Blessed Karl Leisner

Blessed Karl Leisner was a German priest of the Diocese of Münster and a martyr. While still a deacon he was imprisoned for his public profession of faith and his zealous service of souls, and in the Dachau camp he was secretly ordained a priest. The Church commemorates him on August 12, the day of his death.

He was born on February 28, 1915, in Rees on the Rhine, to Wilhelm Leisner, a court official, and Amalie, née Falkenstein. In 1921 the family moved to Kleve, where he went to school and then to the grammar school. From the age of twelve he belonged to the Catholic youth movement, and he soon became a well-loved leader in it.

After finishing secondary school in 1934 he decided to become a priest and entered the Collegium Borromaeum in Münster. At the beginning of his studies he wrote: “Christ, you have called me. I say humbly and firmly: Here I am, send me.” That same year Bishop Clemens August von Galen appointed him diocesan leader of the Catholic youth. Karl made no concessions to the ideology of National Socialism, and so the Gestapo kept watch on him. Under the influence of Father Joseph Kentenich and the Schoenstatt Movement he developed a deep devotion to Mary.

Six months of compulsory work on marshland in the Reich Labor Service in 1937 weakened his health. In 1939 he was ordained a deacon, but soon afterward advanced pulmonary tuberculosis was discovered, and he was sent to a sanatorium in St. Blasien. On November 9, 1939, when the news reached the sanatorium that Hitler had survived an assassination attempt, Karl remarked: “What a pity.” That same day the Gestapo arrested him. After prisons in Freiburg and Mannheim he was taken in 1940 to the Sachsenhausen camp, and on December 14 of that year to Dachau.

In March 1942 his illness flared up again, and Karl was taken to the camp infirmary. Also imprisoned in Dachau was the French Bishop of Clermont, Gabriel Piguet. With the consent of the Bishop of Münster and the Archbishop of Munich and Freising, he secretly ordained Karl a priest on December 17, 1944. On December 26, the feast of Saint Stephen, the gravely ill priest celebrated his first and only Holy Mass.

After the Americans liberated the camp, Karl left Dachau on May 4, 1945, and was taken to a sanatorium in Planegg near Munich, but he was already too worn down to recover. He accepted death calmly and forgave his persecutors. In one of the last entries in his diary he prayed: “Bless also, O Most High, my enemies.” He died in the early hours of August 12, 1945. He rests in the crypt of Xanten Cathedral.

On January 12, 1996, the decree on Karl’s martyrdom was promulgated, and on June 23, 1996, John Paul II beatified him in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, together with Father Bernhard Lichtenberg. In his homily the Pope called them both witnesses not of death but of life, and he recalled Karl’s hope-filled words “Mater habebit curam,” that is, “The heavenly Mother will take care.”