Clemens August Graf von Galen, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetClemens August Graf von Galen
German count, Bishop of Münster, and cardinal, important figure in Catholic resistance to Nazism
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Dinklage, Lower Saxony, Germany
About Clemens August Graf von Galen
- Clemens Augustinus Emmanuel Joseph Pius Anthonius Hubertus Marie Graf von Galen (16 March 1878 – 22 March 1946), better known as Clemens August Graf von Galen, was a German count, Bishop of Münster, and cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.
- During World War II, Galen led Catholic protest against Nazi euthanasia and denounced Gestapo lawlessness and the persecution of the church.
- He was appointed a Cardinal by Pope Pius XII in 1946.
- He was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. Born into the German aristocracy, Galen received part of his education in Austria from the Jesuits at the Stella Matutina School in the town of Feldkirch.
- After his ordination he worked in Berlin at Saint Matthias.
- He intensely disliked the liberal values of the Weimar Republic and opposed individualism, socialism, and democracy.
- A staunch German nationalist and patriot, he considered the Treaty of Versailles unjust and viewed Bolshevism as a threat to Germany and the Church.
- He espoused the stab-in-the-back theory: that the German military was defeated in 1918 only because it had been undermined by defeatist elements on the home front.
- He expressed his opposition to modernity in his book Die Pest des Laizismus und ihre Erscheinungsformen (The Plague of Laicism and its Forms of Expression) (1932).
- After serving in Berlin parishes from 1906 to 1929, he became the pastor of Münster's St.
- Lamberti Church, where he was noted for his political conservatism before being appointed Bishop of Münster in 1933.
- Galen began to criticize Hitler's movement in 1934.
- He condemned the Nazi worship of race in a pastoral letter on 29 January 1934.
- He assumed responsibility for the publication of a collection of essays that criticized the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and defended the teachings of the Catholic Church.
- He was an outspoken critic of certain Nazi policies and helped draft Pope Pius XI's 1937 anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (With Burning Concern).
- In 1941, he delivered three sermons in which he denounced the arrest of Jesuits, the confiscation of church property, attacks on the Church, and in the third, the state-approved killing of invalids.
- The sermons were illegally circulated in print, inspiring some German Resistance groups, including the White Rose.Despite Bishop Galen's opposition to National Socialism, he nonetheless believed Germany was the last bulwark against the spread of godless Bolshevism.
- Parts of a sermon he gave in 1943 were used by the Nazis to aid in the enlistment of Dutch men to voluntarily join the SS.
- Galen feared that German Catholics were being relegated to second-class status in Hitler's Germany and believed Hitler was missing the point that the Catholic Church and the state could be aligned against Bolshevism.
- Bishop von Galen's selective opposition to elements of National Socialism never amounted to solidarity with excluded groups such as the Jews however, and while he spoke out against the euthanasia project he was silent on other issues such as roundups, deportations, and mass murder of Jews.
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See Also
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