As a German-speaking Austrian, Pius Parsch belonged to a rich and complex cultural world that is often unfamiliar to English speakers. This cultural context has also played—and still plays—a larger role than might be expected in the Catholic Church due to the wealth, intellectual achievements, and institutional scope of German-speaking Catholicism. This, the second of six installments, explores this world as it pertains to Parsch with regard to the legacy of Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II, as well as the work of the theologian Matthias Scheeben. This essay argues that Parsch’s People’s Liturgy emerges as a theological and pastoral response to the long-standing tension between state-directed rationalization and a grace-centered vision of the Church.

Cultural Warfare

The Peace of Westphalia (1648) established a new system of self-governing confessional states according to the principle “cuius regio, eius religio” (“whose land, his religion”) and marked the abandonment of the aspiration to restore spiritual unity to Europe under the papacy. Granting a central place to the emotions, Baroque piety celebrated the goodness of creation and the popular expression of faith in processions and pilgrimages. Protestants also focused on the emotions in terms of their proper formation in the spiritual life, e.g., Pietism.

Confessional warfare shifted from the battlefield to culture—art, architecture, literature, and music—and to academia; by 1700, there were 10-12 Catholic and 15-18 Protestant university faculties of theology. Thus, for Catholics and Protestants, reason came to play a central role in academic theology. Moreover, through their administration of schools, the Jesuits and their pedagogy dominated Catholic education. Thus, their apologetic method of logical argumentation influenced many and, somewhat ironically, contributed to the ascendancy of reason. In attempting to defend faith by appealing to reason, they helped formalize a mode of theological argument grounded in rational demonstration; in later early modern and Enlightenment contexts, that same framework could be detached from its theological foundations and employed to sideline or relativize faith. A rift opened between a rationalizing and erudite theology at the universities and an accessible and emotionally oriented piety—such as devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus— among the pastoral clergy and the people. Theologians and clergy like Parsch grappled with this tension that still gripped the Church in their time.

A century later, the end of the War of the Austrian Succession (1748) solidified the position of the Catholic Habsburgs in Europe. The war, moreover, underscored the urgent need to address systemic political weaknesses. Royal absolutism concentrated power in the sovereign, who ruled through professionalized ministers and bureaucrats rather than aristocrats. Empress Maria Theresa viewed her rule as a divine mandate for which God would judge her. Therefore, as a stalwart Catholic, she saw it as her duty to return her recalcitrant Protestant subjects to the Catholic Church. (Her son and successor, Joseph II, saw things rather differently; one of his first acts as the new ruler granted religious toleration to Protestants and Jews in 1781-82.) She likewise saw it as her obligation to improve the lives of her subjects, which at the same time would make them more productive and thereby strengthen the realm.

All these political, administrative, and economic initiatives required a comprehensive reform of education, which the papal suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 made easier. The Silesian Augustinian canon Johann Ignaz Felbiger, provost of Stift Sagan and an expert in catechetics and religious education, drafted the policy. He published his widely used Textbook of Methods for Teachers (Methodenbuch fur Lehrer) in 1774, the same year that the Empress established a comprehensive and unified school system with compulsory attendance for boys and girls, 6-12 years of age. Firmly in the hands of the state, this school system sought to confer on a loyal and religious populace the skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Given a lack of teachers, schools, and funds, this project was initially more aspirational than actual.

Yet the solution was obvious. Mother and son saw the Catholic Church and its clergy as useful yet underutilized. As teachers and pastors, the clergy could improve the welfare and conduct of the population. The elevation of pastoral theology as a discipline at the University of Vienna illustrates this convergence. In 1591, the auxiliary bishop of Trier, Peter Binsfeld (who is better known for his involvement in witch trials) popularized the term pastoral theology with the publication of the Handbook of Pastoral Theology (Enchiridion theologiae pastoralis). The 1774 reform introduced by the Benedictine abbot Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch intended to bridge the gap between theology (theory) and care of souls (practice). The course of study assisted priests in their care of souls through catechesis, homiletics, sacramental celebration, and moral and psychological education. As a professor of pastoral theology, Parsch embodied this tradition.

