Count Clement August von Galen: bishop of Munster

I heard in Mass today, yes the protestant is going to mass now. That the Vatican has done something with bishop of Munster: Count Clement August von Galen. I think he is now in the canonization process or something. I could not quite follow what the priest said because I do not know enough about the process. :( However, he sounds like a really nifty person. Here is some information about him...

Faith and Fatherland
From the beginning the Catholic Church was one of the main targets of Hitler's policy of annihilation; the totalitarian aims of National Socialism would not tolerate any opposition or allow any other organization to compete for the loyalty of the German people.
The Gestapo were active everywhere, even to the extent of intruding into confessionals to trap priests into making unguarded statements. Priests were kept under active surveillance. As a consequence hundreds of clergy were arraigned before Nazi courts of summary jurisdiction and condemned to death or internment in concentration camps.1
In Dachau alone, no fewer than 2,771 priests were imprisoned, of whom at least 1,000 died from hunger, disease or ill-treatment. Acts of brutality, torture and murder were commonplace in these camps, yet they were the context of daily acts of heroism, as in the case of Maximillian Kolbe in Auschwitz, or the secret and daring ordination in Dachau of Karl Leisner, the young seminarian from Munich.2
The majority of the priests interned in Dachau were of Polish origin; however, apart from German nationals, there were large numbers of French, Czechs, and Austrians. Dachau was host to priests from all over Nazi occupied Europe. Seminarians from these same countries were drafted in as part of forced labour gangs in Germany.
No less than 4,000 priests were put to death during these years, either as "political saboteurs," or, after incarceration in concentration camps, by hanging, starvation, mishandling, lack of medical aid, or as victims of medical experiments including euthanasia. It is a story of courageous and heroic resistance against the overwhelming power of a police state.3
In this context also the memory of a great German ecclesiastic deserves to be recalled for his heroism at another level. Count Clement August von Galen was bishop of Munster, the ecclesiastical capital of the strongly Catholic region of Westphalia and the Lower Rhine in Northwest Germany. He took a consistently courageous stand against the policies of Hitler and the Gestapo, and was unrelenting in his criticism of them. His immense prestige at home and abroad was what ultimately saved him from the extermination that many of his own priests suffered.
At that time one of the directors of propaganda in the British War Office was Brig. General R. L. Sedgwick, a convert to Catholicism, he recalls that the bishop's sermons provided the War Office with the most powerful anti-Hitler propaganda.4 During the war the BBC sent out transmissions specifically targeting the forty million German speaking Catholics. Day after day the radio broadcasts from London drove home the point of Hitler's hatred for Catholicism. The bishop's sermons, he says, were like manna from heaven in the propaganda war against the Nazis. The BBC transmissions, drawing on these sermons, also endeavored to show that National Socialism constituted a grave threat to the family and the religious ideals which it enshrined.
http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=353

There is also information here about: family background, him being the bishop, The struggle against National Socialism, His greatest hour, Battle against euthanasia, Destruction of the cathedral, and Home to die.

In addition, this quote was part of the message today. Though the source the priest used was longer.

BISHOP OF MÜNSTER PROTESTS KILLINGS
Never under any circumstances may a human being kill an innocent person apart from war and legitimate self-defense. If you establish and apply the principle that you can kill 'unproductive' fellow human beings then woe betide us all when we become old and frail!... woe betide loyal soldiers who return to the homeland seriously disabled, as cripples, as invalids. If it is once accepted that people have the right to kill 'unproductive' fellow humans-- and even if it only initially affects the poor defenseless mentally ill--then as a matter of principle murder is permitted for all unproductive people.... Then, it is only necessary for some secret edict to order that the method developed for the mentally ill should be extended to other 'unproductive' people, that it should be applied to those suffering from incurable lung disease, to the elderly who are frail or invalids, to the severely disabled soldiers. Then none of our lives will be safe any more. Some commission can put us on the list of the 'unproductive', who in their opinion have become worthless life. And no police force will protect us and no court will investigate our murder and give the murderer the punishment he deserves. Who will be able to trust his physician any more? He may report his patient as 'unproductive' and receive instructions to kill him. It is impossible to imagine the degree of moral depravity, of general mistrust that would then spread even through families if this dreadful doctrine is tolerated, accepted and followed. Woe to mankind, woe to our German nation if God's holy commandment, 'Thou shalt not kill', which God proclaimed on Mount Sinai amidst thunder and lightning, which God our Creator inscribed in the conscience of mankind from the very beginning, is not only broken, but if this transgression is actually tolerated and permitted to go unpunished.From Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 (New York, 1991), pp. 152-53.

http://www.holocaust-trc.org/bishop.htm

Ok, I hope that you enjoy the reading.