# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1861_S255
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary Affairs. 255

...arisen on Reformed soil Irvingism with its peculiarities, and from that source spring, there and among us, the chiliastic and apocalyptic stimulants."

From Mecklenburg the A. K. Z. reports: "Correspondents in Rostock had spread it about in the 'Protestant Church Gazette' that Consistorial Councillor Krabbe in Rostock, because of his alleged offense against Dr. Baumgarten, had been refused communion by his former confessor and was admitted to it by his present confessor only after a year, and that such exclusion had come about pursuant to a formal resolution of the Rostock ministerium. The Rostock clergy have, in the same newspaper, denied all these statements in full and declared them false rumors. After this publication by the Rostock ministerium, Dr. Baumgarten and 11 of his followers, in a petition to the magistrate, declared the confessional and the altar of the Rostock congregation defiled, and also invoked the protection of the magistrate against the unauthorized encroachment of the church government, by which, according to their account, the clergy had been compelled to make that publication. The magistrate has answered them that it considers itself incompetent in this matter. But since Baumgarten has also turned to the civic representative body, the aim of further gossip and further disquieting of the congregation will probably not entirely miss its mark." (N. Pr. Z.)

Döllinger on the Papal States. The Münkel newspaper contains under this heading, among other things, the following report: "A convulsive movement has taken hold of the stricter Catholics across the globe in favor of the Papal States, in order thereby to preserve the church's independence from secular power; and even Protestants have been caught up in the spasm, as though danger threatened the whole church from that quarter, and have entered into alliances with the Catholics and paid Peter's Pence. Nothing like this has ever happened before. All the more is the world surprised that quite unexpectedly a good Catholic man, the cathedral provost and Professor Döllinger — a very learned, gifted, and respected champion of the Roman church, who has dealt unsparing blows to Protestantism and to the person of Luther — has, in a thoroughly Catholic city, in Munich, in the midst of a Catholic assembly and in the presence of the papal nuncio Chigi, openly come out against the continued existence of the Papal States. The Catholic party had, namely, in opposition to the liberal lectures of the Munich notables, arranged other lectures before a mixed public, which Döllinger opened with subjects of a general religious nature, and in the very first of which he already touched on the Papal States. The surprise was all the greater since people had braced themselves for a decisive speech of defense and counterattack. In the middle of the lecture several ladies withdrew, soon followed by the papal nuncio, because he did not consider it fitting to lend the dignity of his attention to such dangerous principles. He is said afterward to have given vent to his feelings in unwelcome remarks.

Döllinger has himself been in Rome three times and has viewed for himself the state of affairs in the Papal States, which he accordingly describes as an eyewitness, supported by the weightiest testimonies. His view, in short, is that the papacy suffers grave harm from its secular rule and can only gain by the loss of a possession that has now become untenable, since spiritual power will grow in the same measure as it is no longer entangled in alien secular affairs. He appeals to the much-used fact that the papacy existed for 700 years without land, and so could likewise exist again without land. Only since Pepin has the pope become a secular prince; but if one wishes to say that only from that time on did he climb to the highest peak of his power, one forgets that in that very period, from the ninth to the fifteenth century, he seldom possessed his principality in peace, seeing that Gregory VII and Urban II died in a foreign land. The fact is correct, but proves partly more, partly less, than it is meant to. To confine the popes to purely spiritual power is to set them in contradiction with themselves, for their so-called spiritual power is no purely spiritual power.