ABSTRACT
The dogma of papal infallibility aroused a political counter-movement in Germany, which led to the so-called ‘Kulturkampf’. It was intensified by the fact that Catholics and Protestants had fought bloody battles here, the Protestant denominations, moreover, being in constant strife with each other. The ‘Kulturkampf’ properly speaking was preceded, in the first half of the nineteenth century, by another open clash between the State and the Church. Otto v. Bismarck wished to compel the recalcitrant clerics to acknowledge a demarcation between the domain of power of the state and that of the church so that ‘the state in its turn should be able to continue to exist’, the more so since he was convinced that ‘in the realm of the world the state had the right to rule and to hold precedence’. The heaviest blow against Catholicism, however, was not struck by faith, or by the lack of it, but by the hands of the temporal power.
