Chapter VII: Two Bishops and Their Burdens

While I was in Germany, a striking photograph on the cover of a German pictorial magazine caught my eye. It was the picture of a tall Bishop in his robes. There was hung about his neck, just above his pectoral cross, a miniature wooden house into which the faithful were putting their offerings of money. The picture was that of His Excellency, the Most Reverend Lawrence Jaeger, Archbishop of Paderborn, who dramatized the need for new houses in today’s Germany by striding with this odd collection box among the 500,000 faithful assembled at a great Catholic festival in Bochum, a Ruhr mining town. The Archbishop was begging in person for the homeless, the bombed-out, the expellees, and just as he actually carried around his neck the miniature wooden house, so he carries, and is weighted down by, incredibly heavy burdens. His immense diocese, stretching across the heart of a battered continent, illustrates every conceivable post-war problem.

I had the privilege before I left Germany of spending several hours with Archbishop Jaeger in his modest home in the midst of a ruined city. Paderborn was eighty per cent destroyed in the bombings that accompanied the end of the fighting on German soil. While not a military objective, the city stood squarely in the path of the army. A Nazi mayor fled for safety with his own family without transmitting to the residents an offer for the cessation of hostilities in exchange for the surrender of the city. The cathedral and the episcopal residence were only part of the losses of the Church. Also destroyed were the headquarters of the St. Boniface Society, the century-old organization for helping mission area parishes; the great seminary of the diocese; various hospitals; the motherhouse of the Sisters who serve the blind; and the diocesan Caritas headquarters. Around the Archbishop are the other destroyed cities of his diocese, including the famous industrial targets of Dortmund, Bochum and Gelsenkirchen, as well as many smaller towns. It was the thousands upon thousands of family dwellings which had met complete destruction that brought anguish to the heart of this “Father of the Poor.”

Before the war the flock of Archbishop Jaeger numbered 1,900,000. Since the war 1,200,000 expellees have flooded the area of his diocese, of whom 800,000 are Catholics. Archbishop Jaeger invited me to drive to one of the new villages made up of these expellees. It was founded on the site of an old prisoner of war camp and consisted largely of barracks and quonset huts. Most of the barracks had seven rooms and in each room is an expelled family, or what is left of the family group. One of the quonset huts had been made into a chapel and a priest comes to say Mass each day and to instruct the children. Another serves as a hospital in which five nurses supplied by the Caritas of the diocese do all they can to minister to the spirits and bodies of these exiles. It is to camps such as these that the millions of pounds of food, clothing and medicines of War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. are channelled. This camp at Eselheide is just one of the many villages of exiles whose care and welfare lie so heavily on the public and private welfare agencies. Father Dietrich, the Director of Charities for the archdiocese of Paderborn, accompanied us on this visit and outlined some of the other burdens of his Archbishop.

Of the 800,000 Catholic refugees, a large number have been settled in those parts of the diocese that are not equipped with Catholic churches or schools. Hundreds of new service and welfare centers have had to be opened so that priests may have a meeting-place to instruct children and celebrate Mass. The greater number of the Catholic expellees were dumped from the transports into the large section of the Paderborn diocese that extends into the Russian Zone. Archbishop Jaeger makes regular visits to the Russian Zone, and I was shown a map of the towns and villages at which he stopped on his last visitation. More than 300 Catholic centers of various types have been set up in the Russian section of the diocese for these unfortunate expellees. In the main, they are administered by priests, themselves expelled. They are helped in their day-to-day needs by a commissariat established at Magdeburg, the largest town of the diocese in the Russian Zone. This tremendous diocese extends into three occupation zones, British, American and Russian, its furthest point being less than twenty miles from Berlin.

The proportion of expellees among the Catholics of this diocese is higher than one in every three. What struck me with tremendous force was the outlay of the diocesan Caritas on behalf of these destitute newcomers to a scene of destruction. Seventeen homes have been opened for aged expellees, including one for the aged blind. Two large orphanages have been set up for the hundreds of homeless expellee children, and eight youth homes for teenagers who are studying crafts and professions.

A recuperation center for returned Prisoners of War, who are still being returned daily, allows these men to search for their expelled families while they are regaining their strength. All these are extra burdens, accepted courageously by a Bishop who is an example to all of Christian hope.

