Clemens August Graf Von Galen

Clemens August Graf Von Galen

Blessed Clemens August Graf von Galen (March 16, 1878 – March 22, 1946) was a German count, Bishop of Münster, and Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.

Born into a venerable noble family, von Galen received part of his education in Austria from the Jesuits at the Stella Matutina in the border town of Feldkirch, on the Austrian border with Switzerland and Liechtenstein. After his ordination he worked in Berlin at Saint Matthias, where he became a close friend of Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, later to be Pope Pius XII. He disliked intensely the liberal values of the Weimar Republic and was against individualism, socialism, and democracy. Having served in Berlin parishes in years 1906–1929, he became the pastor of Münster's St. Lamberti Church, where he was noted for his political conservatism. He expressed his opposition to modernity in his book Die Pest des Laizismus und ihre Erscheinungsformen (1932).

Bishop Galen began to criticize Hitler's movement in 1934. He condemned the Nazi worship of race in a pastoral letter on January 29, 1934, and assumed responsibility for the publication of a pamphlet of essays criticizing the ideology of Alfred Rosenberg and defending the teachings of the Catholic Church. He was an outspoken critic of certain Nazi policies, emerging in 1941 as one of the church's most outspoken critics of the Third Reich, issuing forceful, public denunciations of its euthanasia programs and persecution of the Catholic Church. He was a staunch German nationalist. Thus, he judged that the Treaty of Versailles was unjust and that Bolshevism was a threat to Germany and the Church. He approved of German troops entering the demilitarised Rhineland in 1936 and encouraged Catholics in 1939 to join in Germany's defense after the Wehrmacht invaded Poland.

Together with Munich's Cardinal Faulhaber and Berlin's Bishop Preysing, he drafted Pius XI's encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (14 March 1937).