Alfred Delp

Early life and education

Alfred Delp was born in Mannheim, Grand Duchy of Baden, to a Catholic mother and a Protestant father. Although he was baptised as a Catholic, he attended a Protestant elementary school and was confirmed in the Lutheran church in 1921. Following a bitter argument with the Lutheran pastor, he requested and received the sacraments of First Communion and Confirmation in the Catholic Church. His Catholic pastor recognized the boy's intelligence and love for learning and arranged for him to study at the Goetheschule in Dieburg. Possibly because of the dual upbringing, he became later an ardent proponent of radically better relations between the Churches.

Thereafter, Delp's youth was moulded mainly by the Bund Neudeutschland Catholic youth movement. Immediately after passing his Abitur – in which he was top of his class – he joined the Society of Jesus in 1926. Following philosophy studies at Pullach, he worked for 3 years as a prefect and sports teacher at Stella Matutina Kolleg in Feldkirch, Austria, where in 1933, he first experienced the Nazi regime, which forced an exodus of virtually all German students from Austria and thus the Stella Matutina by means of a punitive 1000 Mark fine to be paid by anyone entering Austria. With his Director, Fr Otto Faller and Professor Alois Grimm, he was among the first to arrive in the Black Forest, where the Jesuits opened Kolleg St. Blasien for some 300 students forced out of Austria. After St. Blasien, he completed his theology studies in Valkenburg, Holland (1934–1936), and in Frankfurt (1936–1937).

Ministry

In 1935, Delp published his Tragic Existence, propagating a God-based humanism and reviewing the existentialism of Martin Heidegger. In 1937, Delp was ordained a Catholic priest in Munich. Delp had wanted to study for a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Munich, but he was refused admission to the university for political reasons. From 1939 on, he worked on the editorial staff of the Jesuit journal Stimmen der Zeit ("Voices of the Times"), until the Nazis suppressed it in April 1941. He was then assigned as rector of St. Georg Church, part of Heilig-Blut Parish in the Munich neighbourhood Bogenhausen. He preached both at Heilig-Blut and St. Georg, and also secretly helped Jews who were escaping to Switzerland through the underground.

Resistance

Outspoken opposition to the Nazis by individual Jesuits resulted in harsh response from government officials, including imprisonment of priests in concentration camps. The government takeover of church property, "Klostersturm", resulted in the loss of valuable properties such as that of Stimmen der Zeit, and limited the work of the Jesuits in Germany. The Jesuit provincial, Augustin Rösch, Father Delp's superior in Munich, became active in the underground resistance to Hitler.

It was Augustin Rösch who introduced Delp to the Kreisau Circle. As of 1942, Delp met regularly with the clandestine group around Helmuth James Graf von Moltke to develop a model for a new social order after the Third Reich came to an end. Delp's role was to explain Catholic social teaching to the group, and to arrange contacts between Moltke and Catholic leaders, including Archbishop (later Cardinal) Konrad Preysing of Berlin.

Arrest and trial

After the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler failed, a special Gestapo commission arrested and interrogated all known members of the Resistance. Delp was arrested in Munich on 28 July 1944 (eight days after Claus von Stauffenberg's attempt on Hitler's life), although he was not directly involved in the plot. He was transferred to Tegel Prison in Berlin. While in prison, he secretly began to say Mass and wrote letters, reflections on Advent, on Christmas, and other spiritual subjects, which were smuggled out of the prison before his trial. On 8 December 1944, Delp had a visit from Franz von Tattenbach SJ, sent by Rösch to receive his final vows to the Jesuit Order. This was supposedly forbidden, but the attending policemen did not understand what was going on. Delp wrote on the same day, It was too much, what a fulfillment, I prayed for it so much, I gave my life away. My chains are now without any meaning, because God found me worthy of the "Vincula amoris" (chains of love).

