The Prison Meditations of Father Alfred Delp

By Fr. Alfred Delp

Classic reflections on gospel wisdom from a modern martyr show the ongoing relevance of the gospel in an age of idolatrous power and capricious violence.

“Disturbing reminders...that pious formulas and clichés are not enough to combat evil.”—Xavier Rynne, The New Yorker

“What is most characteristic about these writings...is their absolute honesty and the absolute sincerity of their passion for man....Some of the most powerful spiritual writing of recent times.”—Walter Arnold, Commonwealth

“A searching commentary....These meditations of a priest ought to become the foci of those of every layman.”—Eldon Talley, Cross Currents

“Must rank as one of the great human and spiritual documents of our time.”—The Boston Pilot

• Language: English
• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Release date: Jul 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787206281

Fr. Alfred Delp

ALFRED DELP, S.J. (15 September 1907 - 2 February 1945) was a German Jesuit priest and philosopher of the German Resistance. A member of the inner Kreisau Circle resistance group, he is considered a significant figure in Catholic resistance to Nazism. Born in Mannheim, Germany to a Catholic mother and a Protestant father, he left the Lutheran church at 14 and received the sacraments of First Eucharist and Confirmation as a Catholic. Graduated top of his school class, he joined the Society of Jesus in 1926. He worked as a teacher in Feldkirch, Austria and completed his theology studies in Valkenburg, Holland (1934-1936) and Frankfurt (1936-1937). He was ordained a Catholic priest in Munich in 1937 and worked on the editorial staff of the Jesuit publication Stimmen der Zeit (“Voices of the Times”) from 1939 until Nazi suppression in 1941. He was then assigned as rector of St. Georg Church and also secretly helped Jews who were escaping to Switzerland. He joined the Kreisau Circle in 1942 to develop a model for a new social order. Though he knew nothing of the plot to overthrow Hitler, he was arrested eight days after the attempt on Hitler’s life in Munich in July 1944, brought to trial, and, refusing to leave the Jesuits, was executed for high treason on 2 February 1945 at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin, aged just 37. He was honored posthumously for his martyrdom, with theatre halls, memorial chapels, schools and colleges throughout Germany named after him.

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Text originally published in 1963 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE PRISON MEDITATIONS OF ALFRED DELP, S.J.

FATHER DELP

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Thomas Merton

Nihil obstat: James Rea, D.D., Ph.D.,

Censor Deputatus

Imprimatur: T. J. Hughes,

Ordinarius Cliftonienis

die 18a Octobris, 1962

The Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur are a declaration that a book or pamphlet is considered to be free from doctrinal or moral error. It is not implied that those who have granted the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur agree with the contents, opinions or statements expressed.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

INTRODUCTION 7

EXTRACTS FROM FATHER DELP’S DIARY 20

1944 20

1945 24

MEDITATIONS 28

I THE PEOPLE OF ADVENT 28

II THE SUNDAYS OF ADVENT 32

FIRST SUNDAY 32

SECOND SUNDAY: RISE AND STAND ON HIGH 33

THIRD SUNDAY: TRUE HAPPINESS 34

FOURTH SUNDAY: BINDING AND LOOSING 43

THE THREE LAWS OF BONDAGE 43

THE THREE LAWS OF FREEDOM 45

III THE VIGIL OF CHRISTMAS 48

CONCERNING THE BLESSED BURDEN OF GOD 48

IV THE PEOPLE OF CHRISTMAS 54

WHAT IS IT THAT SEPARATES PEOPLE FROM GOD? 54

THOSE ROUND THE CRIB 55

FIGURES LINKED WITH THE FEAST 58

THE PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT AT THE CRIB 60

THE CRUX OF THE MATTER 63

V EPIPHANY 1945 64

THE LAW OF FREEDOM 64

THE LAW OF THE WILDERNESS 66

THE LAW OF GRACE 67

THE TASKS IN FRONT OF US 69

I THE FUTURE OF MAN 69

GOD-CONSCIOUS HUMANISM 69

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY 69

II THE EDUCATION OF MAN 71

III THE FATE OF THE CHURCHES 73

MAKING READY 77

I THE OUR FATHER 77

FATHER 77

OUR FATHER 77

WHO ART IN HEAVEN 78

HALLOWED BE THY NAME 79

THY KINGDOM COME 80

THY WILL BE DONE ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN 81

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD 82

FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES AS WE FORGIVE THEM... 83

LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION 83

DELIVER US FROM EVIL 84

II COME HOLY GHOST 85

AND SEND FROM HEAVEN 85

SEND THY RADIANT LIGHT 86

COME THOU FATHER OF THE POOR 86

COME BOUNTEOUS GIVER 87

COME LIGHT OF OUR HEARTS 88

BEST COMFORTER 88

SWEET GUEST OF SOULS 88

SWEET REFRESHMENT 89

REST IN LABOR 89

COOLNESS IN HEAT 90

SOLACE IN WOE 91

O BLESSED LIGHT 92

FILL OUR INMOST HEART 93

THY FAITHFUL 93

WITHOUT THY GRACE 94

NOTHING IS IN MAN 94

NOTHING IS HARMLESS 94

WASH WHAT IS STAINED 95

WATER WHAT IS BARREN 97

HEAL WHAT IS WOUNDED 98

BEND WHAT IS RIGID 100

MELT WHAT IS FROZEN 102

BEND WHAT IS RIGID—MELT WHAT IS FROZEN 103

CORRECT WHAT IS WRONG 104

GIVE TO THY FAITHFUL 105

WHO TRUST IN THEE 105

THE LAST STAGE 107

I AFTER THE VERDICT 107

II LETTER TO THE BRETHREN 111

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 112

INTRODUCTION

Those who are used to the normal run of spiritual books and meditations will have to adjust themselves, here, to a new and perhaps disturbing outlook. Written by a man literally in chains, condemned to be executed as a traitor to his country in time of war, these pages are completely free from the myopic platitudes, and the insensitive complacencies of routine piety. Set in the familiar framework of seasonal meditations on the Church year, these are new and often shocking insights into realities which we sometimes discuss academically but which are here experienced in their naked, uncompromising truth. These are the thoughts of a man who, caught in a well-laid trap of political lies, clung desperately to a truth that was revealed to him in solitude, helplessness, emptiness and desperation. Face to face with inescapable physical death, he reached out in anguish for the truth without which his spirit could not breathe and survive. The truth was granted him, and we share it in this book, awed by the realization that it was given him not for himself alone, but for us, who need it just as desperately, perhaps more desperately, than he did.

One of the most sobering aspects of this book is the conviction it imparts that we may one day be in the same desperate situation as the writer. Though we may perhaps still seem to be living in a world where, in spite of wars and rumors of wars, business goes on as usual, and Christianity is what it has always been, Father Delp reminds us that somewhere in the last fifty years we have crossed a mysterious limit set by Providence and have entered a new era. We have, in some sense, passed a point of no return, and it is both useless and tragic to continue to live as if we were still in the nineteenth century. Whatever we may think of the new era, whether we imagine it as the millennium, the noosphere, or as the beginning of the end, there has been a violent disruption of society and a radical overthrow of that modern world which goes back to Charlemagne.

In this new era the social structures into which Christianity had fitted so comfortably and naturally, have all but collapsed. The secularist thought patterns which began to assert themselves in the Renaissance, and which assumed control at the French Revolution, have now so deeply affected and corrupted modern man that even where he preserves certain traditional beliefs, they tend to be emptied of their sacred inner reality, and to mask instead the common pseudo-spirituality or the outright nihilism of massman. The meditations of Father Delp were written not only in the face of his own death, but in the terrifying presence of this specter of a faceless being that was once the image of God, and toward which the Church nevertheless retains an unchanging responsibility.

The first pages were written in Advent of 1944, when the armies of the Third Reich launched their last, hopeless offensive in the Ardennes. Defeat was already certain. The Nazis alone refused to see it. Hitler was still receiving lucky answers from the stars. Father Delp had long since refused to accept the collective delusion. In 1943 at the request of Count Von Moltke and with the permission of his religious Superiors, he had joined in the secret discussions of the Kreisau Circle, an anti-Nazi group that was planning a new social order to be built on Christian lines after the war. That was all. But since it implied a complete repudiation of the compulsive myths and preposterous fictions of Nazism, it constituted high treason. Since it implied that Germany might not win it was defeatism—a crime worthy of death.

