This Catholic Priest emerged from obscurity to be known as the “Lion of Munster”.
His name was Clemens August Graf von Galen and this Catholic Priest became Hitler’s worst nightmare.
Bishop von Galen, however, is best remembered for battling the regime’s efforts to eliminate the “unfit.” The German medical profession largely embraced National Socialism – for them, Nazi racism was “applied biology” – and provided the ideas and techniques that led to unparalleled slaughter.
Hitler himself strongly supported euthanasia. As early as 1935, he told Gerhard Wagner, head of the Nationalist Socialist Physician’s League, that “large-scale euthanasia would have to wait until wartime because it would be easier to administer.”
Six euthanasia centers opened in the war’s early years as Charitable Foundations for Institutional Care. As the name suggests, killing was rationalized as a compassionate act.
Von Galen immediately condemned these “centers” in a series of sermons. On Sunday, July 13, 1941, he warned that no one was safe from being “locked up in the cellars and concentration camps of the Gestapo. . . .The right to life, to inviolability, to freedom is an indispensable part of and moral order of society. . . .We demand justice!”
One week later, he condemned the Gestapo’s recent closings of religious houses, schools, convents, monasteries, abbeys, and the confiscation of properties:
Remain firm! We see and experience clearly what lies behind the new doctrines which have for years been forced on us, for the sake of which religion has been banned from the schools, our organizations have been suppressed and now Catholic kindergartens are about to be abolished – there is a deep-seated hatred of Christianity, which they are determined to destroy.
This Catholic Priest never backed down because he knew he was called by God to fight evil and God already gave him the victory.
Von Galen never backed down. He stared Hitler down and won. Hitler recognized that Von Galen had God on his side. He knew that Galen’s influence had the power to undo the Gestapo. This Catholic Priest wasn’t going to cower to the likes of Adolph Hitler. If we believers are going to fight evil in our time, we not only need Von Galen’s courage, but we must act. We look at our modern day Evangelical leaders and they are more than happy to cave to political correctness, the Rainbow Jihad, Abortion rights activists. We’ve grown soft. We have a great Redeemer who is Christ the Lord and we have no reason to fear!