Catholic Niem

Another Niemoeller has arisen in Germany--this time a Roman Catholic, Count Clemens August von Galen, Bishop of Minister in Westphalia. In August he denounced Naziism three times from his pulpit so vigorously that according to news which percolated to the U.S. last week Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler has urged Hitler to have him shot. To date he las not been touched, for his influence on the workers of Westphalia is so great, and the news of his resistance has grapevined so rapidly throughout the Reich, that the Mazis fear there would be a major work stoppage if they harmed him.

Bishop von Galen's sermons followed two attacks: one by British bombers which gave Muenster one of the worst poundings any German city has yet suffered, the other from the Nazis, who suppressed all Catholic religious orders in Westphalia and imprisoned many prominent Catholics. The attack from the "inner enemy," he said in his first sermon, was spiritually the more dangerous.

"No German citizen," added the big, resolute bishop, "has any longer any security, and justice has come to be a thing of the past. If the Church is accused of disrupting the unity of a nation, the reply must be that the secret police is disrupting that unity in a way which concerns all Christians." He praised the heroism of imprisoned Protestant Pastor Niemoeller, saying that Catholics and Protestants alike respected him and that he could not possibly be regarded as an enemy of the people though Nazis treated him as one.

In his other two sermons, Bishop von Galen said that injustices in Germany cried to heaven for redress and that the country no longer had any law. He denounced Nazi use of euthanasia, revealing that many patients in his diocese had been taken away from asylums and put to death. He charged that the Ten Commandments were being violated with the knowledge and consent of all the national leaders--the first commandment by idolatry the fourth by the actions of the Hitler youth on the Sabbath, the seventh by authorities who encouraged soldiers to become "war fathers," the eighth by Naz leaders who were using their positions to enrich themselves personally.

"While there is much talk about national community," Bishop von Galen concluded, "there can be no national com munity with persons responsible for these things and I refuse any kind of fellowship with them."

Other recent religious news from Hitler held Europe:

> Twenty-six German Confessiona Church leaders who aided candidates fo the ministry in underground seminaries have been jailed.

> In America the Rev. John LaFarge, SJ described Nazi treatment of Catholic Slovenia as "a hell deliberately planned by Adolf Hitler, out of his diabolical hatred for Christ and His Church." Local priests are being replaced by Germans, and in one diocese 65% of the priests have already been arrested.

> Quislings could get only 27 of Norway's 700 Lutheran pastors to support Germany's "crusade" against Russia.

> Hitler has issued personal orders to Gauleiter Arthur Karl Greiser of Poland and the Baltic States, according to the Catholic C.I.P. agency, that: 1) the Church must cease to exist except as social or cultural associations; 2) no person under 21 may belong to such an association; Germans and officials are forbidden to join them; 3) these associations may not have central headquarters or keep in touch with any group abroad (i.e., the Vatican) ; 4) all religious education and all convents and monasteries are to be suppressed; 5) every priest must have a secular job, so that he can perform spiritual duties only in his spare time.

> Dutch Protestants and Catholics are fighting the Nazis more openly on the matter of anti-Semitism than Christians anywhere else in occupied Europe. Both still pray in public for Queen Wilhelmina.

> In Occupied France, especially Brittany, Catholics are taking a strong stand against the conquerors. The Bishop of Quimper's sermons have denounced the Nazis steadily since the fall of France. In former Alsace-Lorraine, the Bishop of Strasbourg and Bishop of Metz have been forcibly retired for noncollaboration. In Unoccupied France, the hierarchy has solved the thorny problem of getting along with Vichy and at the same time preventing Petain from using Catholic groups as the social prop for his regime by keeping out of politics. Said the Bishop of Montauban: "We can naturally not collaborate when this involves a confusion between the spiritual and the temporal. . . . France, yes, and heartily, but God first."

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