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Chapter 1

Alfred Delp’s Faith and Ministries

The Situation of the Witness

Ernst Jünger, one of Germany’s most controversial twentieth-century writers, was an intellectual shock trooper for the burgeoning extreme-right movement in Germany in the years between the First and Second World Wars. A decorated soldier of the First World War, an activist of the interwar period, and a military officer during the Second World War, Jünger was an outspoken critic of the Weimar Republic’s ideals of liberty, ease, and comfort. He saw the nihilism of European civilization as a whole in the modern individual’s sensitivity to pain and inward acts of cowardice.¹ At the conclusion of Storm of Steel, his autobiographical account of trench warfare, he writes, “Today we can no longer understand the martyrs who threw themselves into the arena. They were superior to all humanity, all phases of pain and fear. Their faith today, however, no longer exercises a living force.”² Here Jünger perceived early twentieth-century Christianity as a spent faith, surrendered to bourgeois values. If a faith community no longer moves its members to sacrifice themselves, then it will wither away and die, becoming irrelevant in the world. The decline of contemporary Christianity, according to Jünger, serves as a warning for any society wishing to increase its greatness: it must nurture in persons the desire and hardness to sacrifice their lives to bear fruit for the body politic.

As such, “modern life”³ mediocritizes and hinders a nation’s capacity to produce the type of men who seek a heroic destiny, even in death. Jünger regarded the will-to-power as the central drive in human life and was committed to destroying democracy. He advocated in its place an authoritarian nationalism and affirmed the centrality of total war and the quest for power in the human condition. He considered that war-making would reveal the essential aspects of the human condition, standing at odds with modern civilization, which numbed and buried the authentic human in material comforts.

Nonetheless, Jünger found utility in modern technology and industrialization and saw in them the means to increase human power. Jünger anticipated that the combination of humanity’s elemental drive for conflict and modern technology would inevitably give rise to a state that was organized along the lines of a modern army at war—being “steel-like, dictatorial, and total.” An entire nation geared for total war and “planetary dominion” would necessitate the end of a pluralistic society and enforce a homogenization of peoples.⁴ Anyone not committed to the functionality of war and the quest for power would perish.⁵

According to Jünger, only a people deeply committed to destroying democracy, abandoning the pursuit of material happiness for the heroic destiny of planetary dominion, would be appropriate to ushering in a new age. The hero of Jünger’s world is the “Titanic figure,” an allusion to Nietzsche’s Superman and the pre-Olympian Titans of Greek mythology. The titans attempted to seize power and mastery over self, others, and nature. Jünger’s titans were considered demigods and enemies of the gods; they strove for power that did not originally belong to them. Negatively construed, the titans’ assault on the Olympus of the world would fashion a cataclysm. For Jünger, if the titans endured, they would triumph in the disaster. If the titans fell, then they would die a heroic death, manifesting the overcoming of the fear of suffering and death itself. Though Jünger rejected National Socialism’s racism and antisemitism and never became a Nazi, his dystopic vision founded on an absolutism and militarism provides a window into the intellectual and political mentality that led Germany into totalitarianism and war.

In contrast to Jünger and his exploitation of the discontent of the modern and advocation of a totalitarian state that became too real, a German Jesuit priest Alfred Delp at the end of the Second World War decided to offer his life in obedience to God’s will and for the betterment of others. Delp was executed for high treason on February 2, 1945, for being a leading member of an anti-Nazi resistance group—the Kreisau Circle.⁶ In a letter to his Jesuit brethren after being sentenced to death, Delp wrote,

I must relinquish and empty⁷ myself. It is time for the sowing, not the harvest. God sows and he will reap. I want, at least, to fall into the earth and the hands of God as a fruitful and healthy seed. I need to arm myself against the pain and melancholy that sometimes strikes me. If the Lord God desires this path—and everything points to it—then I must walk it freely and without bitterness. May others live better and happier because we died.⁸

This passage communicates a Christian paradox: the formation and the loss of the self.⁹ Delp discerned that he was being asked to surrender himself to God—the source of his existence—in a sacrificial death. Here, the loving relationship between God and the disciple, as exemplified by Delp, was not experienced in terms of a feeling or sentimentality. Instead, the relationship described in this letter involved the experience of resolving to be receptive to the will of God notwithstanding the “pain” and “melancholy.” Delp’s willingness to love to the very end occurs in the thick of anxiety, whose characteristics includes the feelings of constriction, fear, restlessness, vulnerability, and being trapped.¹⁰

Delp’s openness and willingness to do God’s will indicated a commitment of self to something or someone greater than himself. The devotion of the German Jesuit to God is a response to God’s love in Jesus Christ. Moreover, Delp’s gift of himself, according to his letter, brought forth in hope a genuine human fulfillment, understood as “a fruitful and healthy seed.” Altogether, in his letters and writings, Delp used terms such as devotion of self, self-surrender, self-giving, self-abandonment, and self-sacrifice to describe the Christian experience of self-emptying that took place in his life, especially during his imprisonment. This book connects this group of words to the term kenosis. In Christian theology, kenosis describes the self-emptying of Christ that includes his self-sacrificial death on the Cross for the love of humankind. This divine condescension and self-giving establishes a kenotic disposition for discipleship that leads to a life of service.

Henceforth, this chapter introduces the context of Alfred Delp’s witness, which is foundational for a systematic theological understanding of his martyrdom in the ensuing chapters. Delp’s testimony in life and death is critical because he reminds us to seek a vertical or transcendent truth that encompasses the horizontal in a society. As such, a martyr like Delp is a point of intensification that a militant secular society suffering a crisis of truth and goodness needs. His experience of discipleship, which involved the gift of self unto death, is the fruit of a lifelong active receptivity understood as obedience to the will of God. Martyrdom, as exemplified in Delp, takes the form of a decision to attune oneself to God’s will, requiring an inner freedom. From an Ignatian standpoint, inner freedom is referred to as indifference and is a disposition geared toward helping a person to discern and walk the path which he or she receives from God. For Delp, the specificity of his experience of indifference—the experience of an emptying-of-self to a sacrificial death—precluded a discipleship based on sentimentality, lacking truth, or rigid obedience, bereft of love.

This chapter presents Delp’s witness amid the horrors and profound revolution in human self-understanding of freedom and identity as embodied in the writings of Ernst Jünger, who saw deeply into the dark soul of the modern person and exploited its apprehensions. Radical right movements, heralded by Jünger, presented themselves as spiritual alternatives to the materialistic ideology of liberalism. Unfortunately, the transcendence offered by the extreme right in the interwar years emerged as idolatrous, and the meaning of sacrifice became perverted, enshrining violence that sacrificed the lives of millions of people deemed useless in the quest for power, identity, and national stability.

The Young Alfred Delp

Alfred Delp was born and nurtured in a faith-filled environment, which ultimately enabled him to receive and respond to God’s call. Delp’s parents and, eventually, the Society of Jesus nurtured his faith in God. For Delp, the maturation into the obedience to God, intrinsic to discipleship, was a process that occurred in incremental steps. Born in Mannheim, Germany, on September 15, 1907, Delp was the second child of unwed parents. His mother, Maria Bernauer, was a kitchen worker and a Catholic. His father, Friedrich Delp, was an office worker and a Protestant. Delp had a sister, Justina, born two years earlier. A month after his son’s birth, Friedrich decided to take responsibility for the family and married Bernauer. Eventually, Alfred was joined by two more sisters, Gerda and Greta, and two brothers, Ewald and Fritz. In 1914, the Delp family relocated to the town of Lampertheim, south of Frankfurt. They moved into a three-bedroom apartment above a restaurant, located a few steps from the Catholic Church of St. Andreas and across the street from the Lutheran Church of St. Luke’s. At his father’s insistence, Alfred, though baptized a Catholic, received religious instruction from the Lutheran school.¹¹

Alfred, according to his family, was considered a bright student, an avid reader, and a mischievous boy. He also became friendly with the Catholic pastor of St. Andreas, Father Unger. In March 1921, Alfred was confirmed in the Lutheran Church. But, after being slapped across the face by the Lutheran pastor for being late to a religious lesson, Alfred left the church and vowed never to return, instead turning to the Catholic pastor as a teacher. Father Unger began instructing Alfred in the Catholic faith. On June 19 he made his first communion and was confirmed in the Catholic Church nine days later. The following year he entered the minor seminary in Dieburg, a town several miles north of Lampertheim, with a desire to study for the priesthood. His classmates all spoke of his service, cheerfulness, and, above all, his restless and keen intelligence. He enjoyed partaking in philosophical and theological disputations. The classmates judged that the young Delp had already decided to serve God by becoming a theologian.¹² Since he was considered a budding intellectual, according to his teachers, it was arranged for him to attend the Germanicum in Rome, the seminary dedicated to the most intellectually promising German candidates for the diocesan priesthood.

