Hitler’s Hammer, the Church’s Anvil

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Canonization was once a fairly obscure in-house Romish ritual for naming saints. But during the long reign of John Paul II, it somehow became a matter of international significance”often among people with no public connection to the Church. The 1998 canonization of the convert Edith Stein, for instance, had political repercussions among those who insisted the pope was stealing the memory of a Jewish Holocaust victim. Closer to the Vatican was the clamorous opposition to the beatification of Pius IX, who by a misreading of Matthew 15 was alleged to have called Jews “dogs,” and the more indignant outbursts, even by Israeli politicians, over the projected beatification of Pius XII, allegedly silent during World War II.

More of the same began on October 9, when Benedict XVI beatified one of his own countrymen, Clemens August von Galen, who in 1933 was appointed bishop of Münster, the capital of Westphalia”the first new member of the German hierarchy after the rise of Hitler. Not coincidentally, a distant cousin of von Galen, Bishop Konrad von Preysing, would be appointed two years later to Berlin, the capital of the Reich. The two were the youngest bishops and only non-cardinals invited to Rome in 1937 to participate in drafting the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge condemning German racist dogma.

Von Galen was known in his time for attacking in 1934 the bible of Nazi racism, Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century . In the following year, the bishop vigorously objected to the Nazi provincial governor about the planned appearance of Rosenberg at a party rally in Münster: “The overwhelmingly Christian population of Westphalia would regard this as a downright provocation showing contempt for their most cherished convictions.” At the rally Rosenberg personally attacked the bishop. The next day twenty thousand citizens accompanied von Galen in a religious procession, followed by a fiery address in which he declared that he would never succumb to the demands of racists. This was the first public expression of his episcopal motto: Nec laudibus nec timore (“Neither for praise nor out of fear”), and the genesis of his reputation as “the lion of Münster.”

During the war, von Galen became internationally celebrated when he delivered a series of sermons repeatedly attacking the Gestapo by name and condemned the Nazi “euthanasia” program for so-called incurables. Read at all Church services in Westphalia, leafleted by the British air force over every major German city, and broadcast by the BBC in five languages, the sermons ultimately reached an estimated forty million people. Henri de Lubac”a Jesuit member of the French resistance who published this “anvil sermon” of von Galen’s in the underground Témoignage Chrétien ”observed at the time: “If there is one case where the duty to oppose injustice must be fulfilled, it is certainly the extreme anti-Semitic measures imposed by Hitlerism.”

In the anvil sermon”with its refrain of “Become hard! Remain firm!””the bishop declared:

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Hitler’s Hammer, the Church’s Anvil