The trial itself was a show, staged by a specialist in such matters. It was handled with ruthless expertise and melodramatic arrogance before an obedient jury and public of SS men and Gestapo agents. The scenario did not provide for a serious defense of the prisoners. Such efforts as they made to protest their innocence were turned against them and only made matters worse. Count Von Moltke and Father Delp were singled out as the chief villains, and in Delp’s case the prosecution smeared not only the prisoner but the Jesuit Order and the Catholic Church as well. Moltke came under special censure because he had had the temerity to consult bishops and theologians with sinister re-christianizing intentions. The prosecution also tried to incriminate Moltke and Delp in the attempted assassination of Hitler the previous July, but this was obviously out of the question and the charge was dropped. This was plainly a religious trial. The crime was heresy against Nazism. As Father Delp summed it up in his last letter: The actual reason for my condemnation was that I happened to be and chose to remain a Jesuit.

Nearly twenty years have passed since Father Delp was executed in the Plötzensee prison on February 2, 1945. During these twenty years the world has been supposedly at peace. But in actual fact, the same chaotic, inexhaustible struggle of armed nations has continued in a different form. A new weaponry, unknown to Father Delp, now guarantees that the next total war will be one of titanic destructiveness, when a single nuclear weapon contains more explosive force than all the bombs in World War II put together. In the atmosphere of violent tension that now prevails, there is no less cynicism, no less desperation, no less confusion than Father Delp saw around him. Totalitarian fanaticisms have not disappeared from the face of the earth: on the contrary, armed with nuclear weapons, they threaten to possess it entirely. Fascism has not vanished: the state socialism of the Communist countries can justly be rated as a variety of fascism. In the democratic countries of the West, armed to the teeth in defense of freedom, fascism is not unknown. In France, a secret terrorist organization seeks power by intimidation, violence, torture, blackmail, murder. The principles of this organization of military men are explicitly fascist principles. Curiously enough, neo-Nazism recognizes its affinities with the French terrorists and proclaims its solidarity with them. Yet among the French crypto-fascists are many who appeal paradoxically to Christian principles, in justification of their ends!

What in fact is the position of Christians? It is ambiguous and confused. Though the Holy See has repeatedly affirmed the traditional classical ethic of social and international justice, and though these pronouncements are greeted with a certain amount of respectful interest, it is increasingly clear that their actual influence is often negligible. Christians themselves are confused and passive, looking this way and that for indications of what to do or think next. The dominating factor in the political life of the average Christian today is fear of Communism. But, as Father Delp shows, the domination of fear completely distorts the true perspectives of Christianity and it may well happen that those whose religious activity reduces itself in the long run to a mere negation, will find that their faith has lost all content.

In effect, the temptation to negativism and irrationality, the urge to succumb to pure pragmatism and the massive use of power, is almost overwhelming in our day. Two huge blocs, each armed with a quasi-absolute, irresistible offensive force capable of totally annihilating the other, stand face to face. Each one insists that it is armed in defense of a better world, and for the salvation of mankind. But each tends more and more explicitly to assert that this end cannot be achieved until the enemy is wiped out.

A book like this forces us to stand back and re-examine these oversimplified claims. We are compelled to recall that in the Germany of Father Delp’s time, Christians were confronted with more or less the same kind of temptation. First there must be a war. After that a new and better world. This was nothing new. It was by now a familiar pat-tern, not only in Germany but in Russia, England, France, America and Japan.

Was there another choice? Is there another choice today? The Western tradition of liberalism has always hoped to attain a more equable world order by peaceful collaboration among nations. This is also the doctrine of the Church. Father Delp and Count Von Moltke hoped to build a new Germany on Christian principles. Pope John XXIII in his encyclical Mater et Magistra clarified and exposed these principles. If there remains a choice confronting man today, it is the crucial one between global destruction or global order. Those who imagine that in the nuclear age it may be possible to clear the way for a new order with nuclear weapons are even more deluded than the people who followed Hitler, and their error will be a thousand times more tragic, above all if they commit it in the hope of defending their religion.

