Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)
Jörg Seiler, ed. Literatur – Gender – Konfession: Katholische Schriftstellerinnen, Vol. 1. Forschungsperspektiven. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2018, pp. 216.
Antonia Leugers, Literatur – Gender – Konfession: Katholische Schriftstellerinnen .Vol. 2. Analysen und Ergebnisse. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2020, pp. 288.
Dominik Schindler, “Michael von Faulhaber und die katholische Frauenbewegung (1903-1917). Zeitgemäße Seelsorge eines modernen Bischofs.” In Katharina Krips, Stephan Mokry, Klaus Unterburger, eds. Aufbruch in der Zeit: Kirchenreform und europäischer Katholizismus. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2020, pp. 207-220.
By Martin Menke, Rivier University
In the ever-widening definition of church history, the role of women of faith remains an open field. The three contributions under review here demonstrate not only the extent of research that remains to be done but also the significant contribution that Christian women’s history makes to a greater understanding of Christian life in general, especially in the twentieth century. The first two volumes under consideration are the result of a multi-year grant-funded study on Catholic women authors from 1900 to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), while the single chapter throws new light on the support of Michael von Faulhaber, before his appointment as archbishop of Munich, for Catholic women’s groups as well as his views of the woman’s role in church and society.
The study on Catholic women authors was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and based at the University of Erfurt. Antonia Leugers, Jörg Seiler, and Lucia Scherzberg, well-known historians of German Catholicism, as well as other church historians and several literature scholars and experts in database-supported research, collaborated on this study. Establishing a database of 160 Catholic women authors, as many as the grant permitted, the participants welcome future scholars to append additional writers, especially from earlier and later periods, to the historical record.
Based on theoretical concepts such as Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “symbolic power” and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, the researchers inquired how these women fared as women authors and whether the authors met contemporary ideals concerning Catholic women. Did they dedicate their careers to upholding these ideals? Did identifiable subgroups exist? Which works caused scandal, which were forbidden, either by the Reichsschrifttumskammer or the Allied powers? Which authors went into exile? How did that experience change their views? While the volumes answer these questions, they lack effective summaries that conclude “indicators of processes by which these authors emancipated themselves from church norms by analyzing their fictitious characters” (vol. II, Leugers, p. 10) The authors of this volume analyze the degree to which Catholic women authors, in their personal lives and their fiction, adhere to the Catholic image of womanhood promoted by both the church and secular society, especially by the National Socialist regime. Many authors in their lives and their works differ from both Church and social expectations in matters of marriage, chastity, parenthood, and gender.
Instead, the volumes offer a wealth of case studies. Some of the authors, such as Gertrud von le Fort and Hedwig Dransfeld, were well-known, while others published only a few works. Each of the authors has their history. The Leugers volume includes a primarily quantitative summary of the women’s experiences, how many got divorced, converted to Catholicism, left the church, lived in same-sex relationships, had children out of wedlock, attempted suicide, chose cremation, were childless, etc. Leugers admits, however, that such personal information is sometimes difficult to obtain and that, given the limited sample, the data are more “symptomatic” than representative. This detailed qualitative analysis, however, lacks explanatory power. The more important questions raised in the project remain unanswered. The authors offer no conclusions about Catholic women’s emancipation, their understanding of gender, chastity, and parenthood. While some suggest disapproval of modernity, most suggest ways of accommodating it while maintaining a life of faith. In all cases, Catholic faith triumphs. Beyond this, however, this rich body of evidence cries for additional meaningful analysis. One wonders if these volumes report results from which results can be drawn.
Determining a work’s effect, i.e., its reception history, remains difficult. The project includes contemporary critiques of the authors’ works, mostly by Catholic publications. Many of the works were considered trivial. Those authors who adhered most closely to Catholic moral standards tended to fare well in the reviews. Those who problematized Catholic teaching or offered differentiated explanations of human behavior were often condemned by church authorities and Catholic publications. For the period 1933-1945, the detailed records of the Reichsschriftumskammer, which evaluated the publications for ideological conformity or at least compatibility, offer insights into the works. One of the regime’s objections was the Catholic praise for virginity and chastity. The regime denigrated women who chose not to bear children. A final measure of a work’s popularity was the number of volumes printed. In some cases, new editions were published well after the war, while other works sold only a few hundred copies.
