In the meantime the anti-Catholics were busily elaborating their plan of campaign. A certain professor, Emile Friedberg of the University of Leipzig, published a rabid attack upon the Church wherein he outlined the policy to be pursued by his party in dealing with them. Among his suggestions, nearly all of which were ultimately adopted, were the following: The establishment of obligatory civil marriage; suppression of obligatory baptism; separation of Church and State; secularization of charitable works; a penal law against "abuse of the pulpit;" measures to prevent ecclesiastics not in harmony with the Government from using the pulpit; a rigorous surveillance of the education of the clergy; an order forbidding the appointment of ecclesiastics who by their civil or political relations could create difficulties for the Government; suppression of the Order of Jesuits; an interdict striking all Congregations not authorized by the Government; recourse to the State against the decisions of ecclesiastical authority; punishment of "abuse of power" by fines, and by suspension from exercise of jurisdiction; measures compelling the State never to place its powers at the discretion of the Church, never to punish an ecclesiastic resisting his ecclesiastical superiors, never to confirm the penalties ordained by the bishops; measures to abolish the sanctification of the holy days, etc.
All these measures and many more like them are worthy of note inasmuch as they contained the program of the real hostilities now about to begin. The separation of Church and State, being in the eyes of the Radicals, the supreme end, it was proposed to proceed gradually, destroying first the means of life in the German Church, stopping up its veins and arteries, and finally strangling all its activities, until it should at length have become so weak and inert that any measure for its extinction should be easy and successful. It was the proposal of men; God, Himself, however, was to show that the last word remained in His divine power.
On January 9, 1873, Falk, the Minister of Worship, placed upon the desk of the Chamber four resolutions, the object of which was to inaugurate a certain Civil Constitution for the clergy, and to place the Church entirely at the mercy of the State. After having proscribed the religious Orders, these new resolutions aimed at the destruction of the secular clergy.
