Excerpts from today’s Synod speeches are here. Very general.
Also in today’s VISEN, a news item about this Sunday’s beatification:
At 9.30 a.m. on Sunday, October 9, Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins C.M.F., prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, will preside at a Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica during which Cardinal Clemens August von Galen (1878-1946), bishop of Munster, Germany, will be beatified. Cardinal von Galen was a vocal opponent of the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews and of their euthanasia programs.
A note from the Office of Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff reads: "With the beatification of this generous pastor, the Church invites us to imitate, amid the vicissitudes of our own times, his brave and faithful witness."
At the end of the ceremony, Benedict XVI will arrive in the basilica in order to venerate the relics of the new blessed, greet those present and impart his apostolic blessing.
The life of Cardinal Von Galen:
As early as 1935 Hitler had surreptitiously begun to implement this aspect of his eugenics policy. In September 1939 he issued a secret order that all persons with incurable diseases be killed. From the beginning of 1940 regular transport buses brought the unsuspecting patients to particular medical centres where they were speedily put to death, mostly by gas poisoning but sometimes by the injection of drugs. [9] From this time on the Catholic authorities protested to the government at the growing evidence of euthanasia. They were ignored but the matter came to a head with von Galen’s intervention on 3 August 1941. [10]
Now again at St Lambert’s, he condemned this ghastly doctrine which tried ‘to justify the murder of blameless men’, and which sought ‘to give legal sanction to the forceable killing of invalids, cripples, the incurable and the incapacitated’. He had ascertained at the Ministry of Health that no attempt was made to hide the fact that a great number of insane people had already been deliberately killed and that the process would continue. He called the perpetrators of these crimes murderers and demanded protection for the innocent. ‘If’, he said, ‘the principle is established that unproductive human beings may be killed, then God help all those invalids who, in order to produce wealth, have given their all and sacrificed their strength of body. If all unproductive people may thus be violently eliminated, then woe betide our brave soldiers who return home wounded, maimed or sick. Once admit the right to kill unproductive persons, then none of us can be sure of his life. A curse on men and on the German people if we break the holy commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’… Woe to us German people if we not only licence this heinous offence but allow it to be committed with impunity’.
The impact of his sermon reached far beyond the crowded congregation that flocked to hear him. Copies were made by the thousand and distributed throughout the country; they were smuggled to soldiers at the front where his references to the threat of death hanging over invalids and seriously wounded soldiers spread like wildfire. Von Galen’s words had a powerful effect. By the end of August the programme for euthanasia had been suspended, but not before 100,000 people had been killed in this manner. Copies of these 1941 sermons spread all over Germany; hundreds of thousands were printed in response to requests from many cities. These and other sermons were so important to the Allies that they were printed by the million and dropped by the RAF as anti-Nazi propaganda all over Germany and the occupied territories
There are three sermons of Cardinal von Galen linked at Priests for Life:
and here, this one specifically about euthanasia
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