Ten Years Near the German Frontier: A Retrospect and a Warning

'A Pope can do anything – whom you shall forgive,' he laughed, 'is forgiven.'

'A Pope cannot do anything; the moment he approved of plural marriages in the interest of any nation, he would cease to be Pope. He cannot abrogate a law both divine and natural, and I doubt – '

'Do not doubt the power of the head of the German people, the Shepherd of his Church. The German people are the religious, the spiritual counterparts of the true Israelites, were begotten by the spirit, mystical Jehovah who made Israel the prophet-nation; mystically He has designated the German tribes as their successors. He lives in us. This war is His doing; our Kultur, which is saturated with our religion, is inspired by Him. He must destroy that the elect may live.'

'Again, I repeat, Germany can no more accept such debasing of the moral currency than she can encourage the production of illegitimate children at the present moment. I do not believe that there is a hospital in Berlin, especially arranged for the caring for the offspring of army nurses and soldiers. It is a calumny.'

'We must have boy children,' said the pastor, 'but that is going too far. Still, Deutschland über alles. We may one day have a German Pope with modern ideas.'

My friend of St. Peter's Lutheran German Church was out of town. I asked another friend to report the conversation to him. Our mutual friend said that Pastor Lampe smiled and said, 'There are extremists in every country. Tell the American Minister to read Dr. Preuss in the Allgemeine Evangelische, Lutherische Kirchenzeitung.'

But I am out of due time; Dr. Preuss's famous Passion of Germany, in full, appeared later, in 1915.

It is true that Austria's vote at the Conclave had defeated Cardinal Rampolla as a candidate for the Papacy. The Emperor of Austria had permitted himself to be used as a tool of the German Emperor, not willingly, perhaps, for Rampolla stood for many things political which the Absolutists hated. Nevertheless, he had done it, to the disgust of the College of Cardinals, who thus saw a forgotten weapon of the lay power used against themselves. They abolished the right of veto, which Austria as a Catholic Power had retained. But the Conclave elected a Pope who did not please the Kaiser. He was a kindly man of great religious fervour, impossible to be moved by German cajoling or threats. The knowledge of the crime of Germany killed him. Nevertheless, the Emperor William had curbed the power of Rampolla, as he hoped to destroy that of Archbishop Ireland in the Great Republic of the West. A powerful Church with a tendency to democracy was what he feared, and Archbishop Ireland, a frankly democratic prelate, the friend of France, the admirer of Lafayette, had dared to raise his powerful hand against the religious propaganda of the All Highest in the United States of America, where one day German Kultur was to have a home. The great Napoleon had thought of his sister, the Princess Pauline, as Empress of the Western hemisphere. Why not one of our imperial sons for the crude Republic which had helped Mexico in the old, blind days to eject Maximilian? Napoleon had made his son, later the Duke of Reichstadt, King of Rome. Why should not one of the sons of our Napoleonic Crown Prince be even greater, a German Pope – at least a German Prince of the Church expounding Harnack with references to Strauss's Life of Jesus? Why not? The vicegerent of the Teutonic God?

From many sources it leaked out that the Kaiser looked on the Most Reverend John Ireland as an enemy of his projects both in Europe and the United States. The Archbishop of St. Paul was known to be the friend of Cardinal Rampolla. All who knew the inside of recent history were aware that he had been consulted by Leo XIII. on vital matters pertaining to France, in which country the ultra-Royalists, who had managed to wrap a large part of the mantle of the Church around them, were making every possible mistake and opposing the Pope's determination to recognise the Republic. Archbishop Ireland had been educated in France; he had served in the Civil War as chaplain; he knew his own country as few ecclesiastics knew it. He, growing up with the West, in the most American part of the West, had brought all the resources of European culture, of an unusual experience in world affairs, to a country at that time not rich in men of his type. In the East, the Catholic Church had had prelates like Cardinal Cheverus, Archbishop of Boston, a number of them, but St. Paul was little better than a trading station when John Ireland finished the first part of his education in France. The tide of emigration had not yet begun to raise questions on the answers to which the future of the country depended. It required far-sighted men to consider them sanely. From the beginning Archbishop Ireland reflected on them. He saw the danger of rooting in new soil the bad, old weeds, the seeds of which were poisoning Europe. He was familiar with the coulisses du Vatican, knew that Rome ecclesiastically would try to do the right thing. But Rome ecclesiastically depends very largely on the information it receives from the countries under consideration.