The young Alfred, however, developed other aspirations. During his time in the minor seminary, he joined a Catholic youth movement—the Neudeutschland—which was run by a Jesuit, Ludwig Esch. After the First World War, the Catholic Church in Germany wanted to apply the social Catholicism laid out in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (The Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor)¹³ to the lives of young Germans so that they could contribute to the rebuilding of German society. The Neudeutschland was one of the many idealistic Catholic youth movements that arose during this period. Such exposure to Catholic social teaching would lay the foundation for Delp’s desire to plan for a postwar Germany based on the social values of the Catholic Church while he was a member of the Kreisau Circle. Through his contacts in Neudeutschland, he had learned about some of the Jesuit saints, and he went on a retreat based on St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises.¹⁴ Delp was attracted to the spiritual legacy of the Society of Jesus, so he decided to enter the Jesuit order in 1926. When Father Unger heard about Delp’s decision to leave the diocesan priesthood for the Jesuits, he exclaimed, “What is [Delp] thinking! He has disgraced me! With the Jesuits, he’ll waste away somewhere as prefect of students!”¹⁵ Delp’s mother, however, stated, “In my opinion, the Lord God wanted Alfred [with the Jesuits].”¹⁶

Philosophy Studies

In 1928, Delp pronounced his perpetual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and moved into philosophy studies from 1928 to 1931 in Berchmanskolleg near Munich. As a young Jesuit, Delp was deeply engaged in his studies. The Jesuit faculty of philosophy was transitioning between two worlds—neo-scholasticism and modern philosophy as embodied by Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger.¹⁷ In fact, Delp threw himself into an evaluative study of Heidegger’s “Being and Time.” His Jesuit brothers often found Delp pacing the school corridors, grappling with Heidegger’s philosophy. Delp demonstrated a grasp of Heidegger’s ideas and the desire to argue with them. The fruits of his intellectual labor led Delp to publish, in 1935, Tragic Existence, which criticized Heidegger’s philosophy as a reductive understanding of existence.¹⁸

With intellectual restlessness and zeal, Delp had spent his weekends and holidays during his philosophy studies and regency,¹⁹ where he taught and ministered at Stella Matutina, an all-boys boarding school in Feldkirch, Austria, writing his book. This project was the first critical study of Heidegger’s philosophy from the Catholic intellectual world. As such, though it was a bold attempt by a young Jesuit, it was an immature and moralistic criticism of Heidegger.²⁰ Notwithstanding, Delp’s concern over the reduction of humankind’s existence and the need for the Divine to broaden and deepen humankind’s horizon remained consistent themes throughout his later writings.

The Denunciation of Titanic Heroism in Tragic Existence

Delp characterized Heidegger’s philosophy as centered around the situation (Befindlichkeit)²¹ of the contemporary person, consumed by the anxiety (Angst)²² over the meaning of existence.²³ The etymology of anxiety communicates a constriction in the throat or heart.²⁴ Anxiety, for Heidegger, ultimately brought existence to its completeness. It revealed existence as “a being thrown” into the edge of the dark abyss—nothingness—from which it came.²⁵ Persons must decide their fate in the face of this nothingness. In Delp’s view, in this philosophical system, the person “has nowhere to look beyond” him- or herself. He writes, “Behind [them] lies the nothingness of [their] origin. Before [them] lies [their] future,” which consists of decay, a sinking, and dying into death.”²⁶ Consequently, existence is “hollowed-out,” devoid of depth and substance.²⁷ For Delp, Heidegger’s philosophy left the question of one’s existence unfulfilled. Existence was narrowed or reduced to a finitude, only directed downward into a nothingness.²⁸

Nonetheless, Heidegger, according to Delp, attempted to put forth a reason or a positive attitude for life despite the dread and finitude—“even if [one’s actions] are doomed, there will be a proud ending based on a clear knowledge and firm will!”²⁹ Here, the German Jesuit charged Heidegger with bringing forth this philosophy into the hearts of young men and women, encouraging them to find the strength and determination to master and to overcome the nihilism of their existence. This approach corrupted persons, who “must live and die without dignity in the midst of a chaotic and desperate time.”³⁰ This proposed ethos, according to Delp, was ultimately tragic because the appeal to live with resoluteness is one great deception in the face of anxiety and nothingness.³¹ Delp pronounced Heidegger’s worldview and way of being to be an “existence out of nothing, a heroism of finiteness! The gruesome attempt of our existence is always built and christened in a multitude of forms, only to founder again and again in a thousand shipwrecks!”³² That is, Heidegger’s will-to-live was without reason, substance, or purpose. Heidegger, for Delp, did not adequately solve the question of the meaning of existence.

In Delp’s analysis, Heidegger posited a worldview that holds no center or grounding; it was entirely horizontal or secular. As such, this philosophy merely corresponded to the ethos of the time, wherein men and women undergo anxiety, confusion, and the loss of self.³³ Life was something to be suffered; a lonely world arose. Delp wrote of Heidegger’s philosophy:

This Being-in-the-world is dominated by a tremendous inner pessimism, whose most significant achievement is nothing more than possessing the courage “Yes” to the crash into nothingness. This tragic busy world of ours is a lonely world. The only community of existence is the man of everyday decay.³⁴

There remained only a distressing anxiety. Delp concluded that in Heidegger’s philosophy, the creature would attempt to replace or usurp God in a titanist fashion and the meaning of existence would be sought solely within oneself. As a result, life was reduced to a solipsism or a monism, tempting the human person to be like God and inducing a breakdown of the real difference between the Creator and the creature.³⁵

According to Delp, a philosophy that immanentized the world could not lead contemporary humanity out of its crisis of meaning. It told persons that what brought them liberation was the recognition of the inherency of “guilt, decay, arbitrariness, loneliness, and anxiety”³⁶ in life, and the decision to live as if there was nothing beyond life. In a world without a divine foundation, the person “who conquers pain and fear will become a god himself.”³⁷ Delp referred to this alluring but reductive view of existence as a “titanic finitism,” wherein the human person’s freedom decided everything. Delp wrote, “Titanic finitism: this is the thinking of the time; the project of the day.”³⁸ The solipsism or titanism in Heidegger’s philosophy, in Delp’s view, would not bring persons to genuine flourishing. The pessimistic individual existence meant that persons would be unable to find meaning in the relationship with others, especially the Absolute Other—God, who was the ground and goal of existence. From a Christian view, Delp asserted, “the tragedy” of Heidegger’s philosophy and our time was that “one does not encounter humanity because one does not find God, and one does not find God because one has no humanity.”³⁹

The key for genuine living, for Delp, consisted in encountering the center that transcended finitude and connected all life. If people could find and return themselves to this center, who was God, then persons could overcome the crisis of the contemporary time. This center, which grounded and related all things, enabled persons to find a new depth of meaning in all things, including misfortunes, hardship, and even death. For Delp, a relationship with God offered the security and assurance that life was not condemned to creaturely freedom in the face of a cold, arbitrary existence. He wrote, “Where existence is liberated from a tragic worldview, then whoever loses his [or her] life, will find it again overflowing.”⁴⁰

The immediate reaction to Delp’s first academic work was modest in the face of a growing totalitarian state and impending war.⁴¹ Heidegger, who during this time was a member of the Nazi Party and the rector of Freiburg University, did not respond. Later criticisms rebuked Delp for taking a condemnatory and moralistic approach to Heidegger’s project. The war and the execution of Delp interrupted the discussion of the first engagement of Heidegger’s philosophy from the Catholic side. Even though his work on Heidegger was considered to be an early and immature grasp of a formidable system by a young scholar, Delp’s grappling with Heidegger’s thought was significant insofar as it represented another crucial stage in his intellectual progression. As he attempted after his criticism of Heidegger, Delp often returned to engage the anxiety of contemporary humankind, created by the crisis of meaning, and to confront the false paths taken by men and women that lead them away from God and their fellow human beings.

While in philosophy studies, in addition to engrossing himself in studying the philosophy of Heidegger, Delp also showed a loved of history, particularly the history of politics and political change. He also enjoyed academic debates with his classmates and showed a keen interest in the new social teaching of the church, which had emerged with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. Delp was to become an expert in this field, especially in matters concerning Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (In the Fortieth Year).⁴² One of his Jesuit brothers, Josef Neuner described Delp as a man of enormous energy—someone who threw himself into books and possessed a deep and intense prayer life.⁴³ Such interests in politics, justice, and prayer, while a young Jesuit, help set the foundation for Delp’s ardent love of God and love of neighbor amid the Nazi oppression and persecution. In the political turmoil in Germany of the 1920s and 1930s, Delp was also sensitively aware of the changing political events. Toward the end of his letter to his brother Ewald, dated September 4, 1930, Delp appealed:

Keep your spirits up. On September 14, perform your civic duty.⁴⁴ If the Christian parties are not careful during these years, you can visit your brother in exile in a few years. If certain political movements get the majority, they will come for us first with a knife. If you can, support the Centre Party and Brüning’s election campaign.⁴⁵

This letter revealed both Delp's political leanings and trepidation for Germany’s future.⁴⁶

Regency and The Eternal Advent

As a regent at Stella Matutina, Delp found the ministries of teaching, being a prefect, and chaperoning to be successful matches for his creative, restless energy. One of his successes entailed writing and directing three melancholic one-act plays performed by and for the young men on December 21, 1933. The three together are called the Eternal Advent titled, respectively: The Dead Soldiers, The Mineworkers, and The Worker Priest. ⁴⁷ The first play deals with six soldiers who are sentries, isolated from their base and facing an enemy attack. The second involves five miners who are trapped in a collapsed tunnel and confronted with death. The third play concerns a priest who tries to mediate the dispute between a factory owner and revolutionary workers before the Christmas holidays, though the priest eventually gets assaulted by the workers. In these one-act plays, the anxiety, the arbitrariness, and the sinfulness of the human condition accosting the characters is an aesthetical and dramatic embodiment of Delp’s intellectual grappling with Heidegger’s philosophy.

In the tradition of Jesuit theater, the drama of Delp’s plays presented didactic moments. Jesuit dramatists, according to Kevin Wetmore, employed three dramaturgical rules.

