Blessed Clemens August von Galen

Blessed Clemens August von Galen was Bishop of Münster and a cardinal who, in the time of National Socialism, openly defended the freedom of the Church, human rights, and the lives of the sick. For this courage he was called the Lion of Münster. His memorial falls on March 22, the day of his death.

He was born on March 16, 1878, at Dinklage Castle in the Oldenburg region, the eleventh of thirteen children in a count’s family that prayed together every day. He was educated by the Jesuits in Feldkirch, Austria, and studied in Fribourg in Switzerland, in Innsbruck, and in Münster. There, on May 28, 1904, he was ordained a priest.

After two years of work at the cathedral he left in 1906 for Berlin, where he spent twenty-three years, from 1919 as pastor of Saint Matthias parish. In a city where Catholics were a minority, he visited the sick and organized the distribution of food and clothing to the poor. In 1929 he returned to Münster as pastor of Saint Lambert’s Church.

In 1933 Pope Pius XI appointed him Bishop of Münster. He was consecrated on October 28 and took as his motto the words “Nec laudibus, nec timore”: neither praise nor threats would turn him from the ways of God. Already in his pastoral letter for Lent 1934 he laid bare the neo-pagan character of National Socialist ideology. In January 1937 he was among the bishops whom Pius XI called to Rome before the publication of the encyclical “Mit brennender Sorge.”

In the summer of 1941, when the Gestapo was seizing religious houses and expelling their members, he preached three sermons in Münster: on July 13 and 20 and on August 3. In them he denounced the lawlessness of the secret police, and in the third he condemned the killing of the mentally ill, whom the state had declared unproductive. He asked: “Hast du, habe ich nur solange das Recht zu leben, solange wir produktiv sind?” That is: do you and I have the right to live only as long as we are productive? Copies of the sermons circulated secretly throughout Germany. The authorities wanted to arrest the bishop and put him to death, but, fearing the reaction of Catholics, they postponed this until after the war. Instead, several dozen clergy of his diocese were sent to concentration camps, and ten of them died.

He drew his strength from a simple piety: he often went on foot as a pilgrim to the Marian shrine at Telgte and went to confession regularly. After the war he rejected the idea of the collective guilt of all Germans. On February 18, 1946, Pius XII created him a cardinal. On March 16, after his return to Münster, he addressed the crowds in front of the ruins of the cathedral. The next day he fell ill, and on March 22, 1946, he died. He was laid to rest in the cathedral’s Chapel of Saint Ludger.

Pope Benedict XVI enrolled him among the blessed by an apostolic letter read on October 9, 2005, in Saint Peter’s Basilica. He said on that occasion that the bishop had feared God more than men, and therefore had the courage to say what others did not dare to say.