age forced him to cease teaching in the summer of 1863. He died in 1865 and was buried at the Alter Friedhof in Freiburg. Reformist ideas Hirscher's ideas on the reform of the Church were both complex and controversial. As a young man he had written a work on the Mass entitled "De genuina missæ notione", in which the idea of the sacrifice was relegated to the background, and which was put on the Index. Later he was blamed for never having formally retracted the book; he answered that at least he had held quite orthodox theories concerning the Mass in his later writings. Nevertheless, a number of Catholics were not reassured, and when in 1842 and the following years there was question of appointing Hirscher coadjutor of Freiburg, the historian Hurter and Baron de Rinck, raised a cry of alarm. The "Schweizerische Kirchenzeitung" and the "Revue Sion" accused Hirscher of being an enemy of Rome and everything Roman, of dreaming of a German national Church, of opposing celibacy, the Breviary, and ecclesiastical discipline with regard to mixed marriages, of preventing the Freiburg theological review from attacking his benefactor Wessenberg, of being the friend of the Baden Liberals. Hirscher replied in the "Revue Sion" (30 November 1842), and Schleyer, dean of the University of Freiburg, defended him in his book "Hirscher und seine Ankläger". But Rinck continued to write to the effect that if Hirscher were accepted as bishop there would be a worse schism than that of Ronge. In 1842, Hirscher was passed up for consideration as bishop of Freiburg. Two years later, when the Government of Württemberg wanted to have Hirscher appointed coadjutor to the aged Bishop Keller of Rottenburg, Rome refused. These suspicions were confirmed by the pamphlets Hirscher published in 1849, on the social condition of the present day and the Church, "Die socialen Zustände der Gegenwart", and on the present state of religion, "Die kirchlichen Zustände der Gegenwart". These brochures created a profound sensation, for in them Hirscher showed himself hostile to the Catholic Associations' movement, which gave birth to the first general Congress of the German Catholics at Mainz, in 1848; he feared that the movement might lead to imprudent demonstrations by the Catholics. He preferred lay associations to be undenominational, and favoured a synodal organization in which the laity would be represented, and which should be periodically convened by the bishops and presided