The greater indignities perpetrated upon the heads of the Catholic Church in Germany now followed each other with such rapidity and violence as to overshadow the thousands of minor grievances. On July 27, 1874, Bishop Janiczewski, auxiliary of the See of Posen, was imprisoned at Kosmin for fifteen months for having assumed the episcopal office without the permission of the Government. The same day, Mgr. Koryskowski, delegated by the Archbishop of Gnesen to administer the affairs of that diocese, was sent into exile at Stargard. The Canon Woiyewski was imprisoned for having continued in his capacity as ecclesiastical judge after the imprisonment of his Archbishop. Bishop Martin of Paderborn was deposed from his bishopric; he refused to read the sentence which was nailed to the door of his prison cell; he was liberated, however, but conducted to the frontiers at Wesel. On January 18, 1875, the Seminary of Fulda, the most ancient establishment of its kind in Germany, was closed.
The record of persecution during the first five years of the Kulturkampf is an appalling arraignment of its perpetrators. Five bishops imprisoned, and all bishops fined and insulted, fourteen hundred priests incarcerated, all the seminaries closed, it seemed little short of miraculous that religion survived the merciless onslaught. Yet the end had not arrived. On December 4, 1874, Bismarck suppressed the embassy to the Vatican, an act which moved the Catholic people to send to the Sovereign Pontiff an address signed by all the faithful of the Empire. It was in answer to this address that Pius IX. published that eloquent encyclical of February 5, 1875.
Strange to say, however, all the previous legislation had not begotten the results that were expected. The clergy like the episcopate resisted the anti-religious laws, preferring exile, imprisonment and fines to defection, however tempting. The faithful stood loyally by their afflicted pastors, refusing with one mind the ministrations of ecclesiastics sent to them by governmental orders.
The Chancellor, therefore, was driven to a final resort to effect his purpose of extinguishing Catholic faith in Germany. Accordingly a new series of laws was elaborated, entitled the Sperrgesetz, or laws suppressing the payments made to ecclesiastics by the State. One cannot rightly term these payments "salaries," a word which indicates no other claim than remuneration for services performed. The amounts annually payed to the Church by the State were moneys which the State owed to the Church since the beginning of the century on account of the wholesale confiscation of ecclesiastical properties and revenues following upon the Treaty of Luneville in 1803. As such they had been formally recognized, and hence their payment to the officials of the Church was a matter of justice which the State could not afford to refuse without incurring the stigma of robbery.