Bishop von Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism (review)

Abstract

Bishop Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism. By Beth A. Griech-Polelle.(NewHaven: Yale University Press. 2002.Pp.xi,259. $35.00.) Bishop of from October, 1933, until death in March, 1946, five weeks after receiving a cardinal's hat from Pope Pius XII, Galen is celebrated as Lion of Munster for three dramatic sermons against the suppression of religious houses and the dispersal of their inhabitants, and the killing of the mentally ill, preached in 1941 at the height of Hitler's military victories. Beth A. Griech-Polelle believes Galen is over-rated.I do not dispute, she writes, that Galen was a symbol of what was possible in the way of resistance under the Third Reich. She charges, however, he protested only when church interests were at stake, he never encouraged others to resist the regime, and he did nothing to help Jews. Many of the primary sources for Galen's career were lost in wartime bombing. The secondary literature is in German. Griech-Polelle deserves credit for having read this material, for archival research in Germany, and for having written the first scholarly study of Galen in English. Unfortunately, her understanding of the evidence is faulty, and her interpretation of it often false. She appears to lack familiarity -with things Catholic. How else to explain the book's title :Bishop rather than Cardinal? (She mistakenly awards this title to the papal Nuncio in Berlin, Cesare Orsenigo, a bent reed from whom Pius XII withheld the customary red hat.) She mistranslates Paul's words on the Church as the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:26) in order to criticize a sermon Galen preached on this text in 1938. The public reception of Galen in Munster's Cathedral Square on March 16, 1946, following return from Rome, was not his last Mass. It was not a Mass at all, simply last public appearance. And it is untrue Galen's canonization process was officially closed in 1987. The process of beatification (the necessary prelude to canonization) continues. Von Galen's protest against the killing of the mentally ill had nothing to do with church interests. Moreover, it directly contradicts the charge von Galen lost sight of the larger, more humane questions involved in the brutality of the Nazi regime. His protest against the suppression of religious houses was concerned not with the buildings but with people. What moved the deeply emotional Galen was the sudden expulsion from their homes of people he revered for their decades of selfless service: nuns, religious priests and brothers-including Jesuits, teachers [in Innsbruck], tutors and friends, [to whom] I remain bound in love and gratitude until my last breath. It is true Galen encouraged passive but not active resistance. He expressed this in a metaphor which runs like a golden thread through the second of three sermons. We are the anvil, not the hammer! . . . The object -which is forged on the anvil receives its shape not alone from the hammer but also from the anvil. . . . Become hard! Remain firm! If it is sufficiently tough and firm and hard, the anvil usually lasts longer than the hammer. Only a person utterly unfamiliar with life under a totalitarian regime of ruthless terror could criticize a leader for failing to encourage rebellion in such circumstances. In Nazi Germany active resistance, however modest, meant immediate arrest, usually death. The Catholic Church honors martyrdom. It does not encourage it. A newly published book by Sebastian Haffner, a young anti-Nazi jurist who emigrated to England for political reasons in 1938, shows vividly how limited were the possibilities for resistance to Hitler as early as 1933. Published in Eng-lish in 2002 under the title Defying Hitler, the book was written in 1939 and discovered only after Haffner's death in 1999. Anyone unconvinced of the effectiveness of Nazi terror by Haffner's testimony should read of Count Helmut Moltke, hanged in Berlin in January, 1945, for organizing the Kreisau Circle, which discussed building a better Germany after Hitler's defeat. …