Resistance: A Birthday in the Shadow of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

On April 9, 1945 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was martyred for his resistance to tyranny. On April 9, 1953 another life began and resistance to tyranny has been its measure.

“When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

April 6, 2022 by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

This story has to begin with a recent event. On its face, it may not at first seem connected to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famed Lutheran pastor and theologian who was executed on the personal order of Adolf Hitler in 1945. The connection is subtle but real so bear with me. This, too, is about tyranny.

Many readers have reacted to a Linkedin article I wrote in early March, 2022, entitled, “Banned by Facebook for a True Story of Anti-Catholic Oppression.” The anti-Catholic oppression I wrote about was a well-documented true account that took place in Hitler’s Germany in 1937. I entitled it, “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.”

But that was not the only anti-Catholic oppression. I shared that story with the 4,500 Facebook followers of Beyond These Stone Walls and in fourteen Catholic groups there such as the Knights of Columbus and The Catholic Writers Guild, both in which I have active membership.

Just as the post began to be widely shared by others in those groups, it was suddenly removed by Facebook with a statement that it, and the 14 copies I shared among Catholic groups, “violates Facebook Community Standards.” Minutes later, we received another message informing us that our account is now suspended and will be offline until a review takes place.

With the help of an editor, I immediately reviewed all of Facebook’s “Community Standards” and could not locate a single one that I had in any way violated. We then completed an extensive appeal using Facebook’s own format. Catholic League President Bill Donohue weighed in on this with a statement, sent to tens of thousands of Catholic League members, that this suspension was without cause and should be reversed. One week later, on March 14, we received this message from Facebook:

“Gordon J MacRae’s post is back on Facebook. We’re sorry we got this wrong. We reviewed your post again and it does follow our Community Standards. We appreciate you taking the time to request a review. Your feedback helps us do better.”

However, Facebook did not lift any of the restrictions imposed because of its staff’s alarming misreading of the post. We filed yet another appeal, but to date Facebook has remained unresponsive. I was thus barred from posting anything for the last month on my account and from sharing to any of the Catholic and Pro-Life groups to which we have contributed content over the last several years.

Mark Zuckerberg has testified before Congress that Facebook does not suppress conservative viewpoints. It has not suppressed the accounts of the Taliban, but it did suppress mine. Facebook recently suspended its “Community Standards” so that the people of Ukraine may express their honest thoughts about Vladimir Putin. In what world should Ukraine need Facebook’s permission to do that?

Facebook has stated that some of the restrictions on my account will remain in place until June 5, 2022. Ironically, June 5, 2022 is also the 40th anniversary of my priesthood ordination.

In the Shadow of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I will be 69 years old on April 9, 2022. I am not certain at what point in my life I learned that I was born on the same date on which Dietrich Bonhoeffer died. I was young, likely in middle school when I learned about the great Lutheran pastor-theologian and the fact that I came into this world eight years to the day after he left it. I have long known that Bonhoeffer was hanged on April 9, 1945 on the personal order of Adolf Hitler just as Allied Forces descended upon Berlin. This order was one of Hitler’s last acts before taking his own life.

Many years later, I was sent to prison on trumped up charges. It was the same sort of charges that Hitler tried to falsely pin on 300 Catholic priests in Germany in 1937. It was the story I told in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich,” the post that got me banned from Facebook. Ironically, it began with a quote that Facebook hated, but that we should never forget:

“The great mass of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, (trans. “My Struggle”) 1937.

In prison, I developed a friendship, through correspondence, with Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, publisher and editor of First Things magazine to which I had long subscribed. Father Richard had been a celebrated Lutheran Pastor and theologian when he “crossed the Tiber” and was ordained a Catholic priest on September 7, 1991. His life was richly informed and influenced by two great men: Saint Pope John Paul II — who had become a friend to Father Neuhaus in this life — and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

In his famous monthly First Things column, “The Public Square” in 2008 in the June/July issue, Father Neuhaus wrote “Lives Lived Greatly.” It was, among other things, a tribute to some of the most influential persons in his life:

“This April was a time of remembering and gratitude. April 2 [2008] was the third anniversary of the death, on the Eve of Divine Mercy Sunday, of John Paul the Great. On April 4, forty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. ... And on April 9, 1945, just days before the end of the war, Dietrich Bonboeffer was hanged on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer’s writings and witness were a formative influence in my life, as in the lives of innumerable others .... Those were extraordinary April days. They were days of sorrow and gratitude. I count it a gift beyond measure to have known two of them as friends. The life of each awakens us to the possibilities of life lived greatly.”

