
becomes a religious war, and such war soon grows to a war of unbelief
against Faith, of antichrist against Christ. The end is not uncertain.
Christ will be victorious; for it is appointed that the power of hell
shall not prevail.” In such a state of things the first duty of German
Catholics is that they be united. It is necessary that the German church
should remain in intimate union with the Holy Apostolic See, relinquishing
all pretension to be a separate National Church.
The aspiration of our author, so warmly expressed in 1850, that the German
Episcopate should, in mind and action, be one body in the nation, acting
and suffering together, appears, in these later days, to have been
realized. It was also his firm conviction that it behooved them to labor
to obtain complete liberty of action for the church, particularly in
forming an exemplary clergy, both in the lesser and greater seminaries, as
well as in those higher institutions, the German universities. Neither
should the laity fail in the fulfilment of all Christian and charitable
duties.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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