Volksverein und Verbandskatholizismus statt Synodaler Weg
These were often remnant Catholic communities. Mass attendance had declined dramatically and many of the old certainties had faded. Yet among those who remained there persisted a distinctly social form of Catholicism, forged in the struggles of the nineteenth century and sustained through the memory of Bismarck's Kulturkampf. What endured was not merely a set of beliefs but a way of life: a dense web of relationships, institutions, duties and loyalties that bound people together.
Travel has a way of teaching us something about ourselves. In Germany I learned that I am a layman, and that I shall always be a layman. More importantly, I realised that I do not wish to be anything else.
My vocation is not to stand at the altar but to support those who do. I want to assist in the administration of the sacraments, to serve and support our priests, to work for the good of souls and the good of the Church, and to continue seeking the spiritual guidance and prayers of the clergy for as long as God grants me life.
Confucius once observed: "Let the ruler be a ruler, the minister be a minister, the father be a father, and the son be a son." There is a wisdom in that which applies equally well to the Church. Let the priest be the priest and the layman be the layman.
This is not because one vocation is superior to the other. Rather, it is because both have distinct responsibilities. Order depends upon people knowing their duties and fulfilling them faithfully. The clergy already have more than enough to do; so too do the laity. Confusion arises when we attempt to dissolve the distinction between vocations rather than honour them.
This concern lies at the heart of my reservations about Synodality.
Too often Synodality seems preoccupied with structures, procedures, consultations, power-sharing arrangements and questions of internal governance. Its language is frequently managerial, academic and abstract. It speaks endlessly about process while often saying very little about the practical task of rebuilding Catholic life.
The Church does not need another layer of bureaucracy. It needs a renewed social life.
Rather than looking upwards towards committees and structures, we should look outwards towards society and downwards towards the parish. We should recover the older traditions of Catholic social organisation that once gave ordinary Catholics the confidence and capacity to shape the world around them.
Hence the phrase at the head of this article: Volksverein und Verbandskatholizismus statt Synodaler Weg — "People's Associations and Association-Based Catholicism rather than the Synodal Way."
This refers to a distinctively German tradition in which Catholic life was organised through a rich network of independent associations, clubs, fraternities, workers' organisations, youth groups and educational societies.
A working-class German Catholic in the late nineteenth century might worship in a Catholic parish, attend a Catholic school, read a Catholic newspaper, belong to a Catholic workers' association and participate in a Catholic sports or social club. His faith was not confined to an hour on Sunday. It was woven into the fabric of everyday life.
Historians call this the Catholic milieu.
The collapse in church attendance after Covid should remind us of a difficult truth: we no longer possess such a milieu. Faith has become increasingly privatised. Too often we are simply isolated individuals who happen to stand beside one another for an hour each Sunday before returning to separate lives.
This is also why attempts to recreate a pre-Vatican II Church through liturgical restoration alone will ultimately fail. The problem is not merely liturgical but social. One cannot restore a Catholic culture simply by restoring older rites. A living Catholic culture emerges from relationships, institutions, customs and shared practices that develop organically over generations.
Yet there is a paradox here. The liberal individualism that often characterises Synodality and the liturgical individualism that characterises certain traditionalist movements share a common weakness. Both remain insufficiently social. Both struggle to generate the thick bonds of solidarity that sustain a genuine common life.
The task before us is therefore neither bureaucratic reform nor liturgical nostalgia.
The task is to build a modern expression of the Catholic Volksverein and Verbandskatholizismus at parish level: local, practical and rooted in place.
This matters because these associations once formed the social infrastructure of one of the most organised Catholic cultures in modern Europe.
The Catholic Volksverein published books and pamphlets, organised lectures and study circles, taught economics and social policy, and educated ordinary Catholics in the principles of Catholic social teaching. Workers, teachers, civil servants and farmers could all receive a serious formation through its activities.
These institutions in turn supported Catholic labour organisations and workers' associations that campaigned for fair wages, social insurance and the dignity of labour. They created networks of solidarity through which Catholics could live much of their social, cultural and educational lives together.
At first glance this may appear foreign to twenty-first-century Scotland. Yet in important respects it is also part of our own inheritance.
At the turn of the twentieth century, German priests served here in Inverclyde. Among them were Fr Peter Hilgers of Gelsenkirchen and Fr Ludger Kuhler from the Ruhr, who came to St Ninian's, Gourock, in 1897. Fr Hilgers is remembered for helping to expand the parish school and strengthen the institutional life of the parish.
These priests came from one of the most organised Catholic cultures in Europe. They took for granted parish schools, youth groups, workers' societies, confraternities, Sacred Heart associations, Marian sodalities, parish clubs and Catholic social activities. That was the world of Verbandskatholizismus.
At St Ninian's, Fr Hilgers encouraged education, drama groups, sports teams and parish societies. His instinct was to build institutions and cultivate community. Such priorities were entirely characteristic of German Catholicism after the Kulturkampf.
The lesson learned by many German Catholics during that period was simple: if the state is hostile, build stronger Catholic institutions.
In many ways, late Victorian Greenock and Gourock resembled the Catholic regions of western Germany. Both were shaped by industrial labour, rapid urbanisation and life as a religious minority within a wider Protestant culture. German priests arriving here found conditions that felt surprisingly familiar.
They belonged to the same generation of clergy shaped by the Catholic milieu that produced the Volksverein, Catholic workers' associations and the wider world of Verbandskatholizismus. They brought many of those assumptions with them into parish life in Inverclyde.
Perhaps it is time that we learned from them once again.
Not by copying nineteenth-century Germany, nor by importing foreign models wholesale, but by recovering the underlying principle: that the Church is strongest when it is capable of generating a common life.
That common life requires institutions, friendships, duties and shared practices. It requires clergy and laity each fulfilling their proper vocations. It requires less discussion about participation and more participation itself.
In that sense, the older German model may offer us something better than another round of ecclesiastical consultation. It offers a practical form of Synodality before the word existed: Catholics building a common life together through shared work, mutual obligation and local action.
That is a vision worth recovering.
