GERMAN CATHOLICS (DeutschKatholiken), the name assumed in Germany towards the close of the year 1844 by certain dissentients from the church of Rome. The most prominent leader of the German Catholic movement was Johann Ronge, a Roman Catholic priest, who in October 1844 made a vigorous attack upon Arnoldi, bishop of Treves, for having made a relic, which he alleged to be the holy seamless coat of Christ, an object of pilgrimage and adoration. On Ronge’s excommunication on this account, by the chapter of Breslau in December 1844, he received a large amount of public sympathy, and a dissenting congregation was almost immediately formed at Breslau with a very simple creed, in which the chief articles were belief in God the Father, creator and ruler of the universe; in Jesus Christ the Saviour, who delivers from the bondage of sin by his life, doctrine, and death; in the operation of the Holy Ghost; in a holy, universal, Christian church; in forgiveness of sins and the life everlasting. Within a very few weeks similar communities had been formed at Leipsic, Dresden, Berlin, Offenbach, Worms, Wiesbaden, and elsewhere; and at a “council” convened at Leipsic in March 1845, twenty-seven congregations were represented by delegates, of whom however only two or at most three were in clerical orders. Almost contemporaneously with the commencement of the agitation led by Ronge, another movement fundamentally distinct, though in some respects similar, had been originated at Schneidemühl, Posen, under the guidance of Johann Czerski, also a priest, who had come into collision with the church authorities on the then much discussed question of mixed marriages, and also on that of the celibacy of the clergy. The result had been his suspension from office in March 1844; his public ...