Count Clemens August von Galen grew up in a castle in Europe as the privileged son of a firmly established aristocratic family.
Elizabeth Ann Seton was a daughter of prominent Episcopalians in New York who married into a wealthy merchant family.
Although their lives unfolded in very different ways, both saints embodied Jesus’s warning: “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions” (Luke 12:15).
Circumstances took away the wealth, and then the life, of Elizabeth’s husband, leaving her free to enter religious life.
Blessed Clemens August von Galen kept his aristocratic position, but as bishop of Munster during the fateful days of World War II he put his life at risk, becoming known as the “Lion of Munster” for his fearless renunciations of the Nazis.
At his beatification, Pope Benedict XVI said that Bishop von Galen was able to stand up to the Nazis because “He feared God more than men, and it was God who granted him the courage to do and say what others did not dare to say and do.”
Von Galen’s childhood was like the von Trapps’ in the movie The Sound of Music.
Born the 11th of 13 children in 1878, von Galen’s family lived in a palatial estate in northeast Germany where the discipline was strict but the family was loving — and where his parents taught him that service to the poor was central to their Christian vocation.
He and his brother were sent to Austria to be educated by the Jesuits, beginning a lifelong relationship with the order — then on to the Dominican University of Freiburg, where von Galen discovered St. Thomas Aquinas and his vocation.
He was ordained a diocesan priest in 1904 and from 1906-1929 served at parishes in Berlin. “Papa Galen,” the 6-foot-7-inch tall pipe-smoking parish priest, made a big impression there, launching apostolates to serve the poor and a Catholic Young Men’s association.
It was only after he was reassigned to Munster in 1929 that he became known, internationally, as “one of the best-known champions of the Church’s resistance to the unjust National Socialist regime,” as Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins put it at his 2005 beatification.
As he watched the Nazis rise to power in the 1930s, von Galen was initially open to their crackdowns on public immorality, but soon turned against them. He was made a bishop by Pope Pius XI in 1933, and took as his episcopal motto a phrase that would describe his style of governance: Nec Laudibus nec timore — “Neither praise nor threats will distance me from God.”
Bishop von Galen felt a deep sense of responsibility to speak out, no matter the risk.
“The good Lord gave me a position that obliged me to call what was black, black, and what was white, white,” he said.
His first showdown with the Nazis was over Catholic education, when he insisted on the Church’s rights to teach, and refused to add anti-Semitic content to the curriculum.
Von Galen’s clashes with the Nazis often involved writing directly to Adolph Hitler about breaches of agreements the Church had negotiated with the Nazi regime. Von Galen’s homilies grew increasingly harsh in its criticism of the Nazis, telling the people that the world was laughing at the absurdity of Nazi beliefs. Hitler, for his part, is quoted saying that he would settle scores with Bishop Von Galen once the Axis Powers won the war.
In 1937, von Galen helped draft Pope Pius XI’s anti-Nazi encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Concern). The encyclical says “The evidence of events has torn the mask off the systematic hostility levelled at the Church” by Nazis. It adds: “Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State … and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.”
Bishop von Galen is best known for his 1941 statement denouncing the Nazis for killing the unfit and undermining the rights of Germans, saying, “We demand justice!”
He brought to light a secret program in which the disabled and unfit were being eliminated, he said, like farm animals. “Here we are dealing with human beings, with our neighbors, brothers and sisters, the poor and invalids,” he said. “Unproductive? Perhaps! But have they, therefore, lost the right to live? Have you or I the right to exist only because we are ‘productive’?”
He warned, presciently, that worse would follow. “Once admit the right to kill unproductive persons,” he said, “then none of us can be sure of his life.”
The sermons were reproduced and spread far and wide by Germans and dropped behind enemy lines by the Allied Powers.
Justice in the Wake of War
After the war, Bishop von Galen turned his intensity against the victorious soldiers who were guilty of “the ransacking of our homes… the pillaging and destruction of our farms… the murder of defenseless men… and the rape of German women and girls.” He told British officials — and the international press — “just as I fought against Nazi injustices, I will fight any injustice, no matter where it comes from,” and his next “viral” sermon called out the injustices of the post-war occupiers.
Pope Pius XII elevated von Galen to cardinal in 1945. His reputation was so well known that, when the Holy Father conferred the red hat on him at St. Peter’s Basilica, the congregation erupted in cheers. When the new cardinal returned to German he was greeted by 50,000 well-wishers.
However, Von Galen was cardinal for only a short time. He was suffering from serious health issues at the time of his elevation, which included appendicitis. He died from complications following surgery soon after his return from Rome.
When he was beatified in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI said, “The message of Blessed von Galen is ever timely: Faith cannot be reduced to a private sentiment or be hidden when it is inconvenient; it also implies consistency and a witness even in the public arena for the sake of human beings, justice and truth.”
Blessed von Galen is an example to Christians who, like St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, find themselves in circumstances of wealth and privilege.
What Mother Seton said about a wealthy Italian patron who extended his support to her family at a dark time, could also be said about Blessed von Galen: “I rejoice [to] have known him, and had the opportunity of seeing a true gentleman in a true Christian, and wealth sanctified by religion.”
TOM HOOPES, autor más reciente de El Rosario de San Juan Pablo II, es escritor residente en el Benedictine College de Kansas, donde imparte clases. Es anfitrión de La extraordinaria Story podcast sobre la vida de Cristo. Su libro Lo que dijo realmente el Papa Francisco ya está disponible en Audible. Antiguo reportero en la zona de Washington, D.C., fue secretario de prensa del Presidente del Comité de Medios y Arbitrios de la Cámara de Representantes de los Estados Unidos y pasó 10 años como editor del periódico National Catholic Register y de la revista Faith & Family. Su trabajo aparece con frecuencia en el Register, Aleteia y Catholic Digest. Vive en Atchison, Kansas, con su esposa, April, y tiene nueve hijos.
Image: Blessed Clemens August von Galen, Wikicommons.
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