While the research summary volume by Leugers, the second in the trilogy, focuses on the various types of Catholic women authors, the contributors to the Seiler volume, the first in the series (these two volumes are reviewed here; the third volume, also edited by Seiler, discusses the literary conflict between Carl Muth and more conservative, orthodox groups), offer insights useful for future scholars. Lucia Scherzberg, for example, analyzes the gendering of God throughout history and how Protestantism is often defined as male, while Catholicism is usually described as female. She asks how the authors constructed gender and what role religious affiliation plays in constructing gender. In general, she inquires about the role that gender plays in the thinking and works of these authors. Scherzberg provides no answers and poses these questions to future scholars.
In an apparent rebuke to Leugers, Scherzberg also questions “whether or not social scientific theory can capture the contingency of historical processes.” Social scientific theories often cannot provide micro-historical explanations.
Günter Häntzschel discusses Catholic lyric poetry. Interesting is his summary of the conflict between Carl Muth, who founded Hochland, the premier intellectual Catholic journal of the period before World War II, and who sought to establish Catholic literature independent of Catholic teaching, and Richard Gralik, who founded the Gral as a conservative Catholic magazine. Muth became the driving force behind an independent non-ecclesiastical Catholic intellectual life in Germany. Maria Cristina Giacomin addresses Muth’s concern about inferior Catholic literature more directly. Muth feared that Catholic literature, directed primarily at women and older girls, had been feminized. The first novel by a woman that Muth published in Hochland was a complex account of an anti-Catholic man and the Catholic woman who denounces him as a Lutheran for blasphemous desecration, but also reconciles him with the Catholic faith. Gendered religious identities, erotic undertones, and the protagonist’s refusal to bear children yielded much criticism. Giacomin argues that Catholic readers at the time were accustomed to clearly didactic novels in which the Catholic moral lesson was presented unambiguously.
Regina Heyder explains that while Catholics considered women’s chastity and virginity laudable before 1945, in the post-war era, chastity was considered a burdensome outcome of fate. Several authors explain that Catholic women authors described convent schools as places of repression and punishment, but also, more importantly, as places dominated by obscurantism and “void of intellectual and artistic nourishment” (Seiler, 166).
Martin Papenbrock analyzes book covers from the Beaux-Arts style to post-war modernity. While offering little commentary on the works’ Catholicism, he notes that publishers often commission book covers that do not accurately reflect the nuanced discussions provided in the text. They reflect more the times in which the book was published than its contents.
While both volumes lack an analytical, summative conclusion, they complicate scholars’ understanding of twentieth-century Catholicism. Women who read and could afford books, or who sought out lending libraries, were offered a differentiated and challenging image of Catholic womanhood, one that demands further analysis and explanation. These works paint a more complicated picture of Catholic womanhood, as the views of womanhood discussed in these volumes were ascribed to Catholic men of their subjects’ time, and ecclesiastical concerns about “modern” Catholic women. Most importantly, the volumes offer evidence of the significance to Catholic social, moral and cultural history of women’s agency.
Another instance in which women’s agency proved important can be found in Dominik Schindler’s discussion of the relationship between the Katholische Deutsche Frauenbund and Michael von Faulhaber, a theology professor at Strasbourg and bishop of Speyer. In a nuanced brief essay, Schindler argues that Faulhaber actively supported the formation of the Frauenbund and the Hildburgisbund, an organization supporting female university students. According to Schindler, Faulhaber largely adhered to traditional values, but insisted that Catholic values reflect the equal role many Catholic women played in securing the family’s income. He also argued publicly that Catholic theology proved no obstacle to women’s suffrage. While men remained heads of household, this did not consign women to second-class status. Faulhaber’s view of the family remained conservative. Still, he acknowledged that in an industrial society, a man’s wages might not suffice to meet the family’s expenses, and thus a woman might be forced to work. Faulhaber argued that women from the upper classes should be encouraged to participate in social and cultural life. In contrast, women in the lower classes deserved much support to earn an honorable living. He believed that women’s work was necessary to meet the needs of their children. Schindler argues that, even if Faulhaber’s views seem backward today, at the time, they were quite progressive.