Joseph II

After the early death of her beloved husband, Stephen of Lorraine, in 1765, Maria Theresa left behind the exuberant Baroque piety of her youth for a more sober and somber style akin to Jansenism. A Calvinist-tinged Catholic theology critical of the perceived moral laxity of the Jesuits and the Roman curia, Jansenism became popular in France in the 17th and 18th centuries. German-speaking reformers sympathized with Jansenism. Maria Theresa’s final confessor and spiritual director, the Augustinian canon Ignaz Muller, the provost of St. Dorothea in Vienna, one of the four imperial court churches, introduced her to these ideas during the last years of her life. She and her son, Joseph II, governed uneasily together until her death in 1780. She thwarted many of his more revolutionary plans while she lived, even while the general tendency toward “Enlightened Despotism” continued apace.¹

Joseph II is a controversial figure. His far-reaching and detailed reforms of the Church met enormous opposition from faithful and clergy alike, with critics calling him “The Imperial Archsacristan of the Holy Roman Empire.” Today, his legacy is often more generously judged because many of his aspirations have become commonplace in Church life. Out of a deep sense of duty for the welfare of his subjects, the Emperor wanted to restore the Church to what he believed to be its pristine and authentic state. Like proponents of Gallicanism in France and Febronianism in the German-speaking world, Joseph II wanted to rule the Church as a Catholic monarch without interference from Rome. The state, not Rome, should appoint bishops and erect dioceses and parishes.

In accord with his enlightened values of practicality and efficiency, the Emperor suppressed “useless” contemplative communities such as the Carthusians and directed every other monastery to undertake “useful” work, such as parishes, hospitals, or schools, rather than “useless” ones such as the public and solemn celebration of the Divine Office. From the confiscated property of religious communities, he established a fund (Religionsfonds) for his Church reforms to build and maintain parishes, schools, hospitals, and to pay the clergy.² Joseph II also wanted a unified catechism for his whole empire and wanted the German language used in simplified, rationalized rites and in preaching. He outlawed the formation of seminarians outside of imperial seminaries under state control. Joseph II dreamed of a compliant, enlightened clergy to supervise the morality of the people, collect taxes, and ensure obedience to the rulers.

The Emperor died in 1790, witnessing the failure of many of his political reforms. Nevertheless, his Church policy remained effective until the concordat of 1855. Priests had to navigate the ambivalence of being pastors of souls as well as agents of the state. Like the state, the Church also became increasingly bureaucratic. Poverty, alcoholism, and illegitimacy among the populace accompanied the arrival of the first stages of industrialization and urbanization in the tough years after the Napoleonic wars. Visitation reports noted that social conformity rather than conviction appeared to drive Mass attendance. Yet the Romantic movement indicated a shift in mood away from the Enlightenment and Josephinism. For example, St. Clemens Maria Hofbauer (1751–1820) influenced a generation of Catholic leaders through his pastoral work at the University of Vienna, including the missionary Frederic Baraga, who in 1857 became the founding bishop of the Diocese of Sault Sante Marie with his residence in Marquette, MI (renamed the Diocese of Marquette in 1937). St. Clemens’s efforts earned him the title “Apostle of Vienna.”

Reasoned Faith vs. Rationalism

Romanticism gave believers and theologians the chance to slip out of the irrational prison of rationalism, allowing reason to contemplate mystery and beauty without explaining them away. Parsch credits the Rhineland theologian Matthias Scheeben (1835-1888) for his appreciation of the primacy of grace in the life of a Christian, as opposed to human effort framed chiefly in terms of commands and rules. Parsch developed a grace-centered piety (Gnadenfrömmigkeit) and encouraged frequent Holy Communion (already promoted by Pope Pius X) to replace commandment-centered piety (Gebotsfrömmigkeit) and scrupulous Confession, which clearly aligned with the Josephinist function of the Church as a moral enforcer and discipliner of the people. Parsch believed that pastoral life in his own day was still far too rationalistic.³ The Church mimicked socialist organizational successes rather than trusting in grace.⁴

Scheeben derives his ecclesiology from his theology of grace. He pictured the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ or as the People of God (as Vatican II later articulated), rather than primarily in juridical or institutional terms (as emphasized in the Tridentine decrees on hierarchy and sacramental order and later reinforced by the Josephinist reforms). Parsch criticized the tendency to see parish life primarily in terms of organizational development and to measure success in numbers rather than in unfolding the life of grace. Operating in the new post–World War I context of elections and political parties, Catholic Action and other earlier associations gave the laity a limited sphere of active participation in the Church’s mission (see Pope Pius XI’s Ubi arcano). However, Parsch criticized the reduction of Catholic Action to political activity, rather than seeing it as a subordinate aspect or a potential fruit of the People’s Liturgy.⁵ Scheeben also played a leading role in defending the rights of Catholics. He stood out in particular during the Kulturkampf between the Prussian-dominated (that is, Protestant-dominated) German Empire and the Catholic Church in the years after the First Vatican Council in the 1870s.

