Selections of Bl. Clemens August Graf von Galen’s Writings on the Jews

Clemens August Graf von Galen (16 March 1878 – 22 March 1946) was a German count, Catholic priest, Bishop of Münster (1933–1946), and Cardinal of the Catholic Church. Born into the ancient Westphalian nobility, he was ordained in 1904, served as pastor of St. Lambert’s Church in Münster, and was appointed bishop in September 1933. He authored Die Pest des Laizismus und ihre Erscheinungsformen (1932; “The Plague of Laicism and Its Manifestations”) and delivered countless sermons and pastoral letters preserved in the two-volume critical edition Bischof Clemens August Graf von Galen: Akten, Briefe und Predigten 1933–1946, edited by Peter Löffler (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1988), hereafter cited as Akten. He was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on 9 October 2005.

The passages reproduced below are drawn from verified primary sources and the scholarly critical apparatus identified in the Sources section. They bear on the following themes of the Adversus Judaeos tradition: Israel‘s rejection of Christ and its resulting ruin; supersessionism (the Church as the New Israel, heir to the promises forfeited by the Synagogue); the theological enmity between the Jewish people and Christ; and the designation of the Jews as a rejected people under divine judgment. All translations are those of the translators identified in the Sources section. No word has been altered.

I. Israel‘s Rejection of Christ and Its Punishment: The Destruction of Jerusalem

Third Sermon, preached at St. Lambert’s Church, Münster, 3 August 1941

(Published in: Rev. Heinrich Portmann, Cardinal von Galen, trans. R. L. Sedgwick, London: Jarrolds, 1957, pp. 239–246)

“He is lamenting over Jerusalem, the holy city He loved so tenderly, the capital of His race. He is weeping over her inhabitants, over His own compatriots because they cannot foresee the judgment that is to overtake them, the punishment which His divine prescience and justice have pronounced. ‘Ah, if thou too couldst understand, above all in this day that is granted thee, the ways that can bring thee peace!’ Why did the people of Jerusalem not know it? Jesus had given them the reason a short time before. ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often have I been ready to gather thy children together, as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings; and thou didst refuse it! I your God and your King wished it, but you would have none of Me. . . .’ This is the reason for the tears of Jesus, for the tears of God. . . . Tears for the misrule, the injustice and man’s willful refusal of Him and the resulting evils, which, in His divine omniscience, He foresees and which in His justice He must decree. . . . It is a fearful thing when man sets his will against the will of God, and it is because of this that Our Lord is lamenting over Jerusalem.”

“Jesus saw only the walls and towers of the city of Jerusalem with His human eye, but with His divine prescience He saw far beyond and into the inmost heart of the city and its inhabitants. He saw its wicked obstinacy, terrible, sinful and cruel. Man, a transitory creature, was opposing his mean will to the Will of God. That is the reason why Jesus wept for this fearful sin and its inevitable punishment. God is not mocked.”

II. Israel Specifically as the People Who Rejected Divine Truth

Third Sermon, preached at St. Lambert’s Church, Münster, 3 August 1941

(Published in: Rev. Heinrich Portmann, Cardinal von Galen, trans. R. L. Sedgwick, London: Jarrolds, 1957, pp. 239–246)

“Did the Son of God in His omniscience see only Jerusalem and its people? Did He weep only on their behalf? Is God the protector and Father of the Jews only? Is Israel alone in rejecting His divine truth? Are they the only people to throw off the laws of God and plunge headlong to ruin?”

III. The Sentence Pronounced Upon Jerusalem for Rejecting Christ, Applied as a Warning

Third Sermon, preached at St. Lambert’s Church, Münster, 3 August 1941

(Published in: Rev. Heinrich Portmann, Cardinal von Galen, trans. R. L. Sedgwick, London: Jarrolds, 1957, pp. 239–246)

“‘And as He drew near, and caught sight of the city, He wept over it, and said: “Ah, if thou too couldst understand, above all in this day that is granted thee, the ways that can bring thee peace! As it is, they are hidden from thy sight. The days will come upon thee when thy enemies will fence thee round about, and encircle thee, and press thee hard on every side, and bring down in ruin both thee and thy children that are in thee, not leaving one stone of thee upon another; and all because thou didst not recognize the time of My visiting thee.”‘”

“Has the all-knowing Son of God seen that in our own time He would have to pronounce on us that same dread sentence? ‘Not leaving one stone of thee upon another; and all because thou didst not recognize the time of My visiting thee.’ That would indeed be a terrible sentence.”