In talking with me of the past, Archbishop Jaeger told me of the losses among his younger priests during the war. The Nazis took countless priests and impressed them into the army as medical corps men and stretcher-bearers. Others went as chaplains to the soldiers. In this way, one hundred of the active younger priests of the Paderborn diocese died during the war years. Another twelve are still prisoners of the Russians. There is no word about their return. Father Dietrich, the dedicated diocesan Caritas Director, was himself a prisoner of the Gestapo for not supporting the war; while the rector of the Salvatorian Fathers, Father Reinold Unterheld, perished in Dachau for the same reason.

Archbishop Jaeger and his entire flock are now working with the release of energy that comes to men who have regained freedom.

This diocese, which embraces the very heart of Germany, was coveted by anti-Christian leaders. Himmler set up his SS headquarters and his own dwelling in a picturesque and ancient village, Wewelsburg, that commands a long view of the Westphalian landscape. For himself and his SS, Himmler bought the entire village, including the ancient triangular castle. The lovely Catholic Church was expropriated and the sacrifice of the Mass was discontinued. The inhabitants were told to find homes outside the village. Himmler considered this village, Wewelsburg, the center of Germany and of the future. He boasted that from a high conference room in Wewelsburg Castle, marked symbolically with a radiating star as the “Middle-Point of the World,” the ideas of the future would radiate, and that Rome as a center of spiritual leadership would be replaced.

Wewelsburg is again a Catholic village, host to expellees from the East, to young men in its Catholic Youth Home, to homeless old people in a home for the aged, to orphan children, to productive artisans and to families.

Such Christian hospitality to so many victims of the peace came from the generous impulses of Archbishop Jaeger, Father Dietrich, the Catholic Charities Director, and the sorely-tried flock of the Archdiocese of Paderborn. Both the Archbishop and his Charities Director stressed again and again the importance of the relief goods from Catholic Americans in saving the lives of the helpless, the sick, the aged and the fatherless, both among the local population and among the expellees. Large amounts of War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. supplies were channelled into the Paderborn area at regular intervals by the central office of Caritas.

This story of this Archbishop presiding over the needs of an immense diocese in the heart of Europe, is only one of many. I have given it in some detail because it represents the problems and struggles of many other Bishops of Christ’s Church, who, groaning under the burdens of their suffering flocks, the homelessness of them, the terror and the hopelessness of them, must nevertheless serve as towers of strength, and sources of help in a cruel and destroyed world. Similar stories could be gathered about the brave Bishops of Poland, of Hungary, of Yugoslavia, of the war-shattered dioceses of Italy.

AN EXPELLED BISHOP

On the grounds of the Seminary of Koenigstein, in the peaceful valley not far from Frankfurt, is the grave of an expelled Bishop—a Bishop who carried one of the most stupendous burdens ever given to any shepherd since the beginning of Christ’s Church. His flock were the more than 7,500,000 Catholics who were included among the Expellees from such dioceses as those of Ermland and Breslan, which were denuded of their Germanic flocks.

Bishop Maximilian Kaller, an exile also in death, is buried at Koenigstein because it is here that the newer generation of priests for the Expellees, drawn as they are from among the young men of the Expellee group, are being trained.

Bishop Kaller was appointed by the Holy Father as Bishop of all the Expellees. He was to coordinate all spiritual resources to ensure the unbroken continuance of the Church’s ministry to this destitute, nomadic flock, spread all over Germany. He was to plead the cause of his disinherited millions at all doors.

When the Expellees were denuded of their possessions, Bishops were turned out of their dioceses, not by any church authority, of course, but by men who usurped all authority, both of God and of man.

Bishop Kaller was thrown out of his Ermland diocese, and came to central Germany, as poverty-stricken, as homeless, as buffeted by men, as were the first bishops of the Church in apostolic times.

Joined by Father Gerhard Fittkau, whose experiences were described in a preceding chapter, he opened an office in Frankfurt. It was an office that consisted of one room, where he and Father Fittkau stored all the records they had, where they answered the tremendous volume of mail, and where they slept when they called a halt to the work that was never done.