The three works in question raise more questions than they answer, but there is justification for such works. While Laura Fetheringill Zwicker, Martina Cucchiara, and others, including the scholarship reviewed here, have made inroads into German Catholic women’s history, much work remains to be done, work that will enrich the record and challenge scholars to be sensitive to greater differentiation.
Under the terms of the Hitler-Mussolini Agreement, all those South Tyroleans who retained Austrian citizenship after 1919 were now considered citizens of the Reich. They had no choice but to resettle in post-Anschluss Germany. South Tyroleans who had become Italians in 1919 were given a choice. They could opt for Germany and be resettled as German citizens in Germany, or remain and be confirmed in their Italian citizenship. Lamprecht successfully illustrates the painful decisions that South Tyroleans, lay and clergy, had to make. As a result of effective German propaganda and Italian fascist repression, more than eighty percent of South Tyroleans opted for Germany. South Tyrolean laypeople opted for Germany primarily out of resentment of Italian fascism and Italianization policies. The clergy in the parishes, however, found the decision much more difficult. Most sought to remain in their homeland.
Another aunt, on the other hand, talks incessantly about the damnation that awaits Hirneise because of her turning away from God. For this aunt, there is no reality outside of faith, which is why she constantly asks God for forgiveness for Hirneise and her mother. This aunt’s husband is also strictly religious, but unlike his wife, he accepts scientific views to explain the world. For example, he sees the creation of the universe through the Big Bang as entirely possible. And he also accepts that people turn away from God, a stance that his own wife acknowledges with incomprehension. Hirneise’s mother, for her part, reports how her own mother (Hirneise’s grandmother with dementia) had demanded that her daughter remain completely abstinent until her husband—who, it should be noted, had left her—came back to her. The subject of the divorce is not discussed further, so it remains unclear why Hirneise’s father left the family. And of course, he never came back.
In the second chapter, Pangritz addresses the problematic distinction between the terms anti-Judaism and antisemitism. He shows that the distinction between a theologically-argued hostility towards Jews and a racially argued antisemitism, which has been repeatedly postulated since the end of the Second World War, has not stood the test of time. On the contrary, such a distinction harbors the danger that (Christian) hatred of Jews is trivialized by juxtaposing it with antisemitism. Pangritz proposes “not to speak of a break, but rather of a transformation of the traditional Christian ‘doctrine of contempt’ (Lehre der Verachtung) into the modern forms of antisemitism” (35). It remains unclear, however, why Pangritz returns to the concept of anti-Judaism later in the book (e.g. 119). The term has been overused by Christian apologetics, and Pangritz himself has pointed out that the academic distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism has not produced any new insights or meaningful differentiations. (30). Conceptual clarity would have been helpful here, especially since Pangritz argues well with Léon Poliakov, Peter Schäfer and even Reinhard Rürup that “antisemitism” should be used in its most general sense: “The word ‘antisemitism’ denotes hostility, hatred and contempt of all kinds against Jews and Judaism; this does not exclude differences in motivation, but includes them” (33). However, this small point is the only criticism I can make in the entire book.