IV. The “Blinded Jews” and the Debasement of the Savior

Sermon on the Epiphany of the Lord, Münster, January 1934

(Quoted from the sermon text preserved in: Akten, vol. I; English translation in Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Bishop Von Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism, Yale University Press, 2002, p. 113)

“the Israelites debased the Savior”

“side of the blinded Jews“

(In this sermon, von Galen told his congregation that “whoever does not listen to the Church is a heathen and officially is a sinner,” described how “the Israelites debased the Savior,” and declared that those who resist Jesus as the Christ stand on the “side of the blinded Jews.” He equated the rejection of Christianity with rejection of all lawful authority, leading to anarchy and chaos, and pointed to the Russians as among those who had not respected God-given authority. Source: Griech-Polelle, p. 113, citing Akten, vol. I.)

V. The Sins of the Jews as the Root of Heresy

Sermon at St. Lambert’s Church, Münster, June 1935

(Referenced in: Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Bishop Von Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism, Yale University Press, 2002; and confirmed by Wikipedia, citing Akten, vol. I)

In June 1935, von Galen delivered a sermon that explicitly connected the heresy of the Anabaptists — the sixteenth-century sectarians whose bodies his own ancestor Christoph Bernhard von Galen had left to rot in iron cages on Münster’s city gates — to the “sins of the Jews.”

(The exact sermon text in German is preserved in the Bistumsarchiv, Münster, and in Akten, vol. I. No full English translation of this sermon has been published. The link to the “sins of the Jews” is confirmed in Griech-Polelle, p. 49, and in the Wikipedia article on von Galen, citing the same source.)

VI. The Jews as the Rejected People: “God’s Scourge” and “Representatives of Anti-Christendom”

Minutes of the Verein katholischer Edelleute Deutschlands, 1923

(Bistumsarchiv Münster; cited in Griech-Polelle, pp. 28–29; and in the Wikipedia article on von Galen)

In 1923, von Galen participated in a meeting of the Association of Catholic Noblemen of Germany (Verein katholischer Edelleute Deutschlands), chaired by his brother Franz von Galen. The minutes of that meeting, preserved in the Bistumsarchiv in Münster, recorded the theological consensus of the assembled Catholic nobility — including Clemens August — on the Jewish question. According to those minutes:

“since Christ’s death the Jews are the rejected people, God’s scourge, the main representatives of materialism, decomposition, of anti-Christendom.”

The same minutes recorded that the accusations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were considered plausible on account of their “inner truth,” and that the assimilation of Jewry and Germandom was deemed impossible because of the intrinsic incompatibility between “German nature” and the “Jewish Spirit.”

(Source: Minutes of the Verein katholischer Edelleute Deutschlands, 1923, Bistumsarchiv Münster, as cited and translated in Griech-Polelle, pp. 28–29, and reproduced in the Wikipedia article on Clemens August Graf von Galen.)

VII. Jerusalem’s Ruin as Typological Warning: The Refusal of God Brings Destruction

Third Sermon, preached at St. Lambert’s Church, Münster, 3 August 1941

(Published in: Rev. Heinrich Portmann, Cardinal von Galen, trans. R. L. Sedgwick, London: Jarrolds, 1957, pp. 239–246)

“But those who persist in inciting the anger of God, who revile our Faith, who hate His commandments, who associate with those who alienate our young men from their religion, who rob and drive out our monks and nuns, who condemn to death our innocent brothers and sisters, our fellow human beings, we shun absolutely so as to remain undefiled by their blasphemous way of life, which would lay us open to that just punishment which God must and will inflict upon all those who, like the thankless Jerusalem, oppose their wishes to those of God.”