The attitude of the opponents of the Catholic Church is due, as a rule, to their ignorance of anything worth knowing about the Church and their utter disregard of its real history. Their narrow attitude is illustrated by the story that President Roosevelt, in a Cabinet Meeting was once considering the form of a document which official etiquette required, should be addressed to the Pope. 'Your Holiness,' said the President. A member of the Cabinet objected. This title from a Protestant President! 'Do you want me to call the Pope the Son of the Scarlet Lady?' asked the President. The objection was as valid as that of the Puritan who objected to sign a letter 'Yours faithfully' because he was not his faithfully!

In the celebrated Century article of 1908, the handling of which showed that the editors of the Century held their honour higher than any other possession, an allusion to Archbishop Ireland appeared. I have been informed that it showed the animus of the Kaiser against the Archbishop, who with Cardinal Gibbons, the Bishops Keane, Spalding, O'Gorman, and Archbishop Riordan seconded by the present Bishop of Richmond, Denis O'Connell, had defeated, after a frightful struggle, the attempt of Kaiserism to govern the Catholic Church in this country. Its beginnings seemed harmless enough.

A merchant named Peter Paul Cahensly of Limburg, Prussia, suggested at the Catholic Congress of Trier, the establishment of a society for protecting German emigrants to the United States, both at the port of leaving and the port of arriving. Another Catholic Congress met in Bamburg, Bavaria, three years later. Connection was made with the Central Verein, which at its convention took up the matter zealously. But the zeal waned, and in 1888, Herr Cahensly came to New York in the steerage so that he could know how the German emigrant lived at sea. He arranged that the German emigrants should be looked after in New York and then left for home. It was reasonable enough that Cahensly should interest himself in the welfare of the Germans at the point of departure, but entirely out of order that he should attempt any control of the methods for taking care of the emigrants on this side.

It was suspected that Cahensly had talked over a plan for retaining the Catholic Germans, especially in the West, where they formed large groups, as still part of their native country. This had already been tried among the Lutherans, and had for a time succeeded. The Swedish Lutherans, segregated under the direction of German-educated pastors, were considered to have been well taken care of. The war has shown that the Americans of Swedish birth in the West showed independence.

The suspicions entertained by the watchful were corroborated when, in 1891, Cahensly presented a memorial to the Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Rampolla, making the plea that the 'losses' to the Church were so great, owing to the lack of teaching and preaching in German, that a measure ought to be taken to remedy this evil by appointing foreign Bishops and priests, imported naturally, so that each nationality would use the language of its own country.

The object aimed at was to put the English language in the background, to have the most tender relations, those between God and little children, between the growing youths and Christianity, dominated by a mode of thought and expression which would alienate them from their fellows. In business, a man might speak such English as he could; but English was not good enough for him in the higher relations of life. He might earn money in 'this crude America,' but all the finenesses of life must be German. I think I pointed out in the New York Freeman's Journal at the time, that, if there were a special German Holy Ghost, as some of these Germanophiles seemed to believe, he had failed to observe that there was little in the 'heretical' English language so devoid of all morality as the dogmas proposed to govern the conduct of life in some of the Wisconsin papers, printed in German.

Some clear-sighted Americans, Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop Ireland at their head, saw what this meant. Kaiserism was concealed in the glow of piety. The proceedings of the Priester Verein Convention, in Newark, September 26, 1892, is on record. The Ordinary of the Diocese, Bishop Wigger, had protested against the stand the German Priests' Society proposed to take; he had announced his disapproval in advance of 'Cahenslyism'; he was stolidly against the appointment of 'national,' that is, trans-Atlantic Bishops selected because they spoke no language but their own.

