This Day in Religious History

February 2, 1945 – The German Jesuit Alfred Delp was hanged for high treason, just one of 80 members of his religious order killed by the Nazi regime in the course of their 12 years of terror.

After the war, Thomas Merton called Prison Writings, a collection of Delp’s thoughts smuggled out during his last six months of life, to be “perhaps the most insightful…Christian meditations of our time.” Nineteen years after his death, the German state that had ordered his execution issued a postage stamp in his honor for his opposition to Hitler and his membership in the Kreisau Circle, a secret movement formed to lay plans for a post-Nazi order in German based on Christian principles.

Another German Jesuit, Andreas B. Batlogg, offers a moving assessment of Delp’s life and thought in “A Martyr to the Nazis,” in the January 21-28, 2008 issue of America. The article is available only to subscribers, both in hard copy and online, but I urge all of my readers to go to the nearest library that stocks this magazine and read this account.

Nearly one year after Delp’s execution, in January 1946, the Nuremberg prosecution team, led by Supreme Court Justice Robert Justice, presented evidence regarding the persecution of the Church by the Nazis. The life of Delp and his fellow martyrs of all faiths are good reason to endorse, in this increasingly aggressively secular statement, the recent statement by novelist Ian MacEwan: “I think religion is ineradicable, and I think it is a terrible idea to suppress it, too.”