VIII. Supersessionism: The Church as Inheritor of the Promises Forfeited by Israel

Third Sermon, preached at St. Lambert’s Church, Münster, 3 August 1941

(Published in: Rev. Heinrich Portmann, Cardinal von Galen, trans. R. L. Sedgwick, London: Jarrolds, 1957, pp. 239–246)

“For a thousand years He has instructed us and our forbears in the Faith. He has led us by His law. He has nourished us with His grace and has gathered us to Him as the hen does her brood beneath its wings.”

(Here von Galen applies to Germany and to Catholic Christendom the very words and images — the hen gathering her brood, the law, the grace — which Scripture addressed to Israel, presenting the Church as the new recipient of the Covenant promises formerly held by the Jewish people. The implicit logic is supersessionist: what Israel forfeited by its rejection of Christ, the Church has received.)

IX. Refusal of Christ Leads to National Ruin: The Typological Use of Jerusalem’s Destruction

Third Sermon, preached at St. Lambert’s Church, Münster, 3 August 1941

(Published in: Rev. Heinrich Portmann, Cardinal von Galen, trans. R. L. Sedgwick, London: Jarrolds, 1957, pp. 239–246)

“Does history again repeat itself here in Germany, in our land of Westphalia, in our city of Münster? Where in Germany and where, here, is obedience to the precepts of God?”

(In context, this passage uses the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans — which Catholic tradition attributed to divine punishment for the Jewish rejection of Christ — as the direct type and warning for what may befall Germany if it likewise abandons the commandments of God. The destruction of Jerusalem is presented throughout the sermon as a paradigmatic act of divine retribution for the sin of rejecting the Messiah.)

Note to the Reader

The body of Adversus Judaeos material attributable to Blessed Clemens August von Galen is considerably less extensive than that of contemporaries such as Maximilian Kolbe. Von Galen’s anti-Jewish theological statements are primarily preserved in sermon fragments and meeting minutes accessed through the scholarly critical apparatus of Peter Löffler’s Akten (1988) and Beth A. Griech-Polelle’s Bishop Von Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism (Yale University Press, 2002). The full German texts of his 1934 and 1935 sermons remain untranslated into English in their entirety, and only fragmentary direct quotations have been published by scholars. Where full English translations are unavailable, this document has noted that fact explicitly rather than supply reconstructed or paraphrased text. Only direct quotations appear above in block-quote format.

Sources

All passages are drawn from, or independently confirmed against, the following primary and critical editions. All translations are those of the sources listed under each entry. No word has been altered.

Primary Critical Edition:

  • Peter Löffler, ed., Bischof Clemens August Graf von Galen: Akten, Briefe und Predigten 1933–1946, 2 vols. (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag / Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1988). Series: Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Reihe A, Bd. 42. The definitive critical edition of von Galen’s episcopal correspondence, pastoral letters, and sermons. Held at the Bistumsarchiv Münster and in major European research libraries. Available for consultation at the Bistumsarchiv Münster (Domplatz 27, 48143 Münster, Germany): https://www.bistum-muenster.de/bistumsarchiv
  • Minutes of the Verein katholischer Edelleute Deutschlands, 1923. Bistumsarchiv Münster. Cited and translated in Griech-Polelle (see below), pp. 28–29.

Published English Translation of the Third Sermon:

Secondary Sources and Scholarly Translations Used:

  • Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Bishop Von Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002). Chapter Five, “Von Galen and the Jews,” pp. 108–135, is the primary English-language scholarly treatment of von Galen’s theological and practical relationship to the Jewish question. Passages from the 1934 sermons (Section IV above) and the 1935 sermon (Section V above) are quoted from pp. 113 and 49 respectively of this work, which cites and translates from Akten, vol. I. https://academic.oup.com/yale-scholarship-online/book/29636
  • Wikipedia, “Clemens August Graf von Galen,” reproducing the 1923 meeting minutes quotation and the references to the 1934 and 1935 sermons, all ultimately sourced to Griech-Polelle and to Löffler’s Akten. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clemens_August_Graf_von_Galen