(, 'culture struggle') was the conflict that took place from 1872 to 1878 between the
Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwide . It is am ...
led by
Pope Pius IX
Pope Pius IX ( it, Pio IX, ''Pio Nono''; born Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti; 13 May 1792 – 7 February 1878) was head of the Catholic Church from 1846 to 1878, the longest verified papal reign. He was notable for convoking the First Vatican ...
and the government of
Prussia
Prussia, , Old Prussian: ''Prūsa'' or ''Prūsija'' was a German state on the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea. It formed the German Empire under Prussian rule when it united the German states in 1871. It was ''de facto'' dissolved by an e ...
led by
Otto von Bismarck
Otto, Prince of Bismarck, Count of Bismarck-Schönhausen, Duke of Lauenburg (, ; 1 April 1815 – 30 July 1898), born Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, was a conservative German statesman and diplomat. From his origins in the upper class of ...
. The main issues were clerical control of education and
ecclesiastical
{{Short pages monitor
* Trzeciakowski, Lech. ''The Kulturkampf in Prussian Poland'' (East European Monographs, 1990) 223 pp
* Weir, Todd. ''Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession'', Cambridge University Press, 2014, , 9781139867900
* Zeender, John. "Ludwig Windthorst, 1812-1891" ''History'' (1992) 77#250 pp 237–54, the leader of the Catholic Center Party
Historiography
* Anderson, Margaret Lavinia. "Confessions of a Fellow Traveler," ''Catholic Historical Review'' (2013) 99#4 pp 623–648.
* Heilbronner, Oded. "From Ghetto to Ghetto: The Place of German Catholic Society in Recent Historiography" ''Journal of Modern History'' (2000) 72#2 pp. 453–495 in JSTOR
pdf
Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
by a Professor of the
United States Air Force Academy
The United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) is a United States service academy in El Paso County, Colorado, immediately north of Colorado Springs. It educates cadets for service in the officer corps of the United States Air Force and U ...
Ludwig Windthorst
Baron Ludwig von Windthorst (17 January 181214 March 1891) was a German politician and leader of the Catholic Centre Party and the most notable opponent of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck during the Prussian-led unification of Germany and the K ...
Sonderbundskrieg
The Sonderbund War (german: Sonderbundskrieg, fr , Guerre du Sonderbund, it , Guerra del Sonderbund) of November 1847 was a civil war in Switzerland, then still a relatively loose confederacy of cantons. It ensued after seven Catholic canton ...