In 1945, Germany was a place of chaos and misery, though we who saw it feel we can never communicate anything of the reality of that chaos or that misery. Bishop Kaller, without funds, without a car, travelled the roads of Germany to visit those who had been given into his care. He would stand up in the obscenely overcrowded trains, he would walk great distances to meet with priests and lay people; he would fast and go sleepless on his way so that the organization of spiritual care for the homeless would not be hindered. And then he would return to the crowded room in Frankfurt where hundreds of letters awaited him—letters filled with anguish and terror and the blackest misery. Night after night he would work answering these letters, not only offering words of comfort, but planning works of relief.

So many of the letters told of urgent material needs—even for blankets to cover the homeless at night, for food for sick and dying children. So many letters begged the Bishop to help find a mother, lost in a railroad station in the terror of a mass exodus; to find a child lost on the road when the mother became ill; to find a father who had disappeared into the void of captivity in the East.

But what tore at his Bishop’s heart especially were the repetitions of anguished appeals like this: “If you can’t help us, won’t you send us priests; won’t you send Christ to us, here in our wilderness.”

The priests he sent, those priests who labor as we tried to describe in an earlier chapter. The Sacraments were brought to the homeless in the camps and settlements all over Germany. The daily anguish of his task, and the daily privation of his life, showed in the emaciated face and frame of Bishop Kaller. He pressed his poor body on beyond its powers.

And finally, one day in 1947, before he could see any lightening of the burden, before any real improvement in conditions had been noted in the lives of his people, he died. His death came on the eve of his trip to Rulle in the diocese of Osnabreuck, where homeless faithful and priests of his former diocese were gathered together to hear the message of their shepherd. The priests, the men and women and children, who had come to Rulle to be strengthened by their spiritual father, were stunned to hear that they were, in a sense, fatherless. Bishop Kaller’s Vicar-Capitular announced the death of the saintly Bishop, saying “How rich we were to have such a Bishop—to have a Bishop who was so poor.” The Vicar-Capitular pointed out that Bishop Kaller imitated St. Francis in his poverty.

To the tired exiles, so many of whom had come on foot great distances, the Vicar-Capitular said:

“The road will not be easy for us. The road to every great pilgrimage
leads through Stations of the Cross. And we are all pilgrims, on
every day, not only today. We must daily walk many miles to quiet our
hunger, but there is one road we must seek and see every day, the
road to which the shepherd’s crook of our Bishop pointed over and
over again, the road which brings us near to God, the road on which
we must place ourselves every day with the Sign of the Cross.

“On that road our Bishop Maximilian preceded us.”

In his last pastoral letter entitled, “The Contribution of the Homeless to Peace,” written in Lent of 1947 to all expelled Catholics, Bishop Maximilian Kaller drew the real lessons from the mass homelessness of the millions, and asked them to offer up their sufferings as a contribution toward peace. After stating that “the criminal policy of the German leaders had been judged by history,” he asks the Expellees to join with the Saviour in carrying “the terrible accumulation of guilt in this world.”

We have a translation of his words to his people:

“In humble, repentant prayer we will accept whatever God wills.
Through prayerful participation in the divine sacrifice of Our Lord,
we will always find again the strength to crucify our heart with its
wicked passions, with its greed and envy, its vengefulness and its
hatred.

“Our sacrifice must be joined to our prayer. For us, this consists
especially in the patient, voluntary endurance of the injustices
which have been done to us. In that manner, we follow the Saviour,
and we carry with Him the terrible accumulation of guilt in this
world. Only in this way do we break the power of evil in the
world....”

It is a marvelous testimony to the memory of Bishop Kaller that these lessons have not been lost on the Expellees. So many of them, particularly their priests, repeat those sentiments, using almost the same words. They stress their role in the eventual achievement of peace as one of willing acceptance of their daily want and long exile, and some have openly expressed their belief that this sharing with Christ of the terrible accumulation of the world’s guilt may be the Christian alternative to war.

By the time that Bishop Kaller fell dead, broken in body by his heavy burdens, he had laid the foundations for the spiritual care of the Expellees. The supply of priests for the future was assured through the foundation of Koenigstein Seminary where the students from the seminaries in the East were accepted as well as the new vocations, many from the ranks of the demobilized army.