But as Tim Lorentzen’s new book illustrates, it is hardly the first time that interpretations of Bonhoeffer have been based on his ties to the German resistance. Lorentzen, Professor of Early Modern Church History at Kiel University, traces the chronology of German cultural narratives about Bonhoeffer’s resistance, and their intersections with German Protestant memorialization, from 1945 to 2006. His focus on resistance (rather than German historiography about Nazism, the Holocaust, the Protestant Kirchenkampf, or Bonhoeffer’s theological writings) is a narrow lens through which to understand Bonhoeffer, but it raises interesting and provocative questions. As historians know, Bonhoeffer was a minor figure in the resistance circles—and yet this very aspect of his life has become central in the narratives about him. Would Bonhoeffer’s theology be as well-known and widely read today if this were not the case? Has the emphasis on resistance led to the historical distortions one finds in many works on Bonhoeffer? Conversely, does it offer insights we might not otherwise have into his theology and his life?
The film, which is beautifully shot and scored, but at times laden with clunky dialogue, begins with a glimpse into the domestic life of the Bonhoeffer family (warm and loving, and also tranquil until Dietrich’s beloved older brother Walter is killed in the Great War). Yet it largely focuses on Bonhoeffer’s involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, who became chancellor of Germany in 1933. The film flashes back and forth, from Bonhoeffer’s imprisonments in Buchenwald and Flossenbürg to the years preceding the war. It tells the tale of a young theologian whose participation in the 1944 plot to assassinate the Führer and overthrow the Nazi regime seems nearly inevitable. The flashbacks often muddle both the chronology and the film’s interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s de-contextualized words.
Breger rightly notes that following World War II, neutrality had a negative connotation and was often seen as a form of collaboration with the Nazis. Countries like Switzerland, and to some extent Sweden, did not emerge from the war with their reputations fully intact. Consequently, for many years, Vatican neutrality has received little attention in academic literature. This volume, which spans from 1870 to 2020, helps to close that gap by examining various aspects of the Vatican’s neutrality over these 150 years. However, the main focus is on the Vatican’s neutrality as defined in the Lateran Pacts of 1929, which also established the city-state. Breger states the goal of the project thus: “This book will consider the interplay between two normatively disparate subjects – the concept of neutrality in international law and the concept of the Vatican as a neutral actor in international relations” (Breger xii). This review will provide a general overview of the volume, highlighting a selection of the thirteen essays rather than examining each one in detail. I will focus primarily on essays that fall more closely in my own research purview, which deals with Fascism, WWII and the immediate postwar years.
Christian internationalism has yet to find a secure place in the various histories of twentieth-century churches. Very largely this is due to a persistent emphasis on national categories and narratives, but denominational perspectives have also fashioned a great deal of what we expect to find in the foreground. All too often, Bell and Oldham may be observed, usually dutifully and briefly, hovering in the background of anything other than ecumenical surveys. In the final volume of the recent Oxford History of Anglicanism (OUP, 2019), Bell flits about here and there, but there is no very confident sense of where to put him for very long. Meanwhile, Oldham, the United Free Church layman, has almost vanished from ecclesiastical memory altogether. This is an authentic tragedy because it indicates how horizons have contracted across the western Protestant churches in the half-century since their deaths.
After setting his agenda in the introductory chapter, Skiles outlines in Chapter 2 the religious conflicts under National Socialism, and more specifically, the division in German Protestantism between the German Christian movement, which sought to align Protestant theology and praxis with Nazi ideology, and the Confessing Church. For Skiles, at the foundation of that conflict was “a profound disagreement about the nature of divine revelation,” (p. 28) with the German Christians claiming to find divine revelation in history, national identity, and racial “science.” By contrast, the Confessing Church, in the spirit of the Reformation, held to the doctrine that knowledge of God is to be found in scripture alone. This chapter provides important context as it guides the reader through some of the early milestones in the regime’s conflict with the Confessing Church: the controversy over the “Aryan Paragraph” of 1933, which excluded clergy of alleged Jewish heritage from the pastorate; the subsequent formation of the Pastors’ Emergency League, which formed the basis for the Confessing Church; and the issuing of the Barmen Declaration in 1934. Skiles also effectively challenges in this chapter two common and simplified interpretations: that the Confessing Church was an anti-Nazi resistance group, and that the Confessing Church’s conflict with the regime was essentially about ecclesiastical freedom.
