Clemens August von Galen

Blessed Clemens August Graf Cardinal von Galen (1878-1946) was the Bishop of Münster from 1933 to 1946. His term as bishop thus closely coincided with the Chancellorship of Adolf Hitler.

von Galen was a consistent and tireless critic of the Nazi Party, preaching against the party's policies on euthanasia, criminal justice, education, and its attempts to subvert the ecclesial authority of the Catholic Church in Germany. He also wrote essays refuting Nazi racial theories from historical, theological, and moral perspectives. He showed open contempt for Nazi efforts to intimidate him into silence. (Unknown to him, he was being protected by Josef Goebbels, who had countermanded an arrest order by the Gauleiter of Münster for fear that such an arrest would decrease loyalty to the Nazis among Catholics in Bavaria.) However, von Galen was deeply saddened by the knowledge that many priests were sent to concentration camps in punishment for distributing his anti-Nazi sermons.

He opposed the erosion of religious freedom in the Soviet Union and actually supported Hitler's war against Joseph Stalin in 1941. This put him in disfavor with Allied occupation forces after the war, despite their use of his sermons as valuable wartime propaganda tools. (Indeed, the Royal Air Force included his sermon on euthanasia in leaflet drops.) The situation became much worse when von Galen preached against Allied violations of the civil rights of Germans within occupation zones and the ethnic cleansing of Germans in territories annexed to the Soviet Union and Poland.

In early 1946 von Galen was summoned to Rome and made a cardinal by Pope Pius XII, who shared a long and complicated personal history with the bishop going back to Pius's time as papal nuncio in Berlin. Cardinal von Galen returned to Münster and was almost immediately hospitalized. He died of appendicitis in the hospital.

Galen's successor, Bishop Michael Keller, advocated for the beatification of his predecessor. The process was begun by Pius in 1956 and culminated in his beatification on October 9, 2005 by Pope Benedict XVI.

Clemens August von Galen in The War That Came Early
Clemens August von Galen visited Münster City Hall in the winter of 1940. While there he encountered a long line of Jews waiting to see city bureacrats, including Sarah Goldman and her family. von Galen asked the Jews what brought them to city hall and on learning that the Jews had been ordered to get new ID cards with their names changed to reflect their Jewish heritage, von Galen expressed open anger that the city's Jews were being forced to endure yet another indignity at the hands of the Nazi Party. This expression of solidarity by a prominent gentile was encouraging to many of the Jews on the line.

Samuel Goldman reflected that, as Bishop von Galen was already in political disfavor because of his open opposition to Hitler's attempts to influence the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the Reich, it was much harder for the Nazis to intimidate him into acquiescing to their other programs. He also reflected that, if a few hundred prominent German citizens of von Galen's stature had been openly critical of Nazi racial policies since the early 1930s, those policies could not have been implemented.