Credible Witness: Father Alfred Delp, S.J.

Father Alfred Delp, s.j. (1907–1945), imprisoned and martyred by the Nazis, wrote a stunning series of spiritual meditations while awaiting his execution.

Born in Mannheim, Germany, to a Catholic mother and a Protestant father, Delp was baptized as a Catholic but then raised Lutheran. As an adolescent, however, he was confirmed and made his First Communion as a Catholic.

He entered the Jesuit order in 1926, at the age of eighteen, and was ordained in 1937 at Munich. He studied philosophy and from 1939 edited the monthly magazine Stimmen der Zeit (Voices of the Times) until its publication was suppressed in April 1941. He was also a member of the Kreisau Circle, a group comprising approximately twenty-five members of varied backgrounds who opposed the Nazi regime on religious and moral grounds.

Following the July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life, Father Delp was quickly arrested along with most of the other members of his group, even though he had known nothing of the plot. His crim e, as he observed, consisted simply in being a Jesuit.

From Tegel Prison in Berlin, he pondered the prayers of his childhood and the liturgical seasons. He said Mass secretly. He wrote letters and reflections on Advent, Christmas, and the necessity of God to an integrated human life. His insights, later smuggled to the outside, are as pungent and timely now as they were eighty years ago.

"Unless a man has been shocked to the depths at him self and the things he is capable of, as well as at the failings of humanity as a whole, he cannot possibly understand the full import of Advent," he observed. Man has a purpose, a mission, and a duty: to be of service, to proclaim the truth, and to praise God.

On December 8, 1944, Delp received a visit from a superior of his order and was able to make his final vows as a Jesuit. "My chains are now without any meaning," he wrote that day, "because God found me worthy of the vincula amo ris [chains of love]."

He was sentenced to death in January 1945.

Awaiting execution, Father Delp refrained from indulging in bitterness, hatred, or self-pity. Instead he wrote, "[The follower of Christ] must himself throughout these grey days go forth as a bringer of glad tidings. There is so much despair that cries out for comfort; there is so much faint courage that needs to be reinforced; there is so much perplexity that yearns for reasons and meanings."

He hoped, he wrestled with his conscience, he asked for giveness, he apologized to all those to whom he had been unkind, unfair, and prideful.

"God's messengers, who have themselves reaped the fruits of divine seeds sown even in the darkest hours," he reflected, "know how to wait for the fullness of harvest. Patience and faith are needed, not because we believe in the earth, or in our stars, or our temperament or our good disposition, but because we have received the message of God's herald angel and have ourselves encountered him."

Father Delp was executed by hanging on February 2, 1945. The Nazis scattered his ashes over a manure field.