The Blessed Clemens August Graf von Galen was a German count, Bishop of Münster, and cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. During World War II, von Galen led Catholic protest against Nazi euthanasia and denounced Gestapo lawlessness and the persecution of the church. He was appointed a Cardinal by Pope Pius XII in 1946. He was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.
Born into the German aristocracy, von Galen received part of his education in Austria from the Jesuits at the Stella Matutina School in the town of Feldkirch, on the Austrian border with Switzerland and Liechtenstein. After his ordination he worked in Berlin at Saint Matthias. He intensely disliked the liberal values of the Weimar Republic and opposed individualism, socialism, and democracy. After serving in Berlin parishes from 1906 to 1929, he became the pastor of Münster's St. Lamberti Church, where he was noted for his political conservatism. A staunch German nationalist and patriot, he considered the Treaty of Versailles unjust and viewed Bolshevism as a threat to Germany and the Church. He espoused the stab-in-the-back theory: that the German military was defeated in 1918 only because it had been undermined by defeatist elements on the home front. He expressed his opposition to modernity in his book Die Pest des Laizismus und ihre Erscheinungsformen .Von Galen began to criticize Hitler's movement in 1934. He condemned the Nazi worship of race in a pastoral letter on 29 January 1934. He assumed responsibility for the publication of a collection of essays that criticized the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and defended the teachings of the Catholic Church. He was an outspoken critic of certain Nazi policies and helped draft Pope Pius XI's 1937 anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender Sorge . In 1941, he delivered three sermons in which he denounced the arrest of Jesuits, the confiscation of church property, attacks on the Church, and in the third, the state-approved killing of invalids. The sermons were illegally circulated in print, inspiring some German Resistance groups, including the White Rose.
Bishop von Galen's selective opposition to elements of National Socialism did not amount to solidarity with excluded groups such as the Jews however, and whilst he spoke out against the euthanasia project he was silent on the issues of roundups, deportations and mass murder of Jews. He feared that German Catholics were being relegated to second-class status in Hitler's Germany and believed Hitler was missing the point that the Catholic Church and the state could be aligned against their common enemy as he saw it, Judeo-Bolshevism. Von Galen believed Germany was the last bulwark against the spread of godless Bolshevism. Parts of a sermon he gave in 1943 were used by the Nazis to aid in the enlistment of Dutch men to voluntarily join the SS.
“And now go and serve your fatherland.”
von Galen, to the philosopher Josef Pieper when he went to say farewell to the bishop, having been drafted into the German army in 1943. Pieper remarked; I was somewhat baffled; it was a long time since I had heard such words, but on his lips they were by no means a mere pathetic cliché; he meant them in all seriousness;they were to be taken literally. See Beth A. Griech Polelle, Bishop Von Galen, p. 20.
The argument goes: they can no longer produce commodities, they are like an old machine that no longer works, they are like an old horse which has become incurably lame, they are like a cow which no longer gives milk.
Speech against Nazi euthanasia (August 3, 1941)
Speech against Nazi euthanasia (August 3, 1941)
