a heavy burden on the state budget, led to the SPD at times limiting educational expenditures in opposition to its stated goals. State Parliament election 1928 In May 1928 elections were held at both the Reich and state levels. In the Prussian state elections, the SPD made gains while the Centre and DDP both lost seats. In spite of that, the coalition had a parliamentary majority, with a combined 228 of 450 seats. The government remained the same, and Braun promised continued work. One of the government's projects was to be a municipal reorganization of the Ruhr region. Religious politics As the election campaign of 1918/19 had shown, the memory of royal Prussia's Kulturkampf ('cultural conflict') against the Catholic Church was still alive, but in large part due to the strong position of the Centre Party in Parliament and the government, the Catholic population had come to identify relatively strongly with the new Free State of Prussia. Its high point and symbol was the Prussian Concordat with the Vatican, signed on 14 June 1929 by Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII). The treaty superseded an 1821 agreement between the Kingdom of Prussia and the Vatican and eliminated the last remnants of church legislation from the period. It regulated state contributions to the church and the arrangement of bishoprics, including reestablishing the bishoprics of Aachen and Berlin. School issues were excluded, but it regulated the academic training of clergy. The forms of episcopal elections and similar issues were also clarified. There was opposition to the concordat from various sides. The Lutheran Church, supported by the DNVP and DVP, saw it as strengthening Catholicism. Freethinkers in the SPD also rejected the agreement. While the Catholic population was successfully won over to the new Prussia, the issue was more difficult when it came to Protestants. With the revolution, the Protestants of the Prussian Union of Churches lost the king as their top leader. He had officially been the head bishop (summus episcopus) of the Union with far-reaching rights, even to the shaping of the liturgy. Emperor William II had taken the task very seriously, and after the revolution many Protestants lacked an important figure by which to orient themselves. A considerable percentage of church-going Protestants voted for the anti-democratic and nationalistic DNVP. It was no coincidence that the motto of the Protestant church congress of 1927 was "". Antisemitic influences, especially among theological