Prince Bismarck has been telling some Protestant clergymen of Wurtemberg
the real reason for his support of the Falk laws. The Papacy, he says, through the Catholic De- partment in the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs, was encroaching upon the authority of the State. This depart- ment had gradually fallen under the control of the Radzivill family, soft-spoken Jesuits were sidling into the Government, and the members of the Department were becoming "serfs of the Radzivills," when he interfered, abolished the Department, and so provoked the hostility of Rome. In the Polish provinces, the Church was actually Polonising " German districts. It was impossible to bear this, and so the Falk laws were enacted, as a "strong wall of defence in the inevitable conflict with the Papacy." He thought the laws worked well, and that the State bad recovered the position it gave up in 1830, when the King and Pope got on fairly well together. It does not seem to strike Prince Bismarck that any Church has the right to got what in- fluence it honestly can, and that for Catholics to prefer races with a tendency to Catholicism is not only inevitable, but right. The business of the State, if Catholicism grew too strong in the mixed districts, was to let loose argument, not to prohibit, as on many points the Falk laws do, the Catholics from propagating
their own religion.
Previous page
