Project Details
Projekt
"... the willingness to live up to the spirit of a new era must neither fragment nor soften the fundament of Western culture...". Pastoral practice between pre-conciliar modernity and post-conciliar conservativism
Applicant
Professor Dr. Dominik Burkard
Subject Area
Roman Catholic Theology
Term
from 2020 to 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 410907407
The catholicism before Vatican II was by no means as uniform and isolated an entity as it was often perceived in retrospect. Even before the Second Vatican Council, pastors occasionally had had the courage to implement reformist ideas in their parishes. In the aftermath of the Council, however, some of such formerly "modern" pastors experienced a fracture with their convictions: Not only did they reject parts of the Council’s resolutions, but they also radically banned all of their previous efforts of modernisation from their pastoral practice. The double non-simultaneity of these pastors, who, on the one hand acted as pioneers in the middle of the church conservatism that prevailed in the 1940s and 50s, and who, on the other hand undertook a conservative move in a time of high innovation, must be analyzed and explained. Therefore, the subproject will review the diversity thesis of both pre- and post-conciliar Catholicism in the Federal Republic of Germany in the field of pastoral work. The Stuttgart city pastor Hermann Breucha (1902-1972) was selected as a a possible case study. Breucha belonged to a group of pastors who, in pre-conciliar times, deliberately exceeded the boundaries of the ruling conservatism as far as their pastoral activities were. In the second half of the 1960s, he then showed a clear turnaround. The modern pastor became a conservativly acting clergyman. The subproject seeks to examine precisely these fields of conflict, which imply a diversified understanding of being Catholic, by considering the perspectives of pastoral practice, changed semantics, and emotional dynamics. Three analytical dimensions are taken into account: activation and sociality (parish), experience and religious self-appropriation (liturgy) as well as admission and demarcation/permeability (media work/ecumenism).The topic will be examined in two subprojects, which focus on various fields of action of pastoral practice: The first explores the pastor as "manager of the Catholic milieu" in his function ad intra, the second then considers him in his missionary dimension ad extra. Both projects follow a three-stage process that is based on the analysis of unpublished sources, complemented by Breucha's extended public, which has been reflected in print media. To contrast the findings, interviews with Breucha’s contemporaries will be organized. In a future phase of the project, a comparative analysis of another "reformer" (Otto Karrer), who, however, pursued the opposite way to Breucha, may help to work out identity markers that lead to the different directional decisions. By investigating Breucha’s reception by his immediate environment as well by the younger generation, the project will gain further insights in what "being Catholic" meant in the post-conciliar phase. Thus, variants of being Catholic can be studied in differently connoted "echo spaces" over the prolonged period of a little more than 30 years during which a deep upheaval took place.
DFG Programme
Research Units