Chamedes summarizes the existing scholarship concerning the Church’s fight against communism and its willingness to collaborate with fascism. However, her insights about the fear of Western liberalism and materialism are novel and worth exploring further. For example, she cites Vatican archival records in which editor of the Code of Canon Law Eugenio Pacelli, future nuncio to Germany, Cardinal Secretary of State, and Pope, stated his fear that the U.S. entry into World War I was part of the campaign to secularize Europe. [2] The author argues that the Church perceived President Woodrow Wilson as determined to destroy the Church. As Chamades shows, the Church’s fear of liberalism lasted well beyond World War II. After World War I, the Church saw itself engaged in an existential struggle with liberalism, which explains its willingness to work with fascist regimes that opposed both liberalism as well as socialism.
Ten years later, Arnhold has published a condensed version of his doctoral thesis. In 245 pages, he tells the history of the establishment of the largest research institute in the Third Reich that dealt with the so-called “Jewish question”. Promoted by the Thuringian German Christian Church Movement (Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen), the institute was opened at Wartburg Castle in Eisenach – one of the most important places for Protestants –in May 1939 with the intention of tracing and eliminating all Jewish influences within (Protestant) Christianity. The aim was to prove – on its own initiative, without state influence, supported by various Protestant regional churches and with the collaboration of renowned professors – that Jesus of Nazareth, and with him Christianity as a whole, had always stood in extreme contrast to Judaism. Jews, however, had distorted the true message of Jesus, which the Eisenach Institute was to bring to light again. Accordingly, some of the staff also saw themselves as completing Luther’s Reformation. Luther had liberated Christianity from the papacy in the sixteenth century. Now, under the rule of the “God-sent Führer” Adolf Hitler, the time had come to accomplish in full Luther’s Reformation and remove all alleged Jewish influences from Christianity. The message of Jesus and, indeed, his entire person were to be “de-Judaized” (entjudet) – nothing more and nothing less.
The exhibition is well-crafted, offering a thorough and balanced introduction to the history of the Christian churches under National Socialism. At its entrance, a placard lists the curators under the leadership of the Stiftung Kloster Dalheim’s director, Ingo Grabowsky, and the scholarly advisors, Oliver Arnhold of the University of Paderborn; Olaf Blaschke and Hubert Wolf of the University of Münster; Gisela Fleckenstein and Hermann Großevollmer of the Paderborn Archdiocese’s Commission for Contemporary History; Kirsten John-Stucke of the Büren-Wewelsburg District Museum; and Kathrin Pieren of the Westfalen Jewish Museum. As our readers know, Blaschke and Wolf have written extensively about the churches under Nazism. The placard also contains an impressive and extensive list of archives, museums, and libraries, encompassing cities, towns, and institutions across Germany that contributed to the exhibit. Interestingly, there is no mention of Bonn’s influential Commission for Contemporary History or the participation of any of its academic board members.
Sachslehner’s emphasis on Hudal’s early ambition, constant desire for recognition, and embarrassment over his heritage helps to explain both his career as well as his extreme commitment to German nationalism. Hudal’s contemporaries soon recognized his ambitions and accused him of sycophancy. Sachslehner suggests that this need for recognition contributed to Hudal’s völkisch and pro-National Socialist positions as well as his later commitment to a free Austria, even as he helped hunted war criminals to escape. Hudal grew up near Graz. Proving himself intelligent, he won scholarships to obtain a Catholic education, leading to his ordination in 1908 and to a doctoral degree in Old Testament Scripture in 1911. In 1914, the bishop of Graz sent Hudal to the Anima in Rome to continue his studies. Such appointments were considered a stepping stone to higher office in the Austrian church. Hudal helped to ensure that the leadership of the parish and the institute remained in Austrian hands despite German diplomatic efforts to change that. At the time, Hudal believed his only suitable further promotion was to the episcopal seat at Graz, whereas his bishop believed a university post in Graz was a sufficiently dignified position.