What made that tribute so extraordinary for me was that one of those men, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, died as a prisoner. In an earlier April — April of 1943 — Bonhoeffer was arrested by the German Gestapo after informants tipped them off to a plan in which Bonhoeffer was involved to save the lives of Jews by smuggling them out of Germany to Switzerland. He was taken to the infamous Tegel prison where he wrote much of his classic prison journal entitled Letters and Papers from Prison (1953).

On July 24, 1944, the famous “Valkyrie” plot to assassinate Hitler went into action. That account later became a riveting film of the same name. The Valkyrie plot was the last of several such attempts on Hitler’s life, but the first in which the planted bomb actually exploded. Hitler lived, but a vast conspiracy to end his tyranny by ending his life was exposed. He ordered the arrest and torture of thousands, and one of those exposed by informants as a leader in another plot against his tyranny was the imprisoned pastor-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

The Last Station on the Road to Freedom

In February of 1945, Allied planes relentlessly began an aerial bombardment of Berlin in an effort to stop Hitler’s forces from overwhelming Europe. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was transferred from Tegel prison to the Buchenwald concentration camp where he remained for two months, and then to Flossenburg prison. As the Allied forces were advancing on Berlin to end Hitler’s tyranny, the unmoored fascist dictator issued an order for Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s immediate death by hanging. It was the morning of April 9, 1945, the Monday after Holy Week and Easter.

Bonhoeffer’s remains, like those of St. Maximilian Kolbe four years earlier, went up in smoke, his ashes mingled with those of the many Jews he once tried to save. But his writing — most of it from prison — survived him and survived death. When his writings were published they had a profound effect on the faith of the world. In the words of Eric Metaxas whose biography, Bonhoeffer, met wide acclaim,

“Bonhoeffer called death ‘the last station on the road to freedom.’ Bonhoeffer worshipped a God who had emphatically conquered death in Jesus Christ through the Crucifixion and Resurrection.” In Bonhoeffer’s own words ...

“How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether in our human fear and anguish, we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly blessed event in the world? Death is hell and night and cold if not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.”

Though a Lutheran pastor and brilliant theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a most profound regard and respect for the Catholic faith. In a February 23, 1944 letter to his friend, Eberhard Bethge written from Tegel prison, Bonhoeffer wrote:

“If you have the chance of going to Rome during Holy Week, I advise you to attend the afternoon Maundy Thursday service at St. Peter’s Basilica. The twelve candles are lit on the altar and put out as a symbol of the disciples’ flight, till in the vast space there is only one candle left burning in the midd1e — for Christ. After that comes the cleansing of the altar in preparation for Good Friday and Holy Saturday.”

“Lives Lived Greatly” was the last substantive piece of writing by Father Richard John Neuhaus before he succumbed to cancer in January, 2009. Besides Dietrich Bonhoefer and Saint Pope John Paul II, the life and witness of fellow Catholic convert, Cardinal Avery Dulles, a Jesuit and theologian at Fordham University, had a major influence on his life and mine. Cardinal Dulles preceded Father Neuhaus in death by just three weeks. A few months before his death, Cardinal Dulles wrote to me with a request that I “Take up a new chapter in the volume of Christian literature from those unjustly in prison.” He cited Dietrich Bonhoeffer as one whose life my own suffering in prison might emulate. I was shocked and filled with doubt.

In an earlier 2008 issue of First Things, Father Neuhaus wrote about me in an op-ed entitled, “A Kafkaesque Tale.” His urging, and that of Cardinal Dulles, became the catalyst for my own letters from prison in the form of this blog which began six months after their deaths. A decade later, in a review of Beyond These Stone Walls, another writer wrote a brief review that our editor published atop our Posts Page. I was shocked again, and again filled with doubt.

Whatever resistance I have to the tyranny of false witness, unjust imprisonment, and even being one of Facebook’s cancelled priests, is lived in the shadow of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But if I ever stepped into his shoes, it could only be to shine them. I could never be worthy to walk — or write — in such company.

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Notes from Father Gordon MacRae:

#Meta: A lot of Catholics, both the devout and the struggling, are among the two billion users of Facebook, but they cannot read this post unless you share it in my stead. Thank you.

#Consecration: After my post, “The Annunciation and the Consecration of Russia and Ukraine,” we posted the beautifully composed Act of Consecration Prayer at our Library Category page, “Behold Your Mother.”

#HolyWeek: In preparation for Holy Week, please walk the Way of the Cross with us through these special Holy Week posts from Beyond These Stone Walls.

Catholic Scandal and The Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic

“The great mass of people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Ch. 10 (1925)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a tribute to Saint Maximilian Kolbe on the April 28th anniversary of his ordination. I made a controversial point in that post:

“Almost without exception, the typical claims of abuse by Catholic priests so roiling the news media were alleged to have happened thirty to forty years ago.”