First, the protagonist had to undergo a moral struggle that ended in a noble decision, so the audience would have a model for proper decision making in their own lives. Second, the characters needed to be close to the age and class of the audience, so that they might be better able to understand the struggle. Third, there must be a villain who is punished in the end, so the consequence of the negative moral action can be seen.⁴⁸

Delp employed two of the three markers. The struggle in the drama involves the decision to seek and encounter a vertical truth—God, who is the source of human flourishing, especially as one is faced with death.

Overall, Delp wanted to his students to make a decision for Christ, to trust that Christ would be there at the end of their life. As such, the characters in the first two plays are young men, full of hopes and aspirations, enabling the student audience to empathize with the struggle. While the obvious villains in these three plays are war, natural calamity, and greed, the ultimate antagonist in all three plays is the decision not to choose God—a fulfillment that undergirds all human existence, even in suffering and death. Since the inter-related themes of God supporting humanity in threatening situations and human freedom accepting God’s love pervaded Delp’s later writings and own witness, these theatrical dramas as Delp’s first published works provide important insight into the origins of his thought.

In The Dead Soldiers, Delp wanted not only to teach his high school students empathy for the enemy but also to stir in their hearts the question of real happiness. Five of the soldiers in this play are teenage, conscripted privates. One young private shoots an enemy combatant, who happens to be a fellow teenager. The sober scene leads the young men to doubt their duty. Subsequently, the veteran member of the sentry unit, a sergeant, urges the young soldiers to do their job without questioning, since the safety and security of their families depend on them. A teenage soldier retorts that the enemy soldiers on the other side of the front care for their families and loved ones as well:

These men, too, care for their mothers, sisters, wives, and children with whom they want to be happy. They also think about building a home and living an ordinary happy life. They lie there and dream and wait and hope [for the end of the war]. They lie there with the cold rifle in their hands or the grenade in their fist, but their hearts yearn for something else . . . They all want to be happy, and they all stretch out their arms and hands for happiness. But nobody fills their empty hands with happiness and peace. On the entire front, on our side and the enemy’s side, and in the entire world, everyone seeks happiness.⁴⁹

At the end of the play, the sentry unit is overwhelmed by an attack leaving all the men dead. The audience hears the soliloquy of a dead soldier. “Someday a moment will come; a hand will reach in from another life,” he says “It will take all the hands—the ones that sought happiness. It will be the hand of God and yet the hand of a faithful brother.”⁵⁰

Furthermore, Delp’s The Dead Soldiers challenges his adolescent male students not to fall prey to his country’s burgeoning virile fundamentalism. For over a decade in the Weimar Republic, according to Detlev J.K. Peukert, former soldiers, such as Ernst Jünger, continually put forth an “aggressive apologia for the superior warrior male.”⁵¹ They generated disturbing images and roles of “aggressive masculinity” in nationalistic writings. Portrayals of soldierly doubt and empathy for enemies were regarded as weak and effeminate. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they killed the Weimar Republic’s ideals of equality and put forth “the rules of a new world order born of violence.”⁵² Instead of advancing a fantasy of male violence, Delp, in his first play, portrays men in need of conversion to Christ. Such conversion comes not by a violent storming of the heavens, but instead by an act of humility.

In the second play, much like the first, Delp stirs the imagination of his students concerning the meaning of true fulfillment amid desperate situations. In The Mine Workers, the five miners, including a young apprentice, are trapped in a collapsed mine. In the initial aftermath of the implosion, the miners find themselves staring at the corpse of one their co-workers. The surviving miners mourn their friend’s death, as he now leaves behind a wife and two young boys. A couple of the survivors, who attended the dead man’s wedding, reminisce about how he had dreamt of building a happy home. Subsequently, the apprentice, who lost his father in a previous mine accident, expresses his own desires. He would like to taste his mother’s cooking again and to attend his youth group meeting. The foreman consoles the boy, telling him that it is natural to have desires for things great and small because the yearning for happiness is what makes one alive and human. He states that “we have a heart full of longing and homesickness. Our entire life consists of the search for happiness.”⁵³ As the tunnel suffers another implosion, the foreman tells the boy that ultimately the things of this earth will not satisfy one’s yearning for happiness. He says, “Earthly things do not bring peace to the heart. One day somebody has to come and open all the windows, the doors, and the lock to the human heart with his holy eyes. He touches our hearts with his healing hands.”⁵⁴ The play ends when the last of the miners’ lights goes out.

In the third play, Delp grapples with the question of social justice for workers against the background of increasing technological industrialization, understood as “rationalization.” This term, according to Peukert, refers to the modernization of the economy, including the introduction of new manufacturing methods based on high technology, resulting in the replacement of manual operations by machine tools. The “surge of rationalization” delivered increased production but brought about “health damages” and reduced “the number of working faces.” Furthermore, in the shadow of economic crises, the increased productivity was not met with a corresponding demand. As a result, the numbers of workers employed dropped sharply. It is also important to highlight that rationalization in an era of economic stagnation caused a more pronounced divide “between the skilled and unskilled; between those in regular work and those casually employed or unemployed. Rationalization mitigated against solidarity.”⁵⁵

Though he would later address the question of solidarity in a more robust manner, while a member of Kreisau Circle, at that point in his life, Delp attributed the inability to find the shared goodness among persons to the problem of moral failure. The main character in this play is a priest who attempts to mediate the confrontation between a director of a factory and his angry workers, whom he had fired before the Christmas holiday due to their complaints about the lack of safety with the new machinery. When the owner threatens to call the police to disperse the gathering of the revolting workers, the priest steps in from the streets and offers to mediate a truce. The fired workers will not hear of it, accusing the priest of speaking from the position of comfort—in possession of “a warm bed, a full stomach, and no hungry mouths to feed”—whereas they “are thrown into the streets” before Christmas as “worthless and vulnerable” persons.⁵⁶ They charge him of sermonizing but not advocating for a change of any sort. The priest presses on and calls for common ground, saying that much has to change, but the first change must occur in the human heart. The priest agrees that it is not right to have a class of human beings who live off the labor of another class of human beings. Also, Delp has the priest repeat an insight from the previous play—that one has to feed the hunger or longing in one’s heart. The priest states, “Yes, many things are not just. The outside world has to change, but the first change must come from the person’s interior. Things are corrupt on the outside because things got corrupt in the heart.”⁵⁷ Nevertheless, one of the workers responds, “However, it is not right to shut the door on us before Christmas. Think of our children. How will they celebrate Christmas?”

The worker’s matter-of-fact question leads the priest into a discussion on the essence of Christmas with the desperate men. He asks them, “How should Christmas be celebrated?” To this question, the men responded that Christmas is celebrated with a party for children full of toys and food. The priest affirms that Christmas does include a celebration with family, food, and presents, but he then rhetorically asks the men, “However, tell me, is this truly Christmas? Is this Christmas? When you hear the Christmas bells ringing, does the ringing usher in a celebration of the yearnings for material goods?”⁵⁸ Going into a soliloquy, the priest says that Christmas is not the feast of treats and gifts, Christmas is the feast of the transformation of the heart. Reading out loud from his breviary, the priest says, “The people who are living in bitter misery and dire straits, a bright light will light up for this people. Behold, the Lord will come, and a great peace will come on earth. Today, the Messiah is born to you, our Savior and Redeemer.”⁵⁹ Then the priest puts down the prayer book and addresses the workers,

This is Christmas. Christmas is not a sweet fairytale for little children. It is a serious feast that inspires adults to die for it. Christmas involves God entering our lives, taking our hands and bring them to his heart. Christmas is God becoming one of us and setting us free. Nothing else is Christmas.⁶⁰

In this play, Delp communicated the doctrine of the Incarnation in relation to the liberation of people from the distress and injustices of human existence. The freedom won by Christ involved the restoration of men and women’s capacity to respond to God’s call to be in a relationship with him. Such a response included the possibility of dying for Christ. As such, a youthful Alfred Delp criticized both the domestication of faith by bourgeoisie sentimentality and the reduction of life to materialism. At the young age of twenty-six, Delp was already bringing up the issue of martyrdom, conceived as a fruit of an interior liberating communication between Christ’s heart and the human person’s heart. The question of social justice was included within the message of the Incarnation, but Delp wanted to make clear that genuine salvation came from God, not from human revolution.

Overall, these Advent plays revealed a Delp who was sensitive to the injustice, needs, and travails of people of his time. They showed that he was searching for answers to big questions and represent a critical stage in his intellectual and spiritual development. In these three one-act plays, Delp stood in the tradition of Jesuits who employed theater to dramatize, educate, evangelize, and reflect on human experience.⁶¹ Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, understood the theater as a means to reach the unconverted. Ignatius believed it was a dramatic way to assert, encourage, and express human flourishing or “the full promotion of the human person.”⁶²

Delp aimed to use his plays to teach his young students to approach the Christmas Feast with seriousness and to awaken in them the desire to encounter genuine fulfillment in Christ. In particular, he hoped to stir within his students the desire to search for and to meet real joy and the Divine amid desperate, chaotic situations. This aspiration to find meaning amid anxiety, suffering, and death is in significant part due to his grappling with Heidegger’s philosophy, which he was writing on while a regent and would eventually criticize. Moreover, it bears repeating that the shared trait in the writings of Delp and Jünger concerns the question of the act of resoluteness before death. For Delp, the resoluteness entails a self-surrender to God. Whereas for Jünger, overcoming the fear of killing and being killed resolves the challenge of death. The Eternal Advent, with its engagement with searching for meaning amid impending death and apparent meaninglessness, was an imaginative exercise of his thinking on the question of humankind falling under the threat of anxiety.

