Max of Saxony crossing borders

Reflections on the Unification of the Churches

Max of Saxony was born on November 17, 1870. He spent his childhood and youth at the royal court in Dresden. He ended his military career to study philosophy and theology at the former Episcopal Lyceum in Eichstätt from 1893 to 1896. During these studies he lived in the Episcopal Seminary. On July 26, 1896, he was ordained a priest in the Schutzengelkirche in Eichstätt. In the fall of 1898 he received his doctorate in theology from the University of Würzburg. In 1900 Max von Sachsen was appointed to the Faculty of Theology at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) as professor of the newly created Chair of Canon Law and Liturgy, which he held until 1911. He worked intensively on the rites of the Eastern Church and the Eastern languages, undertook extensive research trips in this regard, collaborated on the Patrologia Orientalis, and finally advocated the unity of the Eastern and Western Churches with an essay "Pensées sur la question de l'union des Églises" in November 1910.

Pope Pius X: Ex quo, nono

Max of Saxony's essay was very controversial. Still at the end of 1910, in the middle of the modernism controversy, he was papally condemned and lost the Venia for Canon Law, although he recanted.