He was tried, together with Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, Franz Sperr, and Eugen Gerstenmaier, before the People's Court (Volksgerichtshof) on 9–11 January 1945, with Roland Freisler presiding. Alfred Delp, Helmuth von Moltke, and Franz Sperr were sentenced to death by hanging for high treason and treason. The court had dropped the charge against Delp of being aware of the 20 July plot, but his dedication to the Kreisau Circle, his work as a Jesuit priest, and his Christian-social worldview were enough to seal his fate as a victim of the Nazi "system of justice".

Execution

While he was in prison, the Gestapo offered Delp his freedom in return for his leaving the Jesuits, but he rejected it. Delp, like all prisoners connected with 20 July, was required to wear handcuffs day and night. Prisoners being taken to execution were handcuffed with their hands behind their backs. The sentence was carried out on 2 February 1945 at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. The very next day, Roland Freisler was killed in an air-raid. A special order by Heinrich Himmler required that the remains of all prisoners executed in connection with the 20 July Plot be cremated, and their ashes scattered over the sewage fields. Accordingly, the body of Alfred Delp was cremated and his ashes disposed of somewhere near Berlin; nobody knows where.

Posthumous honours

In September 1949, the superior Fr Otto Faller at Kolleg St. Blasien unveiled memorial plaques for two former educators and teachers slain by the Nazis, namely Alfred Delp and Alois Grimm, the latter's ashes being buried there. Some thirty years later, Kolleg St. Blasien named its new theatre hall after Alfred Delp. The Alfred Delp Memorial Chapel was built in Lampertheim, consecrated on 2 February 1965, at the 20th anniversary of his martyrdom. Many schools in Germany are named after Alfred Delp, among them one in Bremerhaven. In Mannheim, a Catholic student residence is named for him. The guesthouse on the campus of the Canisius College in Berlin also bears his name. In Dieburg, the uppermost level at the Gymnasium, the Alfred Delp School, the Catholic community centre, the Father Delp House, and a street are named after him. The Bundeswehr named its barracks in Donauwörth the Alfred-Delp-Kaserne. 1955 the Wasserburgerstrasse, a street in Munich-Bogenhausen has been renamed to Delpstrasse, where Eva Braun resided from 1935 in a villa.

Fr Delp was included among the almost other 900 Catholics in a list of people having suffered a violent death for adherence to the Christian faith, published in 1999 as Zeugen für Christus. Das deutsche Martyrologium des 20. Jahrhunderts (Witnesses for Christ. The German Martyrology of the 20th century), prepared by Mgr Helmut Moll under the auspices of the German Bishops' Conference. Despite the book's subtitle, Fr Delp's appearing is a sign of respect with only informal significance and does not amount to beatification or the granting of liturgical veneration.

Beatification process

In January 1990 Fr Delp's last parish in Munich sent documentation supporting the start of his official beatification process to the Archbishop of Berlin, Cardinal Georg Sterzinsky. Despite this, it would not appear that a formal procedure has in fact been opened.

Not having been beatified, Fr Delp does not therefore appear in the latest official edition of the Martyrology of the Catholic Church, the Martyrologium Romanum, whose last typical edition in Latin was promulgated by Rome in 2004, unlike other recent martyrs who have in fact been beatified, and hence are included in the Martyrology, such as the priest Blessed Bernhard Lichtenberg, who died while being transported from Berlin to Dachau concentration camp, on 5 November 1943 (aged 67) and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in Berlin on 23 June 1996.

Writings

Delp's book In the Face of Death, published in 1956, gathered together his meditations, notes, fragments of his diary and letters, written during his six months imprisonment, and has been compared to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's, Letters and Papers from Prison. It is the first part of a trilogy that also includes Committed to the Earth and The Mighty God. The American edition of his Prison Meditations (1963), had an introduction by Thomas Merton, who considered him a mystic and his work "perhaps the most insightful Christian meditations of our time". The German edition of his Collected Works (1982–1988), was edited by Fr. Roman Bleistein SJ in five volumes.

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Works

Literature

English sources

German sources