Back in the 1870's a newly united Germany, the Second Empire or Reich, was proudly flexing its muscles as a major new power in Europe. (The First Reich had been founded by Charlemagne and was dismantled a thousand years later by Napoleon, while the Third Reich would make its appearance down the road a piece, waiting for Hitler's appointment [1933] as chancellor of the Republic that took the place of Bismarck's Reich in the settlement after World War I. This Second Reich was principally the construct of Otto von Bismarck, Prussia's prime minister and, from 1871, the newly constituted empire's "Iron Chancellor."   A multitude of principalities, free cities, minor domains and major dominions populated by German-speakers beyond the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had come together under the leadership of Prussia in the wake of a war against Austria and a subsequent war against France, guided by Bismarck's skillful, determined and often intimidating diplomacy. Having established his writ as Germany's law, Bismarck turned next to bringing the Catholic Church to heel. He accordingly unleashed a Kulturkampf, a culture war, against the Catholic Church and its political ally, the Center Party. Among the measures imposed by Bismarck to give teeth to his Kulturkampf was the government's assumption of direct control over all of the new Reich's schools, including the Church's schools and even its seminaries, with expulsion of the Jesuits as a follow-on. The Church and the Center Party fought back-and within little more than a decade won! Bismarck himself grew weary of a struggle that he had come to view as increasingly pointless, even as he found himself more and more preoccupied with a rising threat to his major policies from Germany's socialist party. And he had come to regret the response to persecution shown by so many of Germany's Catholics, who simply took ship for America. Among whom, I might note, for those of you who are fond of poetry, were five Franciscan nuns, forbidden to teach in Germany, who in consequence embarked for America to teach recently arrived German-speaking children in St. Louis, Missouri. The nuns' ship, the Deutschland, foundered off the coast of England, and of those aboard many, the nuns included, drowned. The nuns' faith-sustained calm in the face of death, as attested by survivors, inspired Gerard Manley Hopkins, perhaps England's greatest lyric poet in the late nineteenth century, to write his longest and greatest (though admittedly formidable) poem: "The Wreck of the Deutschland."

But I digress. Today, this side of the Atlantic, in the land of the free, we are faced with a new Kulturkampf. Enter to a blast of trumpets Barak Obama and friends! In the past month or so they have made it clear, indeed, they have been shouting from the rooftops, that they consider themselves to be in a state of war against the Catholic Church. They gleefully boast that they will compel America's Catholics to violate their faith's tenets in the matter of "gay marriage", sterilization, contraception and  abortion. Though the governmental action they have undertaken is illegal under federal law, and stands moreover in flagrant  violation of our Constitution's First Amendment, scruples about legality seem never to have been a problem for this administration.

Do I exaggerate? May I share with you here a report that appeared in the National Catholic Register for November 10, 2011, written by Mark Rienzi, at the Catholic University of America a professor of Constitutional law.