Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

“The Lion of Muenster,” Clemens August von Galen, was beatified at St. Peter’s on Sunday. Departing from the practice of John Paul the Great, Pope Benedict did not preside at the beatification ceremony but showed up at the end to hail the “heroic courage” of Cardinal von Galen in publicly protesting Hitler’s euthanasia programs and anti-Semitism. “Von Galen feared God more than man, and this gave him the courage to say and do things that many intelligent persons did not say or do in that period in Germany,” said the pope. “He dedicated himself,” Benedict contrinued, “to defending the rights of God, of the Church, and of man, rights which the National Socialist regime violated in a grave and systematic way in the name of an aberrant, neo-pagan ideology.”

Some critics of von Galen have complained that he was more concerned about the rights of God and the Church than about Hitler’s victims, notably the Jews. It is a strange charge that a bishop was chiefly devoted to God and the Church, and even a stranger notion that devotion to God and the Church does not entail, indeed mandate, devotion to all the imperiled children of God. The November issue of FIRST THINGS, which subscribers should be receiving in the next week, includes a timely and enlightening discussion of the heroism of Cardinal von Galen (a few weeks before his death in 1946, he was created a cardinal by Pius XII) and exposes the mean-spirited fatuity of his critics. The article is by Justus George Lawler.