A most promising reaction, mainly in Germany, led by men highly respected and eminent for their learning, set in against the Vatican Council and its decrees, in the so-called Old Catholic movement of the liberal circles of the Catholic people, which went the length, even in 1873, of establishing an independent and well organized episcopal church. Since then, indeed, it has fallen far short of the all too sanguine hopes and expectations at first entertained; but still within narrower limits it continues steadily to spread and to rear for itself a solid structure, while carefully, even nervously, shrinking from anything revolutionary. More in touch with the demands of the _Zeitgeist_ in its reformatory concessions, yet holding firmly in every particular to the positive doctrines of orthodoxy, the Old Catholic movement has made progress in Switzerland, while in other Catholic countries its success has been relatively small.
§ 190.1. =Formation and Development of the Old Catholic Church in the German Empire.=--In the beginning of August, 1870, the hitherto exemplary Catholic professor Michelis of Braunsberg (§ 191, 6), issued a public charge against Pius IX. as a heretic and devourer of the church, and by the end of August several distinguished theologians (Döllinger and Friedrich of Munich, Reinkens, Weber, and Baltzer of Breslau, Knoodt of Bonn, and the canonist Von Schulte of Prague) joined him at Nuremberg in making a public declaration that the Vatican Council could not be regarded as œcumenical, nor its new dogma as a Catholic doctrine. This statement was subscribed to by forty-four Catholic professors of the university of Munich with the rector at their head, but without the theologians. Similarly, too, several Catholic teachers in Breslau, Freiburg, Würzburg, and Bonn protested, and still more energetically a gathering of Catholic laymen at Königswinter. Besides the Breslau professors already named, the Bonn professors Reusch, Langen, Hilgers, and Knoodt refused to subscribe the council decrees at the call of their bishop; whereas the Munich professors, with the exception of Döllinger and Friedrich, yielded. A repeated injunction of his archbishop in January, 1871, drew from Döllinger the statement that he as a Christian, a theologian, a historian, and a citizen, was obliged to reject the infallibility dogma, while at the same time he was prepared before an assembly of bishops and theologians to prove that it was opposed to Scripture, the Fathers, tradition, and history. He was now literally overwhelmed with complimentary addresses from Vienna, Würzburg, Munich, and almost all other cities of Bavaria; and an address to government on the dangers to the state threatened by the Vatican decrees that lay at the Munich Museum, was quickly filled with 12,000 signatures. On April 14th, Döllinger was excommunicated, and Professor Huber sent an exceedingly sharp reply to the archbishop. After several preliminary meetings, the =first congress= of the Old Catholics was held in Munich in September, 1871, attended by 500 deputies from all parts of Germany. A programme was unanimously adopted which, with protestation of firm adherence to the faith, worship, and constitution of the ancient Catholic church, maintained the invalidity of the Vatican decrees and the excommunication occasioned by them, and, besides recognising the Old Catholic church of Utrecht (§ 165, 8), expressed a hope of reunion with the Greek church, as well as of a gradual progress towards an understanding with the Protestant church. But when at the second session the president, Dr. von Schulte, proposed the setting up of independent public services with regular pastors, and the establishing as soon as possible of an episcopal government of their own, Döllinger contested the proposal as a forsaking of the safe path of lawful opposition, taking the baneful course of the Protestant Reformation, and tending toward the formation of a sect. As, however, the proposal was carried by an overwhelming majority, he declined to take further part in their public assemblies and retired more into the background, without otherwise opposing the prevailing current or detaching himself from it. The second congress was held at Cologne in the autumn of 1872. From the episcopal churches of England and America, from the orthodox church of Russia, from France, Italy, and Spain, were sent deputies and hearty friendly greetings. Archbishop Loos of Utrecht, by the part which he took in the congress, cemented more closely the union with the Old Catholics of Holland. Even the German “_Protestantenverein_” was not unrepresented.