Heinrich Brück

Heinrich Brück (25 October 1831, Bingen – 4 November 1903) was a German Catholic church historian, and Bishop of Mainz.

He was ordained to the priesthood in 1855, exercised for some time the ministry, and made a postgraduate course at Munich under Ignaz von Döllinger, and at Rome.

He continued to teach until his elevation to the episcopate, with the exception of the years from 1878 to 1887, when seminary was closed by the order of the Government due to the Kulturkampf.

A more special work is his Geschichte der katholischen Kirche in Deutschland im neunzehnten Jahrhundert ("History of the Catholic Church in Germany in the Nineteenth Century"), in five volumes (1887-1905).

He was also the author of an account of rationalistic movements in Catholic Germany (1865), a life of Dean Lennig (1870), and a work on secret societies in Spain (1881).