Blessed Clemens August Graf von Galen
“Lion of Münster”
Born March 16, 1878
Dinklage Castle, Dinklage,
Grand Duchy of Oldenburg,
German Confederation
Died March 22, 1946 (aged 68)
Münster, Province of Westphalia, Germany
Beatified 9 October 2005 by Pope Benedict XVI
Feast 22 March
The Official Portrait Of Blessed Clemens August Graf Von Galen
The 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 School 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 [The Plague of Laicism and its Forms of Expression] (1932).
The von Galen family home in Burg Dinklage.
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 supported the German Confederation. Thus, he judged that the Treaty of Versailles was unjust and that Bolshevism was a threat to Germany and the Church.
Together with Munich’s Cardinal Faulhaber and Berlin’s Bishop Preysing, Galen drafted Pius XI’s encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (14 March 1937).
Bl. Clemens August (third from left) at age six.
Early years
Von Galen belonged to one of the oldest of the most distinguished noble families of Westphalia, and was born in the Catholic southern part of the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg (Oldenburger Münsterland, near the German border with the Netherlands), on the Burg Dinklage, now in the state of Lower Saxony. The von Galen name had long been associated with the region; the von Galens had been there since 1667, when Christoph Bernhard von Galen was named first bishop of Münster after putting down the Anabaptists. Clemens August was the son of Count Ferdinand Heribert von Galen, a member of the Imperial German parliament (Reichstag) for the Catholic Centre Party, and Elisabeth von Spee, the eleventh of thirteen children.
Until 1890 Clemens August and his brother Franz were tutored at home. He received his main schooling at a Jesuit School, Stella Matutina in the Vorarlberg, Austria, where only Latin was allowed to be spoken. Jesuits were not permitted in Münster at this time, evidence of the lasting impact of the Kulturkampf, so Clemens had to leave his family and state to receive this Jesuit education. He was not an easy student to teach, and his Jesuit superior wrote to his parents: “Infallibility is the main problem with Clemens, who under no circumstance will admit that he may be wrong. It is always his teachers and educators who are wrong.
Bl. Clemens August von Galen in 1899 after a hunt.
Because Prussia did not recognize the Stella Matutina academy, Clemens spent the last years of his education near home. In 1894 he returned home to attend a public school in Vechta and by 1896 both Clemens and Franz had passed the examinations that qualified them to attend a university. Upon graduation, his fellow students wrote in his yearbook: “Clemens doesn’t make love or go drinking, he does not like worldly deceit.” By 1896 he went to Switzerland to study at the Catholic University of Freiburg, which had been established in 1886 by the Dominicans, where he encountered the writings of Thomas Aquinas. In 1897 he began to study a variety of topics, including literature, history, and philosophy. Following the first winter semester at Freiburg, Clemens and Fritz went on an extended visit to Rome, for three months. At the end of the visit he told Fritz that he had decided to become a priest though he was unsure whether to become a contemplative Benedictine, or a Jesuit. In 1899 he met Pope Leo XIII in a private audience. He studied at the Theological Faculty and Convent in Innsbruck, founded in 1669 by the Jesuits, where scholastic philosophy was emphasized, and new concepts and ideas avoided. In 1903 von Galen left Innsbruck to enter the seminary in Münster, and he was ordained a priest on May 28, 1904. At first he worked for a family member, the Auxiliary Bishop of Münster, as Chaplain. Soon he moved to Berlin, where he worked as parish priest at St. Matthias Church.
