Anton Birlinger

Anton Birlinger (14 January 1834 in Wurmlingen near Rottenburg am Neckar – 15 June 1891 in Bonn) was a German Catholic theologian and Germanist.

He immediately made a name for himself with a collection of idioms and sagas, but also through his own literary experiments, finally as the editor of folklore works and dialect dictionaries.

Shortly after the lost war against Prussia, Birlinger went from Munich to the University of Breslau, to which anti-infallible professors of theology had been appointed and which was considered a center of criticism of Roman Catholicism (anti-ultramontanism), especially of Johann Anton Theiner (1799–1860) and the later Old Catholics Joseph Hubert Reinkens and Johann Baptist Baltzer.

University and religious-political questions were now posed differently: between radical German Catholic demands for democracy and religious freedom and the Sailerian theology of a prince-bishop full of mystical flower beds (Melchior von Diepenbrock), this professors' rebellion was about not tolerating any curtailment of academic freedom.

He supported the Bonn theology professors Franz Heinrich Reusch and Joseph Langen, who broke away from their faculty under the protection of the government, and as a priest he participated in the development of anti-Vatican resistance and an "Old Catholic" movement.