Changes

Although dry intone and replete with impersonal tables and social analysis, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany successfully conveys the conservative nature of the Catholic Church, and the integral role that Marian devotion played in the popular acceptance of that conservatism. While affected by Prussian state-building, Sperber shows that the politicization of German Catholicism originated in a visceral reaction against liberal ideals, decades before the punitive measures of the <I>Kulturkampf</I>.