Delp grappled with the question of deep fulfillment in the face of the sensemaking crises⁶³ which were quite tangible in his time. At that time in late 1933, Germany was still recovering spiritually from the blood-soaked trenches of the First World War. The Great Depression had left a staggering 6 million Germans unemployed. Last but not least, the rise of National Socialism, the appointment of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship in January of 1933, and the Reichstag Fire on February of 1933, which empowered Hitler to suspend civil liberties, eliminate political opposition, and seek dictatorial powers herald the rise of totalitarian nihilism. These events instigated the most severe sensemaking crisis for Germans like Delp who feared an impending cataclysm. Indeed, the drama of finding fulfillment through choosing God amid a sensemaking crisis became a consistent theme throughout his Jesuit ministry. And this drama rose to a crescendo at the end of Delp’s life, when he discerned and decided to bear the name of Christ while imprisoned and awaiting execution.

Another point to consider regarding Alfred Delp’s early years as a Jesuit was that he displayed a sharp critical attitude toward his Jesuit brothers. He was argumentative, which made his confreres wary of him, and there were times when his superiors considered dismissing him.⁶⁴ When Delp began his regency at Stella Matutina in 1931, he had severe clashes with his superior, Agustin Rösch,⁶⁵ who would later become provincial of the Upper German Province of the Society of Jesus. Though he was aware of Delp’s intellectual gifts and enormous energy, Rösch found Delp rebellious and intractable. Delp’s boisterous immaturity would later be humbled by imprisonment and transformed gradually by God’s love.

Theology and Young Priest Years: Resisting National Socialism

By the time Delp finished his regency in 1934, the Nazis had taken control of the government in Germany. In April, Delp left Germany to pursue theological studies at Ignatiuskolleg at Valkenburg, in the Netherlands.⁶⁶ The institution endured financial hardship in the wake of a 1934 Nazi law that forbade sending money outside the country, though the difficulty did not keep Delp from thriving in his theological studies and publishing. The aforementioned Tragic Existence was published in 1935 by Herder.

In December 1935, along with his Jesuit brethren he planned to author The Rebuilding, a publication that would outline the kind of German society that should be established after the demise of National Socialism.⁶⁷ The book aimed to go beyond the church’s defensive attitude toward the modern world and offer the German people a different way of being. Delp’s Jesuit collaborators formed an impressive group of bright men that included one of Delp’s theology professors—Hugo Rahner—and future scholars such as Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Delp was assigned to write the first chapter, which concerned a description and a genealogy of the crisis of modernity in Germany.⁶⁸ He was also delegated to write the chapter on political rights, addressing issues of racism, the realities of different communities in a society, the place of the individual in the state, and the importance of the family in society.⁶⁹ In a letter to his Jesuit brothers, Delp viewed this joint project as crucial because it would witness a mutual sharing of ideas in an era where collaboration in the intellectual and spiritual life was diminished. Moreover, he was excited over the potential of “un-fractured Catholics, alive and awake in their faith, addressing contemporary people,” showing them a path from the current crisis.⁷⁰ Unfortunately, the book project did not materialize. The outbreak of the war disrupted the collaboration. Delp was executed on February 2, 1945. Hans Urs von Balthasar left the Society of Jesus in 1950. Consequently, any hope of accomplishing this book project fell by the wayside.

In 1935–1936, Delp was the editor of Ignatiuskolleg’s theological journal Chrysologus, which published selected sermons and theological treatises of the Jesuit students of theology. For that academic year, Delp intended to outline the conflict between Catholicism and the neo-pagan aspirations of National Socialism. The 1936 edition of Chrysologus published thirty-eight essays articulating the distinction between Catholicism and Nazism and offered critiques of the Nazis’ depictions of the Divine, the human person, and human society.⁷¹ Delp contributed eleven of these sermons.⁷² As National Socialism was pervading German society, he desired to illustrate to German Catholics the fundamental truths of the Christian faith and to delineate the irreconcilable differences between the teachings and claims of Catholic Christianity and fascism, particularly National Socialism.

Delp’s appeal to his fellow Catholics in the 1936 edition of Chrysologus to reject Nazism’s allure of self-idolization and perversion of freedom was a crucial piece in the Catholic Church’s multifaceted struggle with the temptation of fascism in its soul. According to Renato Moro, Nazism appealed to a minority of Catholics, including the clergy, who longed for transcendence and a broader sense of purpose.⁷³ They saw Nazism as a bulwark against the destabilizing influence of modernity on the person, the family, and the community. Both Catholicism and Nazism, though for different reasons, were against the two other political movements of modernity: liberalism and communism. Catholicism and Nazism regarded the former as individualistic and decadent, valuing the individual over the community. The latter, they judged materialistic and collectivist. Both perceived modernity, again for different reasons, to be what Walter Benjamin describes from the point of view of the Angel of History as:

One single catastrophe which keeps piling upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we called progress.⁷⁴

The convergences and collusions, in the view of Roger Griffin, between Catholics and Nazis were based on the opposition to modernity’s bewildering, destructive dynamism. Progress—one of modernity’s defining traits—was judged to be corrosive to the bonds of communal life, disseminating isolation, collectivism, and anomie.

Consequently a resentful nationalism, sown in the chaos of the Weimar Republic, bloomed in Nazi Germany. Young adults on the far right in the Weimar Republic, according to Peukert, had grown up with the desire to destroy and replace liberal democracy with a form of “‘socialism’ that would somehow also be ‘national,’ with a strong state and martial ruling ethic.”⁷⁵ Eric Weitz indicates that the German far right’s socialism, embodied by intellectuals like Oswald Spengler, who wrote about “Prussian socialism” or Ernst Jünger’s “Frontline socialism,” were attempts to transform “the collectivist strains of socialism to the cause of nation [or] race, and to decouple socialism from [Marxist’s] egalitarianism and internationalism.”⁷⁶ Social Darwinian struggle couched in national and racial terms characterized the socialism of the German far right. Essentially, the constant pressure of modernization and its economic, political, social, and intellectual upheavals produced social anxiety because of the perceived increase in materialism, moral decadence, individualism, and the collapse of the sense of communal life:

Both fascists and Catholics were intensely concerned, not just with the external symptoms of the breakdown of history, but with secular progress’s destruction of meaning and morality. They were acutely aware that, not just violent upheavals in modern history, but modernity itself has stripped human beings living in the West of an overriding worldview.⁷⁷

Though there was no official collaboration with National Socialism, intersecting concerns led some Catholics to see a useful ally in the Nazis.

Harboring a distrust of the forces of modernization, these Catholics looked to mesh the Catholic faith with fascist ideology and identified fascism, including National Socialism, as an instrument for achieving a Christian civilization.⁷⁸ That is, they understood Nazism to be a vessel to deliver a Catholic solution to the crisis of modernity, all the while never considering fascist movements, such as the Nazis, to be the outcomes of modernity itself.⁷⁹ Sadly, they failed to see the profoundly un-Christian notion of the idolatry of the nation-state and the cult of the human will-to-power. Delp’s project to sever conceptual ties between the fascism of National Socialism and the Catholic faith—an important contribution to the Catholic Church in Germany—will be given greater attention in chapter 3. These sermons and essays will be an evolution of his concern with the angst of contemporary humankind threatened by the forces of modernization as articulated in The Eternal Advent and the dangers of overcoming that angst of modern life via the human will, articulated at the end of Tragic Existence:

We will have to get used to the fact that we are living in a world of alienation and that human beings are divorced from each other. There will be persons who preach, dream, and fancy of small gods, who were once humans but wanted to be more, and therefore, became less.⁸⁰

For the Jesuit Alfred Delp, it was always a matter of course that persons find themselves when they comprehend themselves as God’s creatures and not as titans attempting to usurp the divine throne.

In October 1936, Delp moved to Frankfurt, Germany, to conclude his theological studies.⁸¹ He was ordained a priest at St. Michael’s Church in Munich on June 24, 1937, and he returned to Frankfurt in the fall to complete his licentiate in theology, which he received in 1938. The following September he departed for Lake Starnberger, south of Munich, for his tertianship,⁸² the Jesuit’s final year of formation before formal entry into the order. During this stage, which has been called the “school of the heart,” a Jesuit undertakes the full thirty-day Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola for the second time in his life. For Delp, the Exercises provided a period of intense personal prayer, and he kept a journal of his experience on the retreat.⁸³

During this period of his life, Delp underwent a religious transformation. He recognized the importance of prayer and encountered the transformative love of God in Jesus Christ. A significant theme in his journal is his devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus: six of the journal entries make serious references to this devotional practice.

Delp regarded the devotion not as simple piety but as central to the Christian life because it allows Christian to encounter the person of Jesus Christ as experienced through the medium of prayer. In the devotion to the Heart of Jesus, Delp experienced the intimate and encompassing love of God in Jesus Christ. Such a personal relationship with God enabled him to persevere and find meaning in the tribulations of imprisonment. The most significant treatment of the devotion occurs in a journal entry dated November 1, 1938—a few days before the end of the retreat. The devotion to the Sacred Heart was described as a spiritual practice that involved the senses, the Trinity, and self-sacrificing service. He reaffirmed this experience in the following day’s journal entry: “The Heart of Jesus is the doorway to the Trinity; the Heart of Jesus is the way of sacrifice, faithfulness to the Trinity, to the Father. The Cross is the way of the Heart of Jesus.”⁸⁴ This spiritual understanding of the devotion to the Sacred Heart as a way of openness to God, sacrifice, and the Cross would reach a profundity and intensity in imprisonment at the end of his life.⁸⁵ The German Jesuit’s openness or displonibilité to God flowered during his imprisonment and as he moved toward his death, but the process began during his retreat.

