October 30, 2005

In these final months of the parish’s fiftieth anniversary year, our focus will be on the saints and the universal call to holiness.

A good example of heroic virtue at work was Cardinal Clemens von Galen who was beatified earlier this month in the penultimate step to canonization as a saint, and whose relics Pope Benedict XVI publicly venerated after the ceremony. The “Lion of Munster” was a tall and stately figure, born to an aristocratic family in the Rhineland at the end of the nineteenth century. Count von Galen was ordained a priest and eventually was consecrated Bishop of Munster in the dark days of Nazi tyranny. His sermons strengthened the faithful, as he reminded them of Christ weeping over their land as He had wept over Jerusalem. Mention of his name put Hitler into a rage. Only the government’s fear of a public uprising when Germany was fighting on two fronts—against the western Allies and the Soviet Union—prevented them from arresting him, but he was prepared for martyrdom at any time. Some of his sermons were smuggled out of Germany, printed in Britain, and dropped over Germany by the Royal Air Force.

Bishop von Galen publicly condemned the Nazi government’s attempts to destroy family life and Christian values. He visited priests and nuns in prison and denounced the government’s policy of euthanasia. “Once we admit the right to kill unproductive persons—then none of us can be sure of our lives. . . . If this dreadful doctrine is permitted and practiced it is impossible to conjure up the degradation to which it will lead.” The bishop also repudiated the Nazi media’s attempt to wean people away from the Church by introducing pagan cults, worship of the state and race, promoting sexual license, and exaggerating moral scandals in order to portray the clergy as perverse and degenerate.

Von Galen lived an austere life centered on the Eucharist. He denied himself food and any luxury that could be given to the sick, the poor, and those made homeless by air raids. Before becoming Pope, Benedict XVI remarked how inadequate bureaucratic statements from bishops’ conferences can be, and said that “the really powerful documents against National Socialism were those that came from individual courageous bishops.”

Von Galen was made a Cardinal at the end of the war and died one month later. As witness to the fact that our society suffers many of the same threats that Cardinal von Galen knew, one of his nieces, Countess Johanna von Westphalen, leads a pro-life lobbying group to save society from abortion and euthanasia.

Saints are not figures of speech. Without them, we would not be here today. But sanctity is not a spectator sport. The canonized saints are models and intercessors for us, but they are not our substitutes.

Fr. George W. Rutler