Europeans struggled to find the right balance between the Catholic Church and the modern state. German liberals, for example, developed a critique of Catholics as unfit for modernity due to a lack of proper formation (Bildungsdefizit). According to this line of social analysis, this deficit accounted for the underrepresentation of Swiss and German Catholics in the upper echelons of commerce, higher education, the military, and the government. Concurrently, Catholics articulated the social doctrine of the Church to cast light on the widespread poverty and social dislocation brought about by liberalism and to offer a humane alternative to socialism.

In the more intense phases of the Kulturkampf (“struggle over culture”), Catholics and liberals alike turned to political, legal, and media channels to advance their respective causes. Although the specific character of this response differed between Germany and Switzerland as Protestant-majority lands, and Austria as a Catholic-majority land, the contentious issues—education, marriage, family—were the same. The post–Vatican I Kulturkampf in Germany and Switzerland cooled as Catholics and political liberals found common cause against socialists; this alliance helped consolidate the Catholic milieu in ardent fidelity to Rome (i.e., ultramontanism), while many liberal Catholics broke away to join the “Old Catholic Church.”

The Josephinist subordination of the Catholic Church to the state ended in 1850, resulting in a flourishing people’s church (Volkskirche) and renewed ties to Rome. The 1855 concordat between the Danube Monarchy and Rome, however, gave such preferential treatment to the Catholic Church that it inflamed liberal opinion. With the May Laws in 1868, liberals retracted the key concessions the government had made to the Catholic Church in the concordat and set the legal basis for the separation of church and state. That setback ignited and mobilized Catholics, thus shaping politics for the coming decades.

Politics of Liturgy

These developments—state control, rationalization, and the fragmentation of theology and piety—formed the world that Parsch sought to reform. Parsch understood the People’s Liturgy (Volksliturgie) as a Christian response to his circumstances. Even though he did not engage in party politics, his work was nevertheless political. Like the liberals, he observed a deficit of formation (Bildungsdefizit) that rendered the Church unfit for modernity. Parsch desired to reshape his world through founding communities of liturgically and biblically awakened (erwachte) believers.

This renewed Christianity required a new vision of the parish, the laity, bishops, and priests. Indeed, while Parsch reserved to the clergy specifically priestly activities such as the offering of the Mass and the homily, he argued that the laity not only had a role to play in proclaiming the Gospel (Verkundigung) but also shared in the care of souls (Seelsorge) and in active participation in the liturgy. These claims rested on the common dignity and mission belonging to all the baptized and confirmed. Like the Social Democratic Workers’ Party in Vienna, he saw education as the key means to achieve his goal. Instead of participating in the Christian Social Party, he chose liturgical and biblical renewal as the most effective route to promote the social doctrine of the Church through personal and social transformation.

In the next installment, we shall meet Pope Pius X, who inspired the young canon, and learn about Parsch’s formative experiences in the First World War that catalyzed his desire for renewal.

The full series can be found here.

1. The French political economist Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de La Riviere coined the term in his 1767 work L’ordre naturel et essentiel des societes politiques (The Natural and Essential Order of Political Societies). Sovereigns who ruled in accord with natural law (as he understood it) he called “enlightened despots,” whereas those who did not he called “tyrannical” or “oriental” despots, because they ruled in an arbitrary manner according to preference, passion, or tradition. He argued that a strong monarch was the only sound form of government because it alone could rise above the entrenched interests of the nobility, the clergy, and the guilds to promote the common good.
2. After the Anschluss in 1938, Hitler stole the funds to weaken the Church financially. He did, however, allow the Church to collect a fee from its members—the “church contribution system,” Kirchenbeitragssystem—in the hopes of alienating the population from the Church. During the war, it offered instead an opportunity to resist the Nazi regime.
3. Pius Parsch, Volksliturgie: Ihr Sinn und Umfang (Wurzburg: Echter Verlag, 2004), 169.
4. Parsch, Volksliturgie, 287.
5. Parsch, Volksliturgie, 471-472.