After finishing his tertianship on July 16, 1939, Delp applied to the doctoral program in philosophy at the University of Munich, but his application was rejected. Delp received a letter dated July 18, 1939, from the Bavarian Ministry of Education and Culture which stated that his admission to the university had been rejected. It simply declared that “as a member of the Society of Jesus” Alfred Delp’s admission to “the Faculty of Philosophy cannot be approved.”⁸⁶ The rejection was because he was a Jesuit and reflected opposition to Christian churches in Nazi Germany.⁸⁷ In addition, the schools and universities in Germany “were Nazified” with extraordinary thoroughness, “a process facilitated by deep inroads” of Aryan ideology into academic spheres.⁸⁸ Curricula, textbooks, and lectures applied National Socialist thought to every discipline, “while chairs were established in racial theory and eugenics.”⁸⁹ In hindsight, it was no surprise that a Catholic priest, especially one who had criticized the Nazis in writing, was not granted admission to a university under National Socialist authority.

As a result, Delp’s Provincial, Augustin Rösch, assigned him to take up writing and editorial duties at the German Jesuit journal Stimmen der Zeit. As an editor and writer for the journal, Delp became the resident expert on social issues and published articles that counteracted National Socialism’s policies. Even so, he focused less on politics than on philosophical and theological ideas, going deeper into the long-term causes of the crisis in Germany.⁹⁰ This was his indirect method of responding to the Nazis. For example, in an essay from 1940, entitled “Tragic Existence in Christianity,”⁹¹ Delp criticized a tragic fault in the fascist worldview of many German people: their temptation to master and subdue reality with power. He described significant parts of German society as being taken over by a “titanic school,” leading to the dissolution of faith in God and the eclipse of the human.⁹² In Delp’s judgment, “the Lord of life is finally gone, and with this, the real retreat and the actual struggle for humanity materializes,” wherefore human persons are seduced into seeking ultimate meaning in what they create, in their own power, in their “titanic pride.”⁹³ He criticized his society’s militarism as an attempt to storm Olympus—understood as a “titanism,” or as an advancement of Nietzsche’s claim that God is dead and humankind is the sovereign master of all that is.

However, Delp’s work at Stimmen der Zeit was short-lived. On August 15, 1941, eight Gestapo officers came to the door of Stimmen der Zeit to close down the Catholic publication and seize the building with the statement “for the protection of the people and the state.”⁹⁴ This action was in keeping with a policy that many Christian leaders, both Protestant and Catholic, had suspected for some time, namely that the Nazis planned to rid Germany of Christianity. On September 22, 1941, an SS memo confirmed those suspicions, putting forth the goal of “the complete destruction of all Christianity.”⁹⁵

Anti-Nazi Activities

After the closure of Stimmen der Zeit, a new ministry for Delp began as the rector of St. Georg, a small church in Munich. His homilies carefully criticized the Nazi regime without drawing attention from the Gestapo. In November 1941, however, after viewing the Nazi propaganda film on euthanasia Ich klage, such discretion ceased. He preached against the film’s ideas, which represented in Delp’s words, “an escape from the difficulty of love and community.”⁹⁶

Even if a person’s organs are gone, and he can no longer express himself as a human being, he is still human, and there remains a constant call toward an inner nobility and a call to love and sacrificial strength for those who live around him. If you deprive people of the ability to nurse and heal their sick, you make human beings into egotistical predators who are interested only in their pleasant life.⁹⁷

Though Delp protested openly against euthanasia, there is little evidence that he spoke to the persecution and plight of the Jewish people. His decision to avoid this topic, however, was strategic: he was engaging in helping Jewish refugees escape the Nazi regime and did not want to draw attention to his covert activities.⁹⁸ The Jesuit priest obtained food, rations, and money for Jews who were fleeing Germany through Munich. During their flight from Germany, the Jews received accommodations from Delp in his rectory or in the homes of some parishioners. In this way, Delp helped twelve Jewish people to flee into Switzerland. He ceased to participate in this project when his superior missioned him to be a contributing member of the anti-Nazi resistance group—the Kreisau Circle.

At the heart of Delp’s homilies was the issue of the relationship between God and the world and how that relationship could offer fulfillment amid sensemaking crises. That relationship was embodied chiefly in the saints, who revealed that a meaningful, flourishing life required obedience to a higher call on behalf of and to be a point of security for others amid the disembedding forces of the times. In a homily on the Feast of St. Joseph⁹⁹ in 1943, Delp preached that during this turbulent and hard-pressed time, the figure of St. Joseph held an important message for the church and the world. Delp stated,

This man was called out of existence for the sake of the Kingdom of God. Would the Herods of the world have ever cared for the carpenter of Nazareth, if he had not been brought to Jesus? He had to emigrate for the sake of the kingdom of God, for the sake of a higher role.¹⁰⁰

In Delp’s view, the saintly life did not involve living for oneself alone. The saint existed as a being-for-another. He or she lived out a kenotic disposition in obedience to a divine call.

Delp continued to say that in the midst of these troublesome times, it was hard to find a just person. He defined the just person as one who was called by God, did God’s will, and saw the world from God’s perspective for the sake of the world. St. Joseph shows to the world that a righteous person becomes an intersecting point for God’s love for others, because he or she “is a rock, capable of being the starting-point of new settlements for men and women who have become homeless, who have been dragged into the turbulent water [of the time].”¹⁰¹ Delp remarks that his country has fallen into a horrific state because “we no longer have people who serve [like St. Joseph], rather we only have people who want to be like gods.”¹⁰² The striving to be like gods will only lead people to a bitter resignation. The one act that “makes one truly human is the surrender of one’s heart and the striving to make all hours of one’s existence and work into one great adoration.”¹⁰³

Abandonment of self to God’s will, as evinced in Delp’s homily on St. Joseph, was not the summit of the Christian life rather it is the foundation of the Christian life. Christian self-sacrifice is not ultimately an act of self-renunciation or self-mastery instead it is a gift of self to another. The disciple who gives him- or herself over to God’s call exists in horizontal solidarity with humanity. Delp wrote, “This carpenter, even where violence loomed threateningly on the horizon, still maintained his responsibility, loyalty, and obedience”¹⁰⁴ to God on behalf of his wife and son. To this end, Delp characterized St. Joseph as a strong silent witness to the serious drama of redemption, where all men and women were called to do his or her unique role. To be a disciple in the modern world with its looming threats was for every moment of one’s existence to be given over to the service of God.

Collaboration with Helmuth James von Moltke

Delp’s work in the Kreisau Circle was intimately related to that of Helmuth James von Moltke, the founding member of the enterprise. The mandate of the Kreisau Circle was the preparation and organization of a group of people who would stand ready to take over the German government upon the fall of the Nazi regime, which they believed was inevitable. The new government would re-establish the German nation in the civilized world. Amid the conditions of wartime and totalitarian Germany, the Kreisau Circle’s members could gather only infrequently. Nonetheless, the group remained remarkably cohesive, held together by friendship, a clear purpose, and the threat of Nazism. Moreover, the group had an anchor in the person of Moltke,¹⁰⁵ who established himself as the crux of the entire enterprise, and it was at his family seat at Kreisau, in Silesia, that three significant conferences took place.

Helmuth James von Moltke was born at Kreisau, in Silesia, on March 11, 1907. He was the first child of Helmuth von Moltke and his wife, Dorothy. Both parents were Christian Scientists, but the children grew up Lutheran. As a young man, Helmuth James embarked on studies in law, politics, and history, studying in Breslau, Berlin, and Vienna. Helmuth worked in the legal office of a former justice minister in Berlin. Like Alfred Delp, as Hitler was rising to power, the young Moltke was vocal about his antipathy toward the Nazis. He warned, “Whoever votes for Hitler votes for war.”¹⁰⁶ When Hitler attained the chancellorship in 1933, Helmuth lost all desire to work as a judge in Nazi Germany.¹⁰⁷ In 1935, Moltke went abroad to study British law at Oxford. He used the opportunity to introduce himself to those in favor of appeasement in the British camp and convince them of the real goals of the Nazis.¹⁰⁸ After he had finished his program at Oxford, Moltke returned to Germany in 1939, just as the war was breaking out. He made use of his knowledge of British law by joining the Foreign Division of the Abwehr (the German intelligence service) as legal adviser to the High Command of the Armed Services. The Abwehr, under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was a focal point of much opposition to the Nazi regime.¹⁰⁹ Moltke’s job as a legal adviser to the German military enabled him to remain in touch with different anti-Nazi resistance movements in Germany. From this position, he started the Kreisau Circle, in which Delp would eventually be a key contributing member.

The beginning of the Kreisau Circle originated in Moltke’s judgment, as a member of Abwehr, that Germany would lose the war and that well-established bureaucrats would be vital to the rebuilding of Germany.¹¹⁰ Moltke took care to include representatives of the two groups he saw as essential building blocks for a new Germany, namely majority Protestant and minority Catholic churches; such was the background for ecumenism and collaborative work among the future martyrs. Moltke’s introduction of the Jesuits to the Kreisau Circle was due in part to one of the members, Baron Guttenberg, who encountered Augustin Rösch, provincial of the Upper German Province, in Berlin. In October 1941, while in Berlin to negotiate the dismissal of Jesuits from chaplaincy work in the German military, Rösch met Guttenberg on the street. Guttenberg led him to an apartment building on the outskirts of Berlin where the Jesuit Provincial could meet Moltke. Moltke disclosed to Rösch what he knew of the Red Army reserves from official Abwehr reports, and he went on to predict that Germany would lose the war to the Soviet Union in a few years if Hitler was not removed from office.