One might ask how Bishop Kaller, on the call of the Holy Father, was able with so clear an understanding, so sure and quick an analysis of the problem, to assume so appalling a task of the Church on the move. It has been brought to my attention that, in almost a prophetic manner, Bishop Kaller had published at the beginning of World War II, a brilliant study called “The Wandering Church.” In it, he told priests of the special problems that were coming upon the church as a result of the movement of populations.

Service among migratory Catholic workers had been, providentially, a very important part of Bishop Kaller s experience. For eleven years, as a country priest, he had served among the Polish sugar-beet workers who came to Pomerania. His command of the Polish language was excellent, and he loved his Polish flock as a father. That they loved him in return was proved by the fact that out of their seasonal earnings, they gave him enough money to build three churches so that their sacramental life would not be interrupted during their work in Pomerania.

Considering the unforeseen displacements of population that came during and after the years of the war, it would seem that Bishop Kaller’s words had the ring of prophecy in them when he stated that “... it is by no means impossible that the title ‘Wandering Church’ will come to be regarded as the characteristic name of the Church in our time.” I shall quote an entire paragraph from the early part of the late Bishop’s magnificent analysis:

For, strictly speaking, this “Wandering Church” is only a part,
though a very important one, of a very significant general movement
which is going on in the whole Church. From an original migration of
a considerable number of young people, there has developed in Germany
a huge migration and resettlement of the entire people and, with it,
of the Church. Only by tackling the entire problem of this migration
from a pastoral point of view, can the thorny work of the “Wandering
Church” proper hope to reach its goal. The work done thus far in the
“Wandering Church” is therefore only the beginning of the solution of
much wider problems, and has become a rousing call of the greatest
concern for the entire pastorate. The center of gravity of the
problem of the “Wandering Church” has tended ever more to move from
the care of the “extraordinary,” transitory migration of groups of
young people, to that of the great interior migration, wandering and
resettlement of the German people, which has grown from year to year.
This phenomenon is of such far-reaching importance that it is by no
means impossible that the designation “Wandering Church” will come to
be regarded as the characteristic name of the Church in our time.

These words were meant for the whole church, and the whole church has come to know their meaning. Bishop Kaller himself, came to have in his pastoral care, the greatest and heaviest burdens of the “Wandering Church.”

As if he foresaw this, he wrote; “It is taking too much for granted to suppose that, in a few years, our entire Church in Germany will, on account of this migration, have completely altered its appearance.”

He analysed the types of ordinary and extraordinary migration that economic conditions and war might bring on the Church everywhere and pointed out the grave dangers to the faith. He remarked the strange fact that priests often withdraw into their sacristies and fail to see the coming catastrophe. Even parishes that have already suffered from the emigration of the faithful for this or that cause fail to take the appropriate measures to reach out after the souls who have left. The priests tend to “... meet the situation with speechless dignity or with a sudden fervor of desperate activity.”

The Bishop suggested, instead, a calm analysis of the situation, and appropriate measures on the part of the parish priests to explain the changed status of the church by instructions, sermons, retreats, and the revivifying of parochial societies. The priests and the entire community must be educated to the care of migrating members, to welcome them, to make them feel they have found a home, to lead them to church. Specific organizational measures relating to a faultless system of registration of new and old parishioners, of reports to other parishes of parishioners who are expected to settle there, are outlined. These measures have served well the Expellee priests who know the location of their former flocks, and are thus able to give a sense of continuity in Catholic life even to those who might seem to be swallowed up in the anonymity of mass living. This long-distance pastoral care, even though the Expellees are now settled in other parishes and new areas, is a great source of moral strength to scattered Catholics.

But the sublime message of this overwhelming article is not its organizational message, which is of the practical order, but rather its prophetic vision, that out of the chaos of modern war a new era of the Church should come forth.