Father Delp had no hesitation in evaluating the choice of those who, in the name of religion, followed the Nazi government in its policy of conquest first and a new world later. He said:

The most pious prayer can become a blasphemy if he who offers it tolerates or helps to further conditions which are fatal to mankind, which render him unacceptable to God, or weaken his spiritual, moral or religious sense.

This certainly applies to co-operation with militant atheism first of all, but it applies equally well to any current equivalent of Nazism or militaristic fascism.

ii

What did Father Delp mean by conditions fatal to mankind?

His prison meditations are a penetrating diagnosis of a devastated, gutted, faithless society in which man is rapidly losing his humanity because he has become practically incapable of belief. Man’s only hope, in this wilderness which he has become, is to respond to his inner need for truth, with a struggle to recover his spiritual freedom. But this he is unable to do unless he first recovers his ability to hear the voice that cries to him in the wilderness: in other words, he must become aware of his devastated and desperate condition before it is too late. There is no question of the supreme urgency of this revival. For Father Delp it seems clear that the time is running out.

In these pages we meet a stern, recurrent foreboding that the voice in the wilderness is growing fainter and fainter, and that it will soon no longer be heard at all. The world may then sink into godless despair.

Yet the wilderness of man’s spirit is not yet totally hostile to all spiritual life. On the contrary, its silence is still a healing silence. He who tries to evade solitude and confrontation with the unknown God may eventually be destroyed in the meaningless chaotic atomized solitariness of mass society. But meanwhile it is still possible to face one’s inner solitude and to recover mysterious sources of hope and strength. This is still possible. But fewer and fewer men are aware of the possibility. On the contrary: Our fives today have become godless to the point of complete vacuity.

This is not a cliché of pulpit rhetoric. It is not a comforting slogan to remind the believer that he is right and that the unbeliever is wrong. It is a far more radical assertion, which questions even the faith of the faithful and the piety of the pious. Far from being comforting, this is an alarming declaration of almost Nietzschean scandalousness. "Of all messages this is the most difficult to accept—we find it hard to believe that the man of active faith no longer exists. An extreme statement, but he follows it with another: Modern man is not even capable of knowing God. In order to understand these harsh assertions by Father Delp we must remember they were written by a man in prison, surrounded by Nazi guards. When he speaks of modern man, he is in fact speaking of the Nazis or of their accomplices and counterparts. Fortunately not all modern men are Nazis. And even in reference to Nazis, when stated thus bluntly and out of context, these statements are still too extreme to be true. They are not meant to be taken absolutely, for if they were simply true, there would be no hope left for anyone, and Father Delp’s message is in fact a message of hope. He believes that the great task in the education of present and future generations is to restore man to a state of fitness for God." The Church’s mission in the world today is a desperate one of helping create conditions in which man can return to himself, recover something of his lost humanity, as a necessary preparation for his ultimate return to God. But as he now is, alienated, void, internally dead, modern man has in effect no capacity for God.

Father Delp is not saying that human nature is vitiated in its essence, that we have been abandoned by God or become radically incapable of grace. But the dishonesty and injustice of our world are such, Father Delp believes, that we are blind to spiritual things even when we think we are seeing them: and indeed perhaps most blind when we are convinced that we see. Today’s bondage, he says, speaking of Germany in 1944, is the sign of our untruth and deception.

The untruth of man, from which comes his faithlessness, is basically a matter of arrogance, or of fear. These two are only the two sides of one coin—attachment to material things for their own sake, love of wealth and power. Alienation results in the arrogance of those who have power or in the servility of the functionary who, unable to have wealth and power himself, participates in a power structure which employs him as a utensil. Modern man has surrendered himself to be used more and more as an instrument, as a means, and in consequence his spiritual creativity has dried up at its source. No longer alive with passionate convictions, but centered on his own empty and alienated self, man becomes destructive, negative, violent. He loses

Reviews for The Prison Meditations of Father Alfred Delp

[Fr. Constantine Sarantidis · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A tremendous witness against the easy accommodation that Christians have made to authoritarianism of the past and would-be authoritarians of our time. A witness to true Christian resistance, not the fascist-inclined methods of the religious Right.