The choice of the 'Germanisers' was the Reverend Dr. P. J. Schroeder – Monseigneur Schroeder, rather; he had been imported by Bishop Keane, afterwards Archbishop, to lecture at the Catholic University. Bishop Keane, like most Americans before the war, believed that Germany held many persons of genius who honoured us by coming over. When Dr. Schroeder's name was mentioned, a caustic English prelate had remarked: 'I thought the Americans had enough mediocrities in their own country without going abroad for them.' But Mgr. Schroeder had a very high opinion of himself. American Catholics were heretical persons, of no metaphysical knowledge; they could not count accurately the number of angels who could dance on the point of a needle! He arrogantly upheld the German idea. English-speaking priests were neither willing nor capable. The emigrants in the United States would be Germans or nothing —aut Kaiser aut nullus.

The German priests in the West claimed the right to exclude from the Sacraments all children and their parents who did not attend their schools, no matter how inefficient they were. The controversy became international.

In Germany, to deny the premises of Mgr. Schroeder was to be heretical, worthy of excommunication; in this country there was a camp of Kaiserites who held the same opinion. It is true that Bismarck had opened the Kulturkampf in the name of the unity of the Fatherland. It is true that the Kaiser would gladly have claimed the right his ancestors had struggled for – of investing Bishops with the badges of authority – and that he gave his hearty approbation to the exile of the Jesuits. Nevertheless, he was the Kaiser! Compared with him, the President of the United States was an upstart, and Cardinal Gibbons was to the ultra-Germans almost an anathema as Cardinal Mercier is! There was a fierce struggle for several years. Bombs, more or less ecclesiastical, were dropped on Archbishop Ireland's diocese.

To hear some of these bigots talk, we would have thought that this brave American was Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun. But the right won. Cahenslyism was stamped out, and here was another reason why the Kaiser did not love Archbishop Ireland, and another reason why Bavaria and Austria, backed up by Prussia, protested against every attempt on the part of Rome to give him the Cardinal's hat. This would have meant the highest approval of a prelate who stood for everything the Kaiser and the Bavarian and Austrian courts detested.

The curia is made up of the councillors of the Pope; a layman might be created Cardinal – it is not a sacerdotal office in itself – and while the Pope would reject with scorn the request that a temporal Government should nominate a bishop, he might accept graciously a request that a certain prelate be made a cardinal from the ruler of any nation.

If President Roosevelt had been willing to make such a request to Leo XIII. – he was urged to do it by many influential Protestants who saw what Archbishop Ireland had done in the interest of this country – there is no doubt that his request would have been granted. The Cardinals are 'created' for distinguished learning. One might quote the comparatively modern example of Cardinals Newman and Gasquet; for traditional reasons, because of the importance of their countries in the life of the Church; and they might be created, in older days, for political reasons. But the wide-spread belief that a Cardinal was necessarily a priest leads to misconceptions of the quality of the office.

If the French Republic were to follow the example of England and China, send an envoy to the Holy See, and make a 'diplomatic' rapprochement, neither Rome nor any nation in Europe would be shocked if His Holiness should consent to a suggestion from the President of the French Republic and 'create,' let us say, Abbé Klein a Cardinal.

Archbishop Ireland with his group of Americans saved us from the insults of the propaganda of Kaiserism. This name was synonymous with all things political and much that is social, loathed by the absolutes in Austria, Bavaria and, of course, Germany. The creation of Archbishop Ireland as a Cardinal would have been looked on by these powers as a deadly insult to them, on the part of the Pope. They made this plain.

The failure of the Cahensly plan caused much disappointment in Germany. The Kaiser, in spite of his flings at the Catholic Church – witness a part of the suppressed Century article and the letter to an aunt 'who went over to Rome' – was quite willing to appear as her benefactor. Much has been made of his interest in the restoration of the Cathedral of Cologne. This, after all, was simply a national duty. A monarch with over one-third of his subjects Catholics, taking his revenues from the taxes levied on them, could scarcely do less than assist in the preservation of this most precious historical monument.

He seemed to have become regardless of the opinion of his subjects. He had heart-to-heart talks with the world; one of these talks was with Mr. William Bayard Hale; the Century Magazine bought it for $1,000.00. It was to appear in December 1908. That its value as a 'sensation' was not its main value may be inferred from the character of the editors, Richard Watson Gilder, Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel – a group of scrupulously honourable gentlemen. This conversation with Mr. Hale took place on the Kaiser's yacht. It was evidently intended for publication, for the most indiscreet of sovereigns do not talk to professional writers without one eye on the public.

