SECRET ORDINATION

 

Many Catholic priests and seminarians were imprisoned in the Nazi prison camps, and many died of the intentionally harsh treatment they received. One of these was BLESSED KARL LEISNER, born in 1915 in Rees on the Lower Rhine. As a youth he was active in the Christian youth movement. After he finished his education, Bishop August Graf von Galen (beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005) assigned him responsibility for the care of young Catholics in the diocese of Münster.

In 1934, he entered the seminary in Munich. An apostolic young seminarian, he tried to organize the Catholic students into groups for discussion and recreation. He would take teenagers on "camping" hikes to Belgium and Holland so that they could talk freely about the contrast between what Hitler was teaching and what the Church teaches. However, when the Nazis began to demand complete control over all German youth, Karl's efforts became less effectual.

The government  made Bl. Karl serve for six months in agricultural work service. Despite the Nazi ban on religious activities among his fellow farmers, he arranged ways for them to attend Sunday Mass. On discovering this, the Gestapo declared him a dangerous person. Searching his home, they made off with all his diaries and papers, and most of his books. Fortunately, they preserved all these documents, thus preserving data for a history of this young man's heroic life.

Shortly after his ordination, during a medical examination, the doctor told the new deacon that he had contracted tuberculosis. In those days, the sole treatment available for the disease was good food and fresh air. These were to be found at a sanatorium in St. Blasien in the Black Forest, where he was sent and began to recover. It was during his recovery that a fellow patient heard him criticize Hitler. That very day, the Gestapo arrested him as a political prisoner.  

Having then recovered partially, he was put into jail. Then he was sent to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, and later transferred to Dachau. His tuberculosis worsening, he was lodged in the infamous Dachau infirmary, where the patients were often selected for medical experiments. Only the help of fellow prisoners prevented Karl from being included in the “invalids’ transport” to Hartheim extermination clinic.

In mid-December 1944, Karl fulfilled his long-held desire when he was secretly ordained as a priest by the Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, Gabriel Piguet, who was also a prisoner in Dachau concentration camp, himself having been arrested for aiding Jewish children. (He was later declared Righteous Among the Nations for his charity). The ordination, carefully prepared by Catholic and Protestant clergymen, was a moving event.

The new priest was so ill afterwards, that he had to postpone his first Mass for a week. After that first Mass he never got to celebrate another. When the Allies liberated Dachau in April 1945, he was sent to a sanitarium, but he died a few weeks later of the rigors of disease and jail.

 When Pope St. John Paul II declared him a martyr, it was at a Mass celebrated in the vast stadium that Hitler had constructed for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. In this arena, used so often for Nazi mega-spectacles, St. John Paul denounced the racism and the "absolute cruelty" that Nazism had so often demonstrated under the shadow of the swastika.  Bl. Karl's feast is August 12.

Statue: Kleve, N. Rhine-Westphalia, Germany