Moltke insisted on some form of organized resistance. He argued, “We must fight, we must do everything to save what can be saved.”¹¹¹ He also expressed his disappointment at the conflict between the Confessing Church and the Nazi-supported Reich Church. The different orientations harmed the Protestants, whereas, from the perspective of Moltke, the unity and coherence of the Catholic Church were protected by the structure of the episcopacy and the pope. While discussing the differences between the “Evangelische” and the Catholic churches, Moltke surprisingly added, “As a Protestant, there is one thing I want to say to you: Christianity can only be saved through the German bishops and the pope. We must unite to save Christianity, which is still there, and to make our concern the re-Christianization of the working world.”¹¹² Rösch was convinced, but he believed Moltke’s invitation for collaboration had to be clarified, because he did not want his Jesuits to participate in any act of violence. On December 4, 1941, Rösch met Moltke and assured him of his cooperation in the Kreisau Circle.

On the weekend of May 25–27, 1942, the first large-scale Kreisau Circle conference was held at Moltke’s estate in Silesia. The task was to plan for a Germany after the dissolution of the Third Reich. The themes of the conference were the system of education and the relationship between church and state. Rösch attended and offered the Catholic position. The participants agreed that Christianity was the most potent force for the moral renewal of German and Western society, for the overcoming of hatred and deceit and for peaceful cooperation between peoples.¹¹³ Participants desired that the reconstruction of German society should welcome the ecumenical insights of all the churches. At the end of the conference, Moltke asked Rösch to suggest a Jesuit political scientist who could help the Kreisau Circle by providing the Catholic viewpoints on the state and the economy.¹¹⁴ At Rösch’s suggestion, Alfred Delp was brought into the group. From July 1942 onwards, Delp was engaged in the work of the Kreisau Circle.

Before the second Kreisau conference, scheduled for October 16–18, 1942, Alfred Delp conducted preliminary meetings with Moltke and Rösch to understand better the issues that confronted the group. A text written by Delp, dated August 2, 1942, shed light on these issues.¹¹⁵

Delp and Moltke believed that the starting point for discussion was the dehumanization and disempowerment of peoples. Nevertheless, they acknowledged that there should be no direct political activity from the churches, whose contribution lay in awakening the consciousness of people and providing support to those who were able and willing to participate in the transformation of society. The second meeting of the Kreisau Circle occurred as planned over the weekend of October 16–18, 1942, and focused on building up the state and the economy. Delp facilitated the discussion that addressed the premises of two social encyclicals: Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII; and Quadragesimo Anno by Pope Pius XI. In these papal letters, the Catholic Church expressed concern for the working poor and the lack of social justice in the world.¹¹⁶ One of the socialist members of the Kreisau Circle exclaimed that the exposition of Catholic social teaching by Delp and the Catholic bishop’s confirmation revealed that the Catholic Church had made an irrefutable turn to socialism.¹¹⁷ The socialist wrote, “This is an incredible historical decision!”¹¹⁸

Delp and Moltke desired an economic system that was neither an end in itself nor a domain of the state.¹¹⁹ Instead, they sought a middle way between communism and unbridled capitalism. The two men saw the economy as an instrument with which human beings could responsibly shape the external conditions of their lives. They judged the European community, not just Germany, to be broken and, therefore, maintained that a new foundation was needed and should be built with Catholic Social Teachings. Here, Delp’s concern for the persecuted moved into the social–political sphere.

The third Kreisau meeting, which took place over Pentecost 1943 (June 12–14) dealt with foreign affairs and the international economic order in the postwar period. It also grappled with the issue of punishing war criminals. Delp participated in this meeting and contributed in the area of restoring the rule of law. Delp’s handwritten drafts indicated the direction of his thoughts on these critical issues.¹²⁰ His ideas aligned with the fundamental principles of a state governed by the rule of law, which proceeded from the premise of a human being’s God-given rights. He was concerned about the right to form associations and about the family. Delp believed that protecting the family was in the interest of society, such as by advocating for a family wage that would allow one parent to work and the other to raise their children. He also supported a healthy safety net that would protect households in the event of an economic crisis. The historian Ger van Roon points out that the “Declaration of Principles,” like other Kreisau Circle documents that emerged during and after the end of the third meeting, emphasized a responsible freedom. Roon writes,

To describe this social order as “free” is inadequate. Freedom can be interpreted as arbitrariness, as un-freedom for others. A better word is “responsible” used in several Kreisau documents. Responsibility assumes an obligation towards the community, but it does not set freedom aside or twist into collectivism. Every “responsible” order ought to develop between two poles of freedom and obligation; it is not the case of either/or, but of both/and. This approach shows the influence of Catholic ideas, as expressed in Quadragesimo Anno and other papal documents, as well as a reaction against the excessive claims which National Socialism made for the state.¹²¹

The planners worked from the premise that human beings were the subjects of the state rather than objects for its control and that human beings needed a social order that enabled them to live out their dignity as persons made in the image of God.¹²² Overall, Delp’s social and political concern was not to oppose the modern age but to address its problems, including its deep-seated anxiety, and to orient the modern world to the fullness of life in God. This orientation will be discussed in chapter 3.

On January 19, 1944, as part of a wider crackdown against conspirators and dissenters within the Abwehr, the Reich Security Office arrested Moltke. They were tipped off by a mole, who had overheard Moltke speaking about the war being lost and the necessity for a replacement for Hitler. The arrest had a decisive, adverse influence upon the development of the Kreisau Circle. Though Delp was arguably its intellectual head, especially regarding matters of state and the economy, it was Moltke who held everything together, provided the stimulus, and took the initiative. Moltke had organized the meetings, scheduled the conferences, and inspired people to action. The center was now missing, and the work of the Kreisau Circle came to a standstill, separating the group into individuals dispersed across Germany.

With Bound Hands: Delp’s Letters and Reflections from Prison

After a failed assassination attempt against Hitler on July 20, 1944, by Claus von Stauffenberg,¹²³ the majority of the Kreisau members were implicated and detained. Eight days later, Delp was arrested in the sacristy after celebrating Mass at St. Georg’s in Munich. Delp was taken to the Gestapo prison in Berlin, where he remained in solitary confinement for nearly two months and was subjected to interrogation and abuse. During those months, some members of the Kreisau Circle were tortured, tried, and executed.¹²⁴ In Delp’s case, the Gestapo attempted to persuade him to leave the Jesuits and to join the Nazis to save his life. At the end of September 1944, the remaining Kreisau prisoners were ordered out of their cells and into the courtyard of the prison. When Protestant pastor Eugen Gerstenmaier saw Delp standing behind him and turned to greet him, he reported that Delp stared through him as if he were a pane of glass.¹²⁵ Two months of torture and misery had taken its toll. The prisoners were eventually hustled into a truck that took them to Tegel Prison, a jail for ordinary criminals. The Gestapo prison had become too damaged by Allied bombing to hold the prisoners securely.

The surviving members of the Kreisau Circle soon learned that they were all being held in the same area. They were transferred to the cellar of Department 8 of House 1, known as the “House of the Dead” (Totenhaus) because those who were held there were eventually executed. Delp was prisoner number 1442, and he lay in cell 8/313. Gerstenmaier, Moltke, Delp, and Josef Ernst Fugger occupied adjoining cells. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s cell was in another part of the prison, so the surviving members of the Kreisau Circle and Bonhoeffer most likely never met. Tegel was run by ordinary prison staff, who were less abusive than the Gestapo.¹²⁶

A few days after moving to Tegel Prison, Delp wrote to Marianne Hapig and Marianne Pünder, two social workers who knew him from Munich and were known within various circles of the German resistance movement. He asked for practical items, such as soap and shaving supplies. Delp also asked for hosts and a small bottle of wine so that he could say Mass. The women bribed the guards with cigarettes in order to have the Mass items smuggled into Delp’s cell. On October 1, Delp celebrated his first Mass in his cell. Also through Hapig and Pünder, Delp was able to smuggle out letters through a basket of laundry. With the help of these two social workers, Delp not only sent letters to family, friends, and brother Jesuits but also spiritual reflections on the nature of human existence amid the starkness of his prison conditions.¹²⁷

The capacity to worship, pray, and spiritually reflect over his existence helped to deepen his faith and to make Delp more available to God. At the beginning of his imprisonment, Delp was afflicted with anxiety. The anguish is evident throughout his letters. He wrote to Luise Oestreicher¹²⁸ at the end of October 1944:

I do not know anything about anyone except the people here in chains who are getting more wretched every day. “Unicus et pauper sum ego,” or “I’ve become very alone and very forlorn,” it says in a psalm. I’m so grateful for the Host, which I’ve had in my cell since October 1. It breaks the forlornness, although, I am ashamed to admit, sometimes I feel so tired and wrecked that I can no longer grasp this reality at all . . . I cannot write much to you today; it has not been a good day. Sometimes one’s destiny presses itself into a burden and unloads itself on the heart. And, one does not really know how long this heart can be expected to take it . . . I believe in God and life. And whatever we pray for in faith, we will get. Faith is an art. And I do not believe that God will let me suffocate . . . God has profoundly challenged me to honor my words from the past: with God alone one can live and endure one’s destiny.¹²⁹

In another letter written to Oestreicher around the end of October 1944, Delp conveyed a similar precarious morale. He wrote, “My own strength has gone. ‘God alone suffices.’ I said that once when I was very self-sufficient. And look at me now. I am walking a tightrope in the name of God.”¹³⁰ Delp’s third letter from Tegel Prison, written in the middle of November to the Kreuser family, his friends from Munich, communicated a corresponding anxiety:

I have learned much in these twelve weeks of bitterness, temptation, and forlornness. And adversity. However, God is good to help me redeem all of this. I still have hope for his help, although in purely human terms, the situation is hopeless . . . Please pray and wait with me, and get the children to pray.¹³¹

One detects in these letters the tension between Delp’s affliction with anxiety and his trust in God. It is as if Delp experienced his own “Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane,” wherein, like Christ, he underwent great distress and fear over looming death. Though Delp acknowledged the desperate situation that surrounded him, he communicated a grain of hope. And that hope was linked to God. What Delp was writing ten years ago concerning anxiety in Heidegger and his own three one-act plays has become quite real for him. He was teetering on the abyss toward nothingness and undergoing “a constriction of the throat” or “the oppression of the heart.”¹³² He could no longer trust in own agency but the mercy of God. Delp wrote the third letter around the time that he received a prayer book that contained prayers and devotions to the Heart of Jesus. Delp would begin his prison mediation on the Heart of Jesus soon afterward.