Speaking of his Impressions of the Kaiser, the Hon. David Jayne Hill says: 'It seemed like a real personal contact, frank, sincere, earnest and honest. One could not question that, and it was the beginning of other contacts more intimate and prolonged; especially at Kiel, where the sportsman put aside all forms of court etiquette, lying flat on the deck of the Meteor as she scudded under heavy sail with one rail under water; at Eckernforde, where the old tars came into the ancient inn in the evening to meet their Kaiser and drink to his Majesty's health a glass of beer.'

'Did you ever see anything more democratic in America?' the Kaiser asked, gleefully, one time. 'What would Roosevelt think of this?' he inquired at another.

'Hating him, as many millions no doubt do,' Mr. Hill continues, 'it would soften their hearts to hear him laugh like a child at a good story, or tell one himself. Can it be? Yes, it can be. There is such a wide difference between the gentler impulses of a man and the rude part ambition causes him to play in life! A rôle partly self-chosen, it is true, and not wholly thrust upon him. A soul accursed by one, great, wrong idea, and the purposes, passions, and resolutions generated by it. A mind distorted, led into captivity, and condemned to crime by the obsession that God has but one people, and they are his people; that the people have but one will, and that is his will; that God has but one purpose, and that is his purpose; and being responsible only to the God of his own imagination, a purely tribal divinity, the reflection of his own power-loving nature, that he has no definite responsibility to men.'

Nevertheless, in Copenhagen, we understood from those who knew him well that he was a capital actor, that he never forgot the footlights except in the bosom of his family, and even there, as the young princes grew older, there were times when he had to hide his real feelings and assume a part. In 1908, he was determined that the United States should be with him; he never lost an opportunity of praising President Roosevelt or of expressing his pleasure in the conversation of Americans. I think I have said that he boasted that he knew Russia better than any other man in Germany, and it seemed as if he wanted to know the United States to the minutest particular.

It is a maxim among diplomatists that kings have no friends, and that the only safe rule in conducting one's self towards them are the rules prescribed by court etiquette. It is likewise a rule that politeness and all social courtesies shall be the more regarded by their representatives as relations are on the point of becoming strained between two countries. How little the Kaiser regarded this rule is obvious in the case of Judge Gerard, who however frank he was at the Foreign Office – and the outspoken methods he used in treating with the German Bureaucrats were the despair of the lovers of protocol – was always most discreet in meetings with the Kaiser. I was asked quietly from Berlin to interpret some of his American 'parables,' which were supposed to have an occult meaning. There was a tale of a one-armed man, with an inimitable Broadway flavour, that 'intrigued' a high German official. I did my best to interpret it diplomatically. But, though our Ambassador, the most 'American' of Ambassadors, as my German friends called him, gave out stories at the Foreign Office that seemed irreverent to the Great, there was no assertion that he was not most correct in his relations with the German Emperor. Yet, one had only to hear the rumours current in Copenhagen from the Berlin Court just after the war began, to know that the emperor had dared to show his claws in a manner that revealed his real character. Judge Gerard's book has corroborated these rumours.

The fact that I had served under three administrations gave me an unusual position in the diplomatic corps, irrespective entirely of any personal qualities, and – this is a digression – I was supposed to be able to find in Ambassador Gerard's parables in slang their real menace. A very severe Bavarian count, who deplored the war principally because it prevented him from writing to his relations in France, from paying his tailor's bill in London, and from going for the winter to Rome, where he had once been Chamberlain at the Vatican, said that he had heard a story repeated by an attaché of the Foreign Office and attributed to Ambassador Gerard, a story which contained a disparaging allusion to the Holy Father. As a Catholic, I would perhaps protest to Ambassador Gerard against this irreverence which he understood had given the Foreign Minister great pain, as, I must know, the German Government is most desirous of respecting the feelings of Catholics.

'Impossible,' I said. 'Our Ambassador is a special friend of Cardinal Farley's and he has just sent several thousand prayer-books to the English Catholic prisoners in Germany.' Thus the story was told.8

It seemed that among the evil New Yorkers with whom the Ambassador consorted, there was an American, named Michael, whose wife went to the priest and complained that Michael had acquired the habits of drinking and paying attention to other ladies. 'Very well,' said the priest, 'I will call on Thursday night, if he is at home, and I'll take the first chance of remonstrating with him.'

