One Fearless Voice: The Lion of Munster
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On the occasion of the beatification of Cardinal Clemens August Count von Galen, Inside the Vatican met with the cardinal's great niece Countess Johanna von Westfalen (born von Galen). Countess von Westfalen, who leads a pro-life movement in Germany, said her work on behalf of unborn children was inspired in part by her devotion to von Galen, her great uncle. On October 8, the day before the beatification, she sat down with Christina Badde to talk about the cardinal.
Relationship to Von Galen
My grandfather was Cardinal von Galen's older brother, so the cardinal was my great uncle. When I was a child, I met the cardinal personally several times in his parish in Munster. But I was so small I don't remember much — only that he was very nice and that we laughed a lot with him. He had baptized me, and I felt close to him. Once, when he was injured during a fire in his residence, he came to live with us for a week.
The cardinal spent his first years with his uncle, who was auxiliary bishop of Munster.
The Prussian government at that time was very Protestant and much influenced by Enlightenment thought, while the Catholics in Germany were closely tied to Rome. Then came the Kulturkampf , the period of Germany's "culture war," which raged from 1871 to 1891. When von Galen was born in 1878, many bishops were being chased out of their residences or put in jail. Bismarck really oppressed the Catholic Church in Germany. So you can imagine how difficult politics were at that time — the clash between the German empire and the Catholic groups.
During WWI, von Galen was very active in Berlin, where he built a large house for foreign workers. In this house, they had the chance to be professionally trained and educated, and the cardinal taught them how to pray. After 23 years in Berlin, in 1928, he was called back to Munster by his bishop. He became the parish priest of St. Lambert. While he was in his fifth year, in October 1933, he was elected bishop of Munster.
Hitler came to power in January 1933 and died in 1945 and the cardinal died less than a year after him. Thus, in a way, von Galen's adult life had to accompany Hitler's.
His fundamental commitment was to the freedom of the Church. "I was elected and came to Munster to defend the Church, the freedom of the Church," he once said. His first aim was to keep the Church free of the intervention of the state. He never directly attacked Hitler but wrote in his sermons that the Nazi policies would be the ruin of Germany.
In the first half year, in 1934, after being elected as Bishop of Munster, Alfred Rosenberg — Hitler's chief ideologue — published the Myth of the 20th Century setting forth the theory of Aryan superiority. Then, a few professors wrote an anti-myth against it. The cardinal of Cologne didn't dare to publish this anti-myth. So they went to von Galen in Munster saying that the cardinal of Cologne didn't want to publish it. So he printed it immediately and within a night it was done. Within a week, the "anti-myth" against Rosenberg's criminal ideas was distributed all over Germany. By the time the Nazis discovered it, everyone had read it.
His most famous sermon was delivered on Sunday, August 3, 1941, in Munster Cathedral, in which he openly condemned the Nazi euthanasia program.
Code-named "Aktion T4," the Nazi program to eliminate "life unworthy of life" began on Hitler's order in October of 1939. Midwives and doctors were required to register children up to age three who showed symptoms of mental retardation or physical deformity with the Reich Health Ministry. A decision on whether to allow the child to live was then made by three medical experts solely on the basis of the report. Each expert placed a + mark in red pencil or - mark in blue pencil under the term "treatment" on a special form. A red plus mark meant a decision to kill the child. A blue minus sign meant a decision against killing. Three +++ symbols resulted in a euthanasia warrant being issued and the transfer of the child to a "Children's Specialty Department" for death by injection or gradual starvation. The program soon expanded to include older disabled children and adults.
It was in this context that von Galen delivered his sermon, in which he said: "Fellow Christians! . . . There are sacred obligations of conscience from which no one has the power to release us and which we must fulfill even if it costs us our lives.
"Never under any circumstances may a human being kill an innocent person apart from war and legitimate self-defense . . .
"For some months we have been hearing reports that, on the orders of Berlin, patients from mental asylums who have been ill for a long time and may appear incurable, are being compulsorily removed. Then, after a short time, the relatives are regularly informed that the corpse has been burnt and the ashes can be delivered.
". . . These unfortunate patients must die because, in the opinion of some department, on the testimony of some commission, they have become 'worthless life' because according to this testimony they are 'unproductive national comrades.' 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 . . .
"But have they for that reason forfeited the right to life? Have you, have I the right to live only so long as we are productive, so long as we are recognized by others as productive? If you establish and apply the principle that you can kill 'unproductive' fellow human beings, then woe betide us all when we become old and frail! . . . Then none of our lives will be safe any more. Some commission can put us on the list of the 'unproductive,' who in their opinion have become worthless life. And no police force will protect us and no court will investigate our murder and give the murderer the punishment he deserves . . .
