|
The National Reich Church, officially The German Evangelical Church ((ドイツ語:Deutsche Evangelische Kirche)) and colloquially Reichskirche, was a unified state church that espoused a single doctrine compatible with National Socialism. The Protestant opposition to Nazism established a rival German Evangelical Church, called the Confessing Church, an umbrella of independent regional churches.〔 "Unification, World Wars, and Nazism"〕 After World War II, both of these bodies were replaced by the new umbrella called Evangelical Church in Germany. The National Reich Church abolished the ministerial priesthood and supplanted them with National Reich orators; it also prohibited the publication of the Christian Bible and called for the ''Mein Kampf'' to be placed on the altar table in its stead.〔 In addition, in the parishes of the National Reich Church, the swastika replaced the Christian cross.〔 Services of the National Reich Church were held on Saturday evenings, rather than Sunday mornings. ==Background== In the reorganization of the German states during German mediatisation and the Napoleonic era, in many of the new or territorially extended states, churches previously under other meanwhile dethroned rulers came under the jurisdiction and control of new governments. Many rather monodenominational German states had turned into multidenominational between 1803 and 1815 due to the widespread annexations of smaller states whose people clung to other creeds. At that time in no German state government and religion were separated. State governments abolished older local or regional statutes prohibiting the settlement of adherents of certain creeds in municipalities, towns or even regions whose populations had consisted so far only of adherents of another creed. For example, the formerly Catholic free imperial cities of Überlingen and Ravensburg had to accept Protestant citizens, and provide a place for Protestant worship; similarly, formerly Protestant cities as Schwäbisch Hall had to offer Catholics a place of religious worship. In the 1820s almost all Roman Catholic diocesan boundaries in Germany were redrawn according to the new state borders (see Roman Catholic dioceses in Germany after 1821). As to Protestantism in Germany, then almost exclusively consisting of either Lutheran or Reformed Christians (Calvinists), with very few Mennonites only in Northern Germany, state governments sought to reorganize — ''modernize'' — the cumbersome system of Protestant congregational fragmentation into statewide streamlined, economical ecclesiastical structures, often crossing borders of Protestant denominational or regional traditions. In the 19th century, states such as the Grand Duchy of Baden, and the kingdoms of Prussia, Württemberg, and Saxony sought to reduce religious conflict among their subjects by legitimising a range of Protestant practices that required individual Protestant congregations to accept individuals of other Protestant creeds. In Prussia, for example, with distinctly Catholic, Reformed or Lutheran areas, but also Reformed faithful living as diaspora in many urban centres, like the then king and his children in then prevailingly Lutheran Berlin, the King Frederick William III — married to a Lutheran — established this with the Prussian Union of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches, or sometimes, simply, the Union, originally aiming at a unified Protestant confession, but after strong resistance materialising as an only administrative union of congregations of different Protestant confessions within one umbrella church body. In Baden Lutherans and Calvinists (Reformed Christians) merged in a church of united confession in 1821 (today's United Evangelical Protestant Church in Baden) and in Württemberg, the unified Evangelical State Church in Württemberg of Lutheran tradition but Upper German Reformed liturgy, were established via organization edicts issued following mediatisation. In Saxony and the then Thuringian states, like in most of Bavaria (except of the then Bavarian Rhenish Palatinate) and all of Northwestern Germany Lutherans and Calvinists never merged. The practice of merging Lutherans and Calvinists (Reformed Christians) was not universally accepted; dissenting mostly Lutheran groups frequently sought permission to migrate to other German states, Australia, the United States, Canada and Brazil so that they could practice their own particular "brand" of Lutheran or other Protestant worship. In particular, the Old Lutheran communities in Germany, Missouri, South Australia, and Ontario, Canada came from this movement. In overseas these communities maintained strong ties to the homeland, continued to speak German over generations, and developed extensive education and mission programs such as that offered at the seminary in Neuendettelsau, in Franconia. In the establishment of a German central government after 1871, a consequence of the German unification, new tensions of what it meant to be a German merged with notions of religious differences, creating a so-called Kulturkampf, or War of Culture against the Catholic church in the 1870s. The Kulturkampf aimed to restrain and hamper the factual or rather imagined influence of the Catholic church. There was little solidarity of Protestants and Protestant churches with the Catholic church under political attack. To prevent criticism of state policies, whether national or regional, an 1871 Pulpit Law prohibited pastors and priests from discussing state policy in their homilies, mostly hitting Catholic priests whose church and institutions were the government target. In particular, this law targeted a nascent German Old Catholic Church movement, one free of ultra-montanism, or control by the Vatican. A widely spread belief in a Jesuit conspiracy to taint the new "Germany" gathered momentum, particularly focused against the regions in which Catholicism had a long-standing foothold, such as Bavaria, Baden, the middle Rhineland, in the vicinity of the former Electorate of Cologne in then Prussia. The movement further targeted Jews, (especially those newly-arriving from Russian Poland), and a few hundreds of Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses — like other new Protestant denominations — then still suspect to sectarianism. At the same time, political organizations, such as the Catholic Centre Party, acquired political clout by supporting religious liberty, defending access of Catholics and other groups to primary, secondary and university education, employment, and professions, promoting the idea that legal equality was the basis of government. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「National Reich Church」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|