The evening came; the priest presented himself, and entered into a learned conversation on the topics of the hour, while Michael hid himself behind his paper, giving no opportunity for the pastor to address him. However, he knew that his time would come if he did not make a move into the enemy's country.

'Father,' he said, lowering his paper, 'you seem to know the reason for everything that's goin' on to-day; maybe you'll tell me the meanin' of the word "diabetes"?'

'It is the name of a frightful disease that attacks men who beat their wives and spend their money on other women, Mike.'

'I'm surprised, Father,' said Michael, 'because I'm readin' here that the Pope has it.'

It was necessary for me to explain that this was one of our folklore stories, and could be traced back to Gesta Romanorum– merely one of the merry jests of which the German literature itself of the Middle Ages was so full, of the character, perhaps, of Rheinhard the Fox! This is an example of the way our Ambassador played on the Germans' sense of humour, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tried to play on Hamlet's pipe!

The German propaganda went on in the United States. Look at France, look at Italy, in comparison with Germany's respect for religion! The Falk laws were no longer of importance; Catholics were to be encouraged to go into the political service, having hitherto been 'rather discouraged' and even under suspicion, as von Bülow admitted.

The German was obsessed by the one idea – the preponderance of the Fatherland.9 He was conscientious, he had for years cultivated a false conscience which judged everything by one standard: Is this good for the spread of German Kultur?

'What do you think of all this?' I asked one of the most distinguished diplomatists in Europe, now resident in Berlin, the representative of a neutral country. 'There will be no peace in Europe until Germany gets what she wants. She knows what she wants, and since 1870 she has used every possible method to attain it.'

To return to the indiscretions of the Kaiser – indiscretions that were not always uncalculated. Mr. Clarence Clough Buel, one of the editors of The Century, felt obliged, in justice, to give an authoritative explanation of Dr. Hale's suppressed 'interview.' His account was printed in The New York World for December 26, 1917: 'The proof of this interview had been passed by the German Foreign Office, with not more than half a dozen simple verbal changes. They were made in a bold, ready hand, but as there was no letter, we could not be sure that the proofs had been revised by the Emperor. The usual hair-splitting of great men and officialdom had been anticipated, so with considerable glee, the trifling plate changes were rushed, and the big "sixty-four" press was started to toss off 100,000 copies.'

The London Daily Telegraph 'interview' of October 28, 1908, was a thunderbolt, and the editors of The Century, at the urgent request of the German Government, suppressed the edition. I had been informed by Mr. Gilder of the facts. I was very glad of it, as I was enabled to explain this very interesting episode at the Danish Foreign Office. Mr. Clarence Buel writes (it was his duty to read the last galley proofs): – 'But in the last cold reading I had grave suspicion that the Kaiser's reference to the Virgin Mary might be construed by devout Catholics as a slur on an important tenet of their faith. So the sacred name was deleted, and the Kaiser's diction slightly assisted in the kindly spirit for which editors are not so often thanked by the writing fraternity as they should be. This incident is mentioned to show the protective attitude of the magazine, and also to indicate that the original "leak" as to the contents of the interview came from an employee of the printing office. Only some one familiar with the galley proofs could have known that the Virgin Mary had figured in the manuscript, for the name did not appear in the printed pages and consequently could not have reached the public except for the killing of the interview. Let it be said, with emphasis, that there was nothing in the Kaiser's references to the part taken by the Vatican in looking out for the interests of the Church in world politics which could have caused serious irritation in any part of Europe. As a student at the Berlin University, I had attended some of the debates in the Landtag during the famous Kulturkampf over the clerical laws devised by bold Bismarck to loosen the Catholic grip on the cultural life of Prussian Poland. Knowing the nature of that controversy, and the usual, familiar attitude of (Protestant) Europeans toward religious topics, I could believe that everything in the article bearing on Church and State, from the over-lord of most Lutherans, was offered in a respectful spirit, and would hardly make a ripple across the sea.'