Clemens August Graf von Galen
Clemens Augustinus Emmanuel Joseph Pius Anthonius Hubertus Marie Graf von Galen (16 March 1878 – 22 March 1946), better known as Clemens August Graf von Galen, was a German count, Bishop of Münster, and cardinal of the Catholic Church. During World War II, Galen led Catholic protests against Nazi euthanasia and denounced Gestapo lawlessness and the persecution of the Church in Nazi Germany. He was appointed a cardinal by Pope Pius XII in 1946, shortly before his death, and was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.
Born into the German aristocracy, Galen received part of his education in Austria-Hungary from the Jesuits at Stella Matutina in the town of Feldkirch. After his ordination, he worked in Berlin at St. Matthias. He intensely disliked the secular liberal values of the Weimar Republic. A monarchist, 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. Despite his later opposition to Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church, he participated in a 1923 meeting of Catholic German aristocrats which affirmed the "inner truth" of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the inability of Jews to assimilate to German culture. He expressed his opposition to secularism in his 1932 book Die Pest des Laizismus und ihre Erscheinungsformen (The Plague of Laicism and its Forms of Expression). 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 before being appointed Bishop of Münster in 1933.
Galen began to criticize Hitler's movement in 1934. He condemned the Nazi "worship of race" in a pastoral letter on 29 January 1934, and assumed responsibility for the publication of a collection of essays which fiercely criticized Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and defended the teachings of the Catholic Church. He was an outspoken critic of the euthanasia policies and anti-Catholicism of the Nazis and helped draft Pope Pius XI's 1937 anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. Nevertheless, he did not publicly condemn the Nazi persecution of Jews. In 1941, von Galen delivered three sermons in which he denounced the arrest of Jesuits, the confiscation of church property, Nazi attacks on the Church, and in the third, fiercely condemned the state-approved mass killing in the involuntary euthanasia programme of persons with mental or physical disabilities (Aktion T4). The sermons were illegally circulated in print, inspiring some German Resistance groups, including the White Rose.
In the Martyrology
- March 22 Blessed Clemens August von Galen, cardinal