The German Government, however, was by no means willing to accept these pronouncements as final. In the name of nationalism German unification was accomplished; in the name of nationalism German missionaries abroad must look to their own Government for protection. To admit a foreign claim to the protectorate of Germans was to stain the national honor. To accede to the French pretension that Catholic Germans occupied an inferior position in the East was to decrease the prestige of German citizenship. The Shantung incident was a noisy demonstration of the intention of the German Empire to recognize no such distinctions. The visit of the Kaiser to the Sultan in the same year, 1898, was directly concerned with the determination of _Wilhelmstrasse_ to assert the secular rights of German missionaries, Catholics as well as Protestants.[31] French Catholics denied the German claims and worked upon national sentiment at home to add to the growing fear of German imperial aggrandizement. “Catholic missions,” it was asserted, “by their very nature and purpose are a supra-national institution, similar to the sovereign majesty of the Pope.” What could be the purpose of the Germans in asserting the doctrine of the “nationalization of missions,” if it were not to undermine French influence in Turkey? How great would be the national humiliation if the protectorate of the Faithful in the East should pass from the hands of Catholic France to Protestant Prussia! The Germans, too, were prejudicing the Holy See against the Republic. A notoriously pro-German party at the Vatican, supported by their political allies, the Italians, were winning the sympathies of the Pope by insinuating references to “red France,” “schismatic Russia,” and “heretical England”! Thus was a dark plot being hatched against France and against the unity of Christendom![32]