Go back just another thirty to forty years, I wrote, and you will find yourself right in the middle of the Nazi horror that engulfed Europe and claimed the lives of six million Jews and millions of others. I suggested that Catholics should not accept what some would now impose: that the Catholic Church is to be the moral scapegoat of the Twentieth Century.

A TSW reader responded to that insight by sending me a rather startling document.  As I began to read it, I almost tossed it aside dismissing it as just another sensational headline. You might be tempted to do the same.  Resist that temptation, please, and keep reading:

“There are cases of sexual abuse that come to light every day against a large number of the Catholic clergy. Unfortunately it’s not a matter of individual cases, but a collective moral crisis that perhaps the cultural history of humanity has never before known with such a frightening and disconcerting dimension. Numerous priests and religious have confessed. There’s no doubt that the thousands of cases which have come to the attention of the justice system represent only a small fraction of the true total, given that many molesters have been covered and hidden by the hierarchy.”

This isn’t an editorial in yesterday’s New York Times, nor is it the opening gun in a new lawsuit by Jeffrey Anderson. It also isn’t a quote from S.N.A.P. or V.O.T. F. It is part of a speech delivered on May 28, 1937 by Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich.

As a direct result of Goebbels’ speech, 325 Catholic priests representing every diocese in Germany were arrested and sent to prison. The story was uncovered by Italian sociologist and author, Massimo Introvigne and republished by LifeSiteNews.com. According to Mr. Introvigne, the term “moral panic” is a modern term used since the 1970s “to identify a social alarm created artificially by amplifying real facts and exaggerating their numbers” and by “presenting as ‘new’ events which in reality are already known and which date to the past.”

It all has a terribly familiar ring. Though “moral panic” wasn’t a term used in 1937, it describes exactly what Joseph Goebbels was called upon by the Third Reich to create.  And the propaganda campaign, like the current one, had nothing to do with protecting children. It was launched by the Third Reich because of a 1937 Papal Encyclical by Pope Pius XI entitled “Mit brennender Sorge” — “With burning concern” — in which the Pope condemned Nazi ideology. According to Matthew Cullinan Hoffman of lifeSiteNews.com, the encyclical was smuggled out of Rome into Germany and read from every pulpit in every Catholic parish in the Reich.

The propaganda campaign launched by Goebbels was later exposed as a clear exaggeration and exploitation of a few cases of sexual abuse that were all too real, but for which the Church had taken decisive action. In the end, the vast majority of the priests arrested and imprisoned, their reputations destroyed and the Church’s moral authority in Germany impugned — were quietly set free. When the campaign finally evaporated, only six percent of the 325 priests accused were ultimately condemned, and it is a certainty that among even those were some who were falsely accused.

By the end of the war, according to Introvigne, “the perfidy of the campaign of Goebbels aroused more indignation than the eventual guilt” of a relatively small number of priests — a number that was a mere percentage of those first accused.

The accused priests were not Goebbels’ real target, of course. The Nazi Ministry of Propaganda targeted the Church and its bishops and papacy declaring a cover-up of the claims and keeping the matter in the daily headlines.

According to Massimo Introvigne who uncovered this story, “Goebbels’ campaign followed the same pattern seen in recent media attacks on the Church.” Like today’s moral panic, the Goebbels campaign attempted to revive old claims that had long since been resolved to keep the matter in public view and to discredit the Catholic Church.

It was all because of the Papal encyclical denouncing Nazi ideology and tactics and defending “the Church’s Jewish heritage against Hitler’s racist attacks,” according to Hoffman.

Consider the Source

How the Massimo Introvigne article came to me makes for an interesting aside. It was sent to me by a victim of sexual abuse perpetrated twenty-two years ago by a priest in my diocese, a priest with whom I once served in ministry. The young man he violated has worked to overcome his anger and to embrace the grace of forgiveness. He sought and obtained a modest settlement for the abuse he suffered years ago, and he used it for counseling expenses. This man is a reader of These Stone Walls who recently wrote to me:

“I have been scouring the Internet and doing a great deal of reading … For what it is worth, I believe you are serving an unjust sentence for a crime you did not commit. If I do not do everything in my power to be of assistance to you, I would be committing a grave sin.”

That is certainly a far different reaction than the rhetoric of most other claimants against priests and their “advocates” among contingency lawyers and the victim groups that are receiving major donations from contingency lawyers. My more recent exchanges with this man lead me to conclude something I have long believed: that the people most repulsed and offended by false claims of abuse and the rhetoric of a witch hunt should be the real victims of sexual abuse.

It is no longer the Nazi state that stands to win big from the creation of a moral panic targeting the Catholic Church and priesthood. But the current propaganda campaign is little different in either its impetus or its result.