A tall Bishop in his robes—about his neck hangs a miniature wooden
house into which the faithful were putting their offerings of money.
]

An expelled Bishop blesses his homeless flock. The miter with the
message of peace was made of cardboard.
]

His Eminence Cardinal Frings, Papal Protector of Expellees,
examines with Monsignor Swanstrom, Executive Director of War Relief
Services-N.C.W.C., and Mr. James J. Norris, European Coordinator for
the Organization, a booklet on the Expellee problem prepared by the
Catholic Refugee Council of Germany.
]

“Is it not the will of God,” asks Bishop Kaller, “that the final result of the terrible turmoil which has come over mankind should be to point out with urgency to the Church her true vocation as pilgrim and stranger on the journey towards the perpetual Sabbath rest of her only home in Heaven?”

We who have seen the destruction visited upon the great edifices that were left to us by the Church of the Middle Ages, and who hear now of the future necessity for decentralization (and therefore immense migrations from great centers of population) due to the threat of Hydrogen and Atom bombs, can understand what Bishop Kaller must have seen through grace when he wrote the foregoing words, and when he said:

“‘The Wandering Church’ is the Church of the future.”

There was faith in his heart when he stated “we must look on the ‘Wandering Church’ and its miseries with the eyes of faith. By it, God visits and arouses us. Does not the innermost being of the church reveal itself, though not perhaps at first sight, in the ‘Wandering Church,’ namely as the ever-living Christ? ‘The foxes have their lairs; and the birds of the air have their nests, but the Son of Man has not whereon to lay his head.’”

And Christian hope speaks through him when he says near the end of his unforgettable article:

We should lose no more time in the realization that the age of the
“Wandering Church” is an age of Salvation.

Sympathy with those who suffer was so deep in the heart of the saintly Bishop that he fought the ministry of evil, the Gestapo, until during the war years, he was taken out of his diocese by Gestapo officials as a prisoner. He was not interned, as he had expected to be, but it was thought that he would scarcely dare to return to his See, the town of Frauenberg. Exiled to central Germany, he was free to move after the arrival of the Allies, and he returned to Frauenberg as a pilgrim, on foot.

But perhaps the most Christ-like aspect of Bishop Kaller’s life came to light after his death when two letters were discovered in his correspondence. One is a letter from the Bishop to the Apostolic Nuncio and the other the answer from the Nuncio.

There had been a discussion regarding the possibility of having a priest enter the Concentration Camp of Theresienstadt, where thousands of Jewish men, women and children were interned. Some of these innocent victims of racial hatred were Catholic Jews, or the half-Jewish offspring of mixed marriages. The only way that they could be ministered to was to have a priest enter Theresienstadt and live with the inmates, partaking of their hunger, their daily terror, their bonds.

In a letter so beautiful, so selfless, that it reads like a letter of one of the Saints, Bishop Kaller, on the 27th of February, 1942, offered to be the priest to enter Theresienstadt, to give testimony of his complete identification with the innocent victims of persecution, and to bring Christ’s ministry to the Jewish Christians.

“I would want to be the priest who will minister to the Non-Aryan Christians,” writes Bishop Kaller.

The Bishop explains how he has meditated upon this offer, and has come to the decision that he himself, and not some delegated priest, must accept the task. He even analyses a section from a book of meditations entitled, “Concerning the Disposition to Martyrdom,” and expresses the hope that no human considerations at all enter into his decision.

Not even his closest friends, no member of his Chancery or of his diocese, was to know of this letter until after Bishop Kaller had died. The letter goes on to say:

“I believe and hope that this will of mine corresponds to the Will of
God. But I will always comply with the opinion of superiors.

“The highest fidelity must embrace everything. I will keep nothing
for myself, will have no reservations. I want to fulfill my office
according to the order which I receive. St. Francis of Assisi shall
be my model; he who took the words of God completely literally and
fulfilled them. I will not actually be able to fulfill all to the
fullest extent.

“It will require a long practice, but I may say that the will is
there.

“Whether I judge rightly about myself, and about my wish, I do not
know, because selfishness and temptations are so tightly interwoven
with human nature that one often does not know and does not guess how
deeply these two enemies are hidden.”

These are the words of a man selling himself unto slavery for his poor enslaved brothers. His offer was refused.

This letter is only now revealed to show the character of the first real Bishop of a truly “Wandering Church,” a Bishop whose example still inspires the millions whose wanderings are not yet over.