When German Catholics Fought Back, by Casey Chalk

By Casey Chalk, The Catholic Thing, October 10, 2025

Casey Chalk is the author of  The Obscurity of Scripture and The Persecuted. He is a contributor for Crisis Magazine, The American Conservative, and New Oxford Review. He has degrees in history and teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College.

There was a time when German Catholics fought for the faith. One hundred and fifty years ago, half the bishops of Prussia were imprisoned, as were hundreds of parish priests, leaving more than a thousand parishes orphaned. All of them had refused to cooperate with various Prussian laws, often called “May Laws,” intended to suffocate the independence of the Catholic Church in favor of an “ecumenical” brand of Protestantism. German lay Catholics responded by providing hiding places for clergy, paying fines clergymen incurred from the state, and purchasing bishops’ furniture at auction. And they were just getting started.

As Roger Chickering explains in his recent book The German Empire, 1871–1918, this battle between the German State and Catholics was years in the making, and shows a Catholic Church in Germany that was orthodox, pious, and deeply fervent. It is not only a demonstrable difference from a German church today, which is hemorrhaging members, but also likely explains why the German-American experience – which included such a large percentage of Catholics – was itself so vibrant, giving us such saints as St. John Nepomucene Neumann and St. Marianne Cope. ….

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