Three Catholic martyrs executed under the Nazi regime were
beatified in
Fathers Hermann Lange, Eduard Müller and Johannes Prassek,
along with Lutheran pastor Karl Friedrich Stellbrink, were guillotined in a Hamburg
prison in November 1943. The Nazi regime found them guilty of “defeatism,
malice, favoring the enemy and listening to enemy broadcasts.”
At a ceremony in the northern German city of Lubeck ,
Cardinal Angelo Amato, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of
Saints, declared the trio of Catholic clergy to be ‘blessed.’ He also expressed
an ‘honorable remembrance’ for the priests’ fellow Christian martyr, Pastor
Stellbrink.
“What distinguishes these four also is the fact that in the
face of National-Socialist despotism they overcame the divide between the two
faiths to find a common path to fight and act together,” says the official
history which accompanied the ceremony.
It’s estimated that over 9,000 pilgrims – both Catholic and
Protestant – attended the Beatification ceremony. Twenty Catholic and four Protestant
bishops planned to attend.
On June 24 Lutheran Vespers were prayed for the martyrs at Lubeck ’s
Memorial Church
The official history recounts that the men would copy and
distribute the anti-Nazi sermons of Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen of the
Catholic Diocese of Munster.
“They felt, like many others, the liberating tone of these
sermons, which broke the silence and proclaimed aloud the thoughts many had in
their hearts, when the Nazi action for the ‘destruction of unworthy lives’
began, the euthanasia of innocent mentally retarded persons,” the history says.
The men’s last letters, written just hours before their
deaths, have been preserved and were put on display this weekend. Father
Johannes Prassek wrote his family:
“I am so happy, I can hardly explain how happy. God is so
good to have given me several beautiful years in which to be his priest. “Do not be sad! What is waiting for me is joy and good
fortune, with which all the happiness and good fortune here on earth cannot
compare.”
Father Eduard Muller wrote to his bishop: “It gives me great pleasure to be able to write a few lines
to you in this, my last hour. Whole-heartedly, I thank you first of all for the
greatest gift which you gave me as a successor of the apostles, when you placed
you hands on me and ordained me as God’s priest. “But now we must embark upon this – in human terms
difficult- final walk, which is to lead us to Him, whom we served as priests.”
Beatification is public recognition by the Catholic Church
that a deceased person has entered Heaven. It is the third of the four steps
towards canonization and confers the title “blessed.”
No comments:
Post a Comment