Lion of Munster challenges Hitler

AN AUSTRIAN contemporary weekly "Die-Furche" recently published an article about three rediscovered sermons by Bishop Clemens August, Count von Galen. The bishop was known as "the Lion of Munster". During the second World War his was the very rare voice of the Catholic Church that dared publicly to challenge Hitler and the Nazi regime. Preaching on the ninth Sunday after Whitsun 1941 the courageous bishop condemned the horrific crime of the murder of sick and handicapped. Referring to his Pastoral Letter of 6 July Bishop von Galen said:
"For some months we have heard reports that on the orders of Berlin (the Nazi Headquarters), long suffering, sick and possibly incurable people have been compulsorily removed from hospitals and institutions for the mentally handicapped.
Shortly afterwards the next of kin invariably received notification that the person had fallen victim to a disease, and that the remains had been cremated, and that the ashes could be delivered to them.
Suspicion bordering on certainty is that these deaths of mentally handicapped people had not been natural deaths, but deliberately brought about following a teaching that maintains that it is permissible to destroy socalled futile life, in other words to kill innocent human beings when it is considered that their life is no longer of value to the people or the state. A terrible teaching which tries legally to justify the murder of the innocents, the violent killing of those disabled, invalids, cripples, the incurable, the geriatrics."
Had these words of the courageous Bishop Count von Galen been published in this country during the War, they would have been applauded and used as yet another justification for our war against Hitler.
Today we are debating euthanasia and abortion: how long before we go further down the road of which the Lion of Munster spoke some 50 years ago? Jonathan Kemp London