VATICAN CITY — Today Europe is faced with the grim reality of euthanasia.

Holland and Belgium have passed laws allowing limited forms of legalized killing. Britain's Parliament is now contemplating legislation allowing hospitals to withdraw food and water from tube-fed patients. And the French media have been highlighting cases where people are allegedly pleading for the “right to die.”

For European pro-lifers, campaigning against euthanasia is an added burden to groups already taxed with fighting abortion and the widespread distribution of the “morning-after” pill.

Now, however, the Church is providing a champion in the form of a courageous figure whose cause for canonization has now been formally introduced. He is Bishop Graf von Galen, the “Lion of Münster,” Germany's courageous bishop from the dark days of the 1940s who spoke out fearlessly against the Nazi euthanasia program.

In December, Pope John Paul II officially pronounced Bishop von Galen a servant of God in formal recognition of his heroic virtues. The next stage is formal beatification.

Count Clemens von Galen was born into an aristocratic family with a strong Catholic heritage in a part of Germany that had been Catholic for centuries. Today, his body lies in the Galen Chapel in the great cathedral in Münster, and pilgrims come to lay flowers and pray at his tomb, where he lies with his ancestors.

Catholic Aristocrat

Born in 1878 in the family castle at Dinklage, von Galen had a childhood dominated by the Catholic faith, traditional country pursuits and a lifestyle that today would seem extraordinarily Spartan — no heating in most of the castle's huge rooms, no piped water, simple and rather formal meals, and an emphasis on duty and service.

Education at home was followed by a Jesuit boarding school and then the seminary. During World War I, the young Father von Galen worked in Berlin, chiefly among the poorest people. In 1929 he was appointed parish priest of St. Lambert's in Münster, and in 1933 he was appointed bishop of the city.

By then, Hitler was in power. Bishop von Galen's first clashes with the National Socialists came over the government's closing of Catholic youth groups, pressuring the young into joining the Hitler Youth.

But the real battle was joined after World War II began, as word filtered from hospitals and institutions housing the mentally sick and handicapped. Groups of them were being taken away to centers where they were killed, after which their families were told they had died of natural causes.

With Nazi totalitarianism at its peak, Germans could learn of the euthanasia campaign only by oblique means. The Gestapo tapped telephones and opened private letters, newspapers were censored and radio broadcasts filled with official propaganda.

Still, news of the mass killings spread slowly but effectively through personal means, as distraught families placed carefully-worded death notices in local newspapers, making it clear their loved ones had died under unusual circumstances.

Plagued by anti-life movements in Europe, pro-lifers now have an ally: Bishop Clemens von Galen, who is on the road to canonization.

Speaking Out

On Aug. 3, 1941, Bishop von Galen mounted his pulpit and denounced this slaughter of the innocent.

“Paragraph 21 of the Code of Penal Law is still valid,” he noted. “It states that anyone who deliberately kills a man by a premeditated act will be executed as a murderer. It is in order to protect the murderers of these poor invalids — members of our own families — against this legal punishment that the patients who are to be killed are transferred from their domicile to some distant institution.”

“I am assured that at the Ministry of the Interior and at the Ministry of Health, no attempt is made to hide the fact that a great number of the insane have already been deliberately killed and a great many more will follow,” Bishop von Galen added.

The bishop cited specific cases where people had been killed, including patients from the Marienthal Hospital and 800 from the Waestein Institute.

“Here we are dealing with human beings, with our neighbors, brothers and sisters, the poor and invalids … unproductive — perhaps! But have they, therefore, lost the right to live?” Bishop von Galen asked. “Have you or I the right to exist only because we are ‘productive’?”

The Nazi authorities wanted to arrest and silence the bishop, but this was not easy since he was immensely popular, commanding respect throughout Catholic Germany. So, extraordinarily, Bishop von Galen's words brought a halt to the euthanasia campaign, at least for a time.

But in 1944, with the tide of war turned fully against Germany, the National Socialists took their revenge. That July, Bishop von Galen was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen prison camp, where he remained until he was released in early 1945.

In the months immediately after Germany's final defeat in May 1945, living with his people in the hunger and ruins, Bishop von Galen was a reminder to the Western Allies that there had been voices from within Germany opposing the Nazi evil.

His own death in March 1946 — from illness induced by hunger and hardship — came just one month after he had been formally made a cardinal by Pope Pius XII in tribute to his wartime stance.

Today, Bishop von Galen's message is still heard. One of his nieces, Countess Johanna von Westphalen, heads the pro-life group Christian Democrats for Life. In a Germany and a Europe where the Church faces quite different problems from those of the 1940s — huge affluence, the marginalizing of Christianity in every sphere of life, massive dissent within Catholicism — Bishop von Galen's name is still an inspiration for those seeking to uphold the values he knew and taught.

Inspiration

“His grave in Münster always has flowers and candles around it. Every day, people come — there is never a time when candles and fresh flowers are not there,” von Westphalen said.

Still, von Westphalen admits she is worried about the future. “The young people do not know their faith — there is great confusion,” she said. “Many seem to be growing up entirely pagan.”

Pope John Paul II, a Pole who endured the Nazi occupation of his own land, has repeatedly called for a “re-evangelization” of Europe. One of the methods he is using is the heroic example of saints. As the Europe-wide campaigns for euthanasia continue, the Church holds up heroes such as Bishop von Galen and urges new generations to listen to them.

Joanna Bogle writes from London.