A letter to Luise Oestreicher, dated November 17, 1944, reaffirmed the tension between Delp’s anguish and his faith in God:

Slowly, the hour of decision will come. . . . This week has in many ways been turbulent. Three of our number have gone the way that remains a bitter possibility for all of us and from which only God’s miracle can spare and protect us. Within me, I have much to do before God, to ask, and to offer up myself completely.¹³³ One thing is clear and tangible to me in a way that it rarely has been: the world is full of God. From every pore of things, God rushes out to us, as it were.¹³⁴

The phrase “the hour of decision” refers to Jesus’ being handed over to Judas and the authorities. It is important to note that Jesus suffered anxiety in the Garden of Gethsemane as he was forsaken by his disciples and anticipated the destructive evil looming on the horizon. In spite of the anxiety crashing down on him, Delp admitted that people, including himself, were often blind to God’s presence in the world. He wrote, “In both beautiful and evil times, men and women cannot perceive grace. In everything beautiful and every hardship, God wants to celebrate the encounter and asks from us a prayerful response of self-surrender.”¹³⁵

In the letter, he recognized his prison cell and the upcoming trial as a testing ground for the abyss that lay before him. The way across did not depend on his actions as it might have previously; what was demanded of him was nothing less than a total surrender to the loving mercy of God. He could pinpoint the moment when he first let go of his misery and placed himself into God’s care; it was the day after he had received a beating from the prison guards. That evening in the cell, Delp found comfort meditating on the Gospel figure of St. Peter, who flailed about in the water whenever he relied on his strength and who walked in safety only when he gave himself to the Lord.¹³⁶

Within Delp, there was a recognition that his words on trust and sacrifice were becoming more real than he could ever imagine. Delp realized that if he saw the world from a purely human perspective, his situation appeared hopeless. To see the world from God’s perspective entailed trusting in Christ:

Oh, how bounded is the human heart in matters of its own ability: in hope and faith. It needs help to come to itself and not to flutter around like some young, partially-fledged birds that have fallen out of their nest. Faith as a virtue is God’s “Yes” to himself in human freedom—I preached that at one time. That’s how it is now—exactly that.¹³⁷

The love of Christ seemingly overcame the figurative walls surrounding Delp in late November. He had become detached from his strengths and past achievements, and he realized that when the human person turns away from God and trusts only in his talents, he becomes merely an individual like St. Peter sinking in the Sea of Galilee.

In that same November 1944 letter to Luise Oestreicher, Alfred Delp noted that he would like to compose something cohesive—a theological reflection of his Gethsemane-like experience of learning how to trust in God and to discern and follow his will amid the looming danger. Even so, he was afraid that his bound hands would keep him from writing anything more than just letters. Gradually, however, he learned to write sustained meditations with his fastened hands. The meditations helped him come to know himself and to build a spiritual kinship with the people with whom he was imprisoned. Delp’s first two prison meditations are on devotion to the Heart of Jesus.¹³⁸ Delp’s biographer, Roman Bleisten, SJ, describes these particular meditations as a rescue (“a yanking out” would be a more accurate translation) from the kitsch that has invaded the devotion.¹³⁹ The principal themes of Delp’s meditations on this devotion are the recognition of humankind’s brokenness, God’s initiative to save humanity, prayer as the dialogical event wherein one encounters the rescuing love of God in Jesus Christ, and the encounter with Christ that re-creates the human person as a disciple.¹⁴⁰

Delp followed the theme of the Sacred Heart with a meditation on Advent. His first Advent meditation was titled the “People of Advent.” His words were quite sobering, yet they did not fall prey to bitterness or despair despite his trying circumstances. Faced with humiliation, privation, pain, and inescapable death, he encountered a deep and fulfilling divine love that prepared him for martyrdom. He wrote,

The terror of this time would not be bearable—any more than the terror brought on by our world situation if we comprehend it—except for this other knowledge that continually encourages us and sets us straight. It is the knowledge of the promises that are being spoken right in the middle of the terror and that are valid.¹⁴¹

Such knowledge is not abstract but rather a lived experience of consolation that allows him to encourage people not to fall prey to desolation:

To wait in faith, for the fruitfulness of the silent earth and the abundance of the coming harvest, means to understand the world—even this world—in Advent. To wait in faith—no longer because we trust the earth or the stars or our temperament and good courage—but only because we have perceived God’s messages . . . and even have encountered one.¹⁴²

With these words, Delp invited himself and others to see and hear God’s love even in the midst of the horrors of war.

Delp continued the theme of confidence in God in his meditation on the First Sunday of Advent when he wrote that the holy season brought to people’s attention the awareness of the powerlessness and futility of human life without God.¹⁴³ The impotence and hopelessness of human existence were consequences of sin and acted as boundaries of creaturely existence. Nonetheless, sin did not have the final say in human life. Advent communicated God’s alliance with people, who meets men and women in their limitations. In the Incarnation, Delp stated, “God resolved to raise the boundaries of our existence and to overcome the consequences of sin.”¹⁴⁴ God’s love enabled Delp to see who he was meant to be and liberated him from any Nazi distortions of the human person and attempts to dehumanize him. He wrote,

May God help us to wake up to ourselves and in doing so, to move from ourselves toward him. Every temptation to live according to other conditions is a deception. Our participation in this existential lie is the sin for which we today—as individuals, as a generation, and as a continent—are so horribly doing penance. The way to salvation will be found only in an existential conversion and return to the truth.¹⁴⁵

For the second Sunday in Advent, Delp continued to develop the theme of encountering the Divine in the midst of darkness. He noted that the encounter included the divine initiative to save humankind and humankind’s decision to accept God’s offer of salvation. For Delp, the concrete place of the encounter was in Christ—“the way of salvation is the way of the Savior. . . . One must see this and say it clearly, not water it down.”¹⁴⁶ Accordingly, the healing and liberation that God offers do not relieve Christians of responsibility and commitment to the world. God’s liberation of human persons serves the purpose of deepening Christian discipleship in the world.

The theme of the Third Sunday of Advent is the decision, the deliberate choice of salvation in Christ. One’s salvation depends much upon the “Christianization of life, through the personal bond with the figure and mission of Christ himself.”¹⁴⁷ For Delp, this decision for Christ enabled men and women to experience a power greater than the threat of death or spiritual lostness. As such, at the end of his life, Delp returned to and deepened themes that he intellectually and spiritually wrestled with since the beginning of his Jesuit formation. The solution to the ills of modernity, particularly finding meaning and fulfillment amid sensemaking crises, was resolved in being bound to Jesus Christ from which one engaged the world.

The Recognition of Oneself as God’s Gift

In prison, Delp became conscious of a “transformation” taking place in him—a change that included his Kreisau Circle collaborators. Before their imprisonment, the Christian members of the Kreisau Circle collaborated as Catholics and Protestants. During their internment, as they awaited their trial, sentencing, and potential execution, they worshipped and prayed as brothers in Christ. The collaboration that had started during the Kreisau Circle’s clandestine meetings was now deepened into a spiritual union, made all the more intense by their furtive communication.¹⁴⁸ Through the process of prayer, Delp came to know Christ on an intimate level. A close friendship with Christ, as with other persons, requires an openness to change or to be converted. Delp’s prison meditations and letters reveal a man matured by his friendship with Christ. The early months of imprisonment appeared to be an occasion for a profound surrender of self.

Tegel Prison was an opportunity to encounter God in Christ not in some supra-sensible oasis kept free from a broken world but rather in the wreck of human existence. In the same letter he writes:

Mass in the evening was full of grace . . . I did not sleep much last night. For a long time, I sat before the tabernacle and just kept praying the Suscipe ¹⁴⁹ in all the variations that comes to me in this situation.¹⁵⁰

It is important to note that the Suscipe is found at the end of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. The one praying the Suscipe has matured and come to understand whose power is truly undergirding him. The subject of most of the verbs is God, by whose power alone one can hope to do great things for God’s creation. In alluding to the Suscipe at this point in his life, Delp spoke of the unpredictable ways in which God loved him. He recognized in himself a reawakening to the never-ending presence and power of God in Christ. He sensed the nearness of God, despite his situation.

In the hostile environment of Tegel Prison, where pain and suffering reign, Delp’s note of experiencing grace conveys that he sees himself as a gift of God. In this context, if one substitutes “grace” with “gift,” then one can say that despite his anxiety and suffering, Delp does not see himself as abandoned by God. He is not on his own. Moreover, he recognizes his personhood comes from God—his Creator. In recognizing God as the Creator, Delp acknowledges himself as being graced: that his existence is gifted. As such, in his imprisonment, he bears witness to the fact that a Christian can be the point of intersection between God and creation. Even in a crisis or a state of anxiety, Delp expresses a surprising attitude of gratitude to God for the wondrous gift of himself.