"Woe to mankind, woe to our German nation if God's Holy Commandment 'Thou shalt not kill,' which God proclaimed on Mount Sinai amidst thunder and lightning . . . is not only broken, but is actually tolerated and permitted to go unpunished."
The sermon sent a shockwave through the Nazi leadership all the way up to Hitler, and on August 23, 1941, Hitler suspended "Aktion T4" which had accounted for nearly 100,000 deaths by this time.
The Nazis pondered what to do about the cardinal. They eventually retaliated by arresting and then beheading three parish priests who had distributed his sermon, but left the cardinal unharmed to avoid making him into a martyr.
After the war, von Galen condemned the British government as harshly as he had the German government for not providing food to the German prisoners of war.
Von Galen: Prelude to Pius XII Beatification?
We all hope that Pius XII will be beatified because he was a fabulous and very brave man. He called von Galen several times during the war and they wrote to each other quite frequently. The Vatican archives were recently opened on this, so one knows that they were in constant connection.
We have a letter from von Galen to Pius XII, dated November 4, 1943, in which he wrote: "On Sunday 10 October, a raid by enemy bombers, brief but extremely savage, reduced most of the ancient and venerable historical center of Munster to rubble. A high explosive bomb hit and set fire to the north bell tower of the Cathedral . . . Thanks to the merciful protection of God, I was personally unharmed, apart from some slight wounds . . . but in the fire that inevitably followed I lost all my furniture, all my books, writings and documents and, among them, Your Holiness' well-loved handwritten letters, a circumstance, the latter, which causes me particular pain . . .
"Holy Father! Still more than such external losses concern for the safety of the souls of the faithful entrusted to me and for the maintenance of the Christian religion in our country weighs on me. Of course, there are still thousands who . . . are faithful to Christ and to His Holy Church, and . . . are giving great witness in the ordeal and valiantly and with resignation bear the sufferings caused by the war and offer them to God . . . And yet it is undeniable that, in general, truly considerable parts of the German people look at Christianity, at true faith in God, with indifference, indeed with enmity, abandoning ever more the moral ties of the Christian legacy till now handed on.
"We must perhaps see in the war of annihilation that is threatening to reduce much of non-Christian Europe to a heap of rubble and to a wasteland, just chastisement come down on those who 'have abandoned the font of living water, and have dug wells that do not hold water.' Showing them the way back to the 'fontes Salvatoris' is our great and heavy task."
In December 1945, he was made a cardinal and in February he managed, with the help of the British, to go to Rome — crossing the British, American, and French zones, via Paris over the Alps, down to Italy. He came back a few weeks later after visiting thousands of German prisoners in southern Italy.
He came back to Munster three weeks before he died. He'd finished his duty.
He was the only bishop who stood and spoke up. Everyone said, "We have to talk to Hitler." And, he said, "No, it's too late to talk, we have to tell the people what's wrong because they mustn't lose their faith in God."
I think he was already considered a courageous bishop when I was small, but we never talked about such things because it was too dangerous. Imagine what would have happened if we children would have told people in the village what was talked about at home! We were always told not to say anything outside. One could end up in a concentration camp merely for being discovered with one's radio tuned to the BBC's frequency. So when Mummy listened to the BBC, she always moved it back afterwards, so no one could find out.
Thank God that he isn't alive today, because he would be devastated if he would see the situation of the Church today. Especially the sexual immorality, the way people don't pray anymore, the way school systems are run and above all abortion.
He is an inspiration for me. He was fighting just as I am now.
August Clemens von GalenOn October 9, Pope Benedict XVI praised Cardinal Clemens von Galen for his courage in speaking out against the Nazi regime during World War II. "He feared God more than man," the Pope said at von Galen's beatification ceremony in St. Peter's Square.
After his ordination as Bishop of Munster, Germany, in 1933, von Galen became the Catholic Church's most vocal opponent of Hitler's regime in Germany.
Born of an aristocratic family, von Galen, also known as the "Lion of Munster," gained widespread recognition for his powerful speeches against the Third Reich's practice of euthanasia which claimed nearly 100,000 disabled and mentally ill people.
Hitler, convinced that the cardinal was planning an anti-Nazi uprising, ordered the cardinal's arrest in 1941. Hitler's advisors persuaded him not to arrest and execute him, due to the respect for him among the German people. As a result, von Galen survived the war and Hitler's wrath, dying in 1946 at the age of 68, just a few weeks after Pope Pius XII made him a cardinal.
Christina Badde is the Managing Editor of Inside the Vatican.
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