Dr. Thomas Plante, Ph.D., a professor of Psychology at Santa Clara University, published an article entitled “Six important points you don’t hear about regarding clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church” (Psychology Today, March 24, 2010). Dr. Plante’s conclusions from studying the empirical data are far different from what you may read in any propaganda campaign — either the 1937 one or the one underway now. These are Dr. Plante’s conclusions:

“Catholic clergy are not more likely to abuse children than other clergy or men in general.” [As I pointed out in “Due Process for Accused Priests,” priests convicted of sexual abuse account for no more than three (3) out of 6,000 incarcerated, paroled, and registered sex offenders.]

“Clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic church cannot be blamed on celibacy.” The majority of men convicted of sexual abuse are married and/or divorced.

“Almost all of the clergy sexual abuse cases that we hear about in the news are from decades ago,” most from the 1960s to 1970s.

“Most clergy sex offenders are not pedophiles.” Eighty percent of accusers were post-pubescent teens, and not children, when abuse was alleged to have occurred.”

“There is much to be angry about,” Dr. Plante concluded, but anger about the above media-fueled misconceptions is misplaced. Why this isn’t clearer in the secular press is no mystery? As one observer of the news media wrote,

“More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudice of his audience.”

— Lewis Lapham, Money and Class in America, Ch. 9, (1988)

You know I was born on April 9, 1953. That was just eight years to the day after Lutheran theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged at age 39 on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler. It was to be Hitler’s last gesture of contempt for truth before he took his own life as the Allies advanced on Germany in April, 1945.

Since childhood, I have been aware that I shared this date with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man I greatly admire. He was imprisoned and hanged because he made a decision of conscience to resist Hitler with every ounce of strength God gave him. I concluded my Holy Week post with an excerpt of his most famous book, The Cost of Discipleship.

The truth of what happened in Germany and Poland emerged into full public view just sixty-five years ago. The entire world recoiled in horror and revulsion. The revelations changed the world, radically altering humanity’s world view. It marked the dawn of the age of cynicism and distrust. How did a society come to stand behind the hateful rhetoric of one man and his political machine? How did masses of people become convinced that any ideology of the state was worth the horror unfolding before their eyes?

As the truth slowly emerged during the years of war and slaughter, The New York Times, in its 1942 Christmas Day editorial declared:

“No Christmas sermon reaches a larger congregation than the message Pope Pius XII addresses to a war-torn world at this season. This Christmas more than ever he is a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent.”

In 1942, The New York Times was joined in its acclaim of Pope Pius XII by the World Jewish Congress, Albert Einstein, and Golda Meir. The March 2010 issue of Catalyst reported that Pope Pius was officially recognized for directly saving the lives of 860,000 Jews while the chief rabbi in Rome, Eugenio Zolli, converted to Catholicism and took the name “Eugenio” in honor of the Pope’s (Eugenio Pacelli) challenge of the Nazi regime.

The New York Times has sure changed its tune since then, and has helped build a revisionist history of Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church that takes a polar opposite point of view. Today, commending a pope, or even mentioning Christmas, would be anathema to the Times’ editorial agenda.

By the end of April, 1945, within days of ordering Dietrich Bonhoeffer hanged, Adolf Hitler took his own life. Joseph Goebbels, intensely loyal to Hitler, murdered his wife and children before also committing suicide. The terror and propaganda of the Third Reich were over.

The propaganda of the current moral panic is just getting fully underway, however. British atheist Richard Dawkins has declared the Catholic Church to be “a child-raping institution” and wrote in The Washington Post a few weeks ago of Pope Benedict’s planned visit to England in September:

“This former head of the Inquisition should be arrested the moment he dares 
set foot outside the tin pot fiefdom of the Vatican and he should be tried in an appropriate civil court.”

Does this sound like reasonable discourse to you? And it isn’t just the secular press engaged in this sort of hate speech. I was utterly dismayed a few weeks ago to see a highly respected Catholic weekly newspaper box off and highlight a letter from a reader calling for the imprisonment of all priests accused from thirty and forty years ago.

Don’t be so quick to consign 80-year-old men to prison for things alleged to have happened decades ago — things that cannot be proven at all. It’s tempting to toss the rights of all priests out the window in the heat of a global media witch trial, but it is not the way of our Church to abandon all reason in favor of the mob.

The secular press is going to do what it always does: sell newspapers to the mob. But this hateful rhetoric should not be appearing in the Catholic press. Calling upon the Vatican to set aside the rights of priests under Church law is no way to conclude the Year of the Priest.

Adopting the rhetoric of Joseph Goebbels simply doesn’t bring light to the issues. It is caving in to our basest nature, and reflects not the Truth upon which our faith is built. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran, would be calling Catholics to a much higher standard of discipleship.

Pope Pius XI denounced the Nazi ideology in his 1937 Encyclical "Mit bennender Sorge."