Consequently, the collaboration that had begun during the clandestine meetings of the Kreisau Circle deepened into an en-graced life with Christ. A transformed group of men emerged from the depths of Tegel Prison. Through whispers, Delp and friends shared their prayers or meditations on particular Bible passages. They looked to the parable of the wheat seed in John 12: 24 (unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit) as an interpretation of their impending death. In a letter to his brother Jesuits at the end of December, Delp referred to this group in prison as “this praying Una Sancta in chains.”¹⁵¹ The “praying Una Sancta in chains” points toward a new mission for Christians. Delp wrote the following in a Christmas letter after he received a small Christmas gift from a fellow Protestant prisoner:

This was a beautiful Christmas gift. And if we are outside again, we should show that it meant much more . . . History will have to carry further the burden and inheritance of the divided churches. The division should never again become a scandal to Christ. I believe so little in utopian ideas, but Christ is nevertheless undivided, and where there is undivided love, we are led to him . . . The Lord dedicates us to a new mission.¹⁵²

The word “Christ” for Delp stands above denominational differences. Both Delp and Moltke learned this in the Kreisau Circle, particularly during their time in prison. Christ calls persons toward Himself and one another. The encounter with Christ in prayer and worship is an experience of grace that enables a type of personhood that emerges, wherein one sees oneself as God’s gift, can enjoy the presence of others, but can also, when called upon, willingly suffer for others. For Delp, as for Moltke, the encounter with Christ in prayer inaugurated a new way of being human and the fulfillment of his identity in relation to the other members of the Kreisau Circle.

Final Vows and Trial

The account of Delp’s Final Vows and trial demonstrates that, for Delp, one of the fruits of prayer was a closer identification with the Cross. While the two Mariannes ensured that Delp’s prison writings survived, smuggling out his reflections and letters in his laundry, they also passed valuable information to him in like manner. One of these communications, dated December 8, 1944, gave Delp the news that he would be able to pronounce his final vows as a Jesuit. About an hour after Delp received this news, Franz Tattenbach, SJ arrived and gave the impression to the prison guard that the meeting was informal.¹⁵³

The final vows had deep meaning for Delp. They were a firm rejection of the efforts of the Gestapo to influence him to leave the Society of Jesus. In a letter written to Tattenbach on December 9, 1944, Delp wrote:

I would like the [vow formula document] kept safe from the bombs. It would be too bad for all concerned if it got lost. I was supposed to write a letter that I was out. This response would be inflammatory [to the Gestapo].¹⁵⁴

Delp regarded his pronouncement of final vows as meaning that, no matter what happened to him, he had given his life over into the hands of God, making concrete a theology of trust, obedience, and self-surrender. In light of receiving Final Vows and a closer intimacy with the Cross of Christ, Delp showed that the human person was meant to seek fulfillment, including his or her own but not in the manner the world does. After the encounter with Christ, especially his complete self-giving on the Cross, Delp expressed the desire to remain faithful to and follow Christ to the very end, even though he preferred to avoid suffering and death. That said, if Delp had not recognized his life as God’s gift, giving it for others would have been pointless.

Delp’s pronouncement of Final Vows deepened and underscored his commitment to his Christian and Jesuit identity during his imprisonment, which came to light in his trial and that of the other Kreisau members between January 9 and 11.¹⁵⁵ The Kreisau Circle members, who had been in constant but furtive contact with one another while in prison, had coordinated their defense. The common defense of the members was that they had not taken part in any direct activity against the National Socialist government but had rather been discussing constitutional possibilities. They were to be tried by the People’s Court, Volksgerichtshof, established in April 1934.¹⁵⁶ Overall, the People’s Court offered the National Socialist regime nearly unlimited scope for the persecution and liquidation of any form of opposition. According to the court, “The case against the accused was that ‘they had together undertaken to change the constitution of the Reich by force, and to deprive the Führer of his constitutional power and thereby, at the same time, to give assistance at home to the enemy power during a war against the Reich.’”¹⁵⁷

The presiding judge for the trial was Roland Freisler, known as “Red Roland” because of his tendency to work himself into a state of rage.¹⁵⁸ During trials targeting Nazi resistors, Freisler would shriek so loudly that sound engineers told him he was damaging the microphones. As presiding judge, Freisler ensured that all defendants would appear undignified. The defendants would receive brutal treatment at the hands of the Gestapo before the trial. They were poorly fed and had to hold up their pants because their belts and suspenders had been confiscated. Freisler reduced all the other participants in the trial to mere extras: the accused, their court-appointed defense attorneys, the prosecutors, and even his colleagues on the panel. As in the case of Alfred Delp and Helmuth James von Moltke, he berated, vilified, and mocked the conspirators.

Freisler believed that every death sentence he meted out would contribute to National Socialism’s survival. Freisler noted, “It is not a matter of dispensing justice but of destroying the opponents of National Socialism.”¹⁵⁹ The lives and dignity of the defendants did not matter to him. A woman who attended the trial of the Kreisau members recalled that, “Roland Freisler’s defendants are the playthings of his intellect. He juggles with people’s lives and provides the unexpected twist, the lighting and color he needs in order to turn something unimportant into an impressive piece of theatre, to present the tragedy that he has already planned.”¹⁶⁰

Alfred Delp was the first defendant called to the stand. Freisler began the questioning in a normal tone of voice that may have given the defendant the impression that he would receive a fair trial. Freisler asked how Delp had come to know Moltke and the others. What did he discuss with them? What did he know of the other meetings held by the Kreisau members? What was considered at the Kreisau meetings? Why did the Kreisau meetings, concerned with a future German society, not include a single National Socialist representative? Delp stood calmly and with composure, responding to each question in a low, even tone.

Freisler’s voice, though, gradually began to rise as he pushed further: What were the aims of such meetings? What future German society were you discussing—one that would exist after the defeat of the Nazis? “Defeatism!” Freisler shouted. He screamed that such talk amounted to treason and launched into a tirade against Delp:

You miserable creep, you clerical nobody—who dares to want the life of our beloved Fuhrer taken . . . a rat—that should be stamped on and crushed. Now tell us, what brought you as a priest to abandon the pulpit and get mixed up in German politics with a subversive like Count Moltke and a troublemaker like the Protestant Gerstenmaier? Come on, answer.¹⁶¹

Delp calmly and firmly responded with the following:

I can preach forever, and with whatever skill I have I can work with people and keep setting them straight. But as long as people have to live in a way that is inhuman and lacking in dignity, that is as long as the average person will succumb to circumstances and will neither pray nor think. A fundamental change in the conditions of life is needed.¹⁶²

In the case of his trial, Delp understood that fidelity to his God-given mission required him to suffer the evil of being imprisoned and mocked. The Nazis’ reign of sin and oppression was absorbed by Delp’s courageous fidelity to his Christian faith.

The following day, it was Moltke’s turn to face Freisler’s interrogation and the continued assault on the Christian faith and the Jesuits. Again, the initial questions were calm. Then, in expected fashion, Freisler began to raise his voice when broaching the issues related to Moltke’s anticipation of a German defeat and his plan for a new German society. Freisler exploded:

All Adolf Hitler’s officials set about their work on the assumption of victory, and that applies just as much to the High Command as anywhere else. I simply won’t listen to that kind of thing—and even were it not the case, it is clearly the duty of every single man for his part to promote confidence in victory.¹⁶³

Freisler’s final tirade targeted Moltke’s collaboration with Delp and the Society of Jesus:

And who was present [at these meetings]? A Jesuit father! Of all people, a Jesuit father! And a Protestant minister, and three others who were later condemned to death for complicity in the 20 July plot! And not a single National Socialist! No, not one! And the provincial head of the Jesuits, you know him, too! He even came to Kreisau once! A provincial of the Jesuits, one of the highest officials of Germany would not touch a Jesuit with a barge-pole! People who have been excluded from military service because of their attitude! If I know there’s a Provincial of the Jesuits in a town, it is almost enough to keep me out of town altogether! And the other reverend gentleman! What was he after there? Such people should confine their attention to the hereafter, and leave us here in peace! And you went visiting bishops! Looking for something you lost, I suppose! Where did you get your orders from? You get your orders from the Führer and the National Socialist Party. That goes for you as much as any other German!¹⁶⁴

In further reflection upon the interrogation, Moltke’s final letter to his wife Freya highlighted two critical points. The first was that the members of the Kreisau Circle were not being condemned for something they were accused of (participating in the assassination attempt against Hitler) but rather for having considered an alternative to Nazi Germany. Moltke wrote:

The beauty of the judgment on these lines is the following: it established that we did not want to use any force; it established that we did not take a single step towards organization, did not talk to a single man about the question of whether he was willing to take any post.¹⁶⁵

The second point Moltke’s letter highlighted concerned the Christian faith of the Kreisau Circle. Throughout the trial, Freisler insisted that the members of the Kreisau Circle owed Adolf Hitler their loyalty, whereas the accused argued that they had a higher duty of fidelity to God. It was significant, for Moltke, that the members of the Kreisau Circle were being condemned for their Christian convictions.

The decisive moment in the trial, according to Moltke’s letter to Freya, was the following utterance of Freisler: “Herr Graf, we National Socialists and Christianity have one thing in common and one only: we demand the whole man.”¹⁶⁶ Moltke reflected on this statement in his letter:

I don’t know if the others sitting there took it all in, for it was sort of a dialogue—a spiritual one between [Freisler] and myself, for I could not utter many words—in which we two got to know each other through and through. Of the whole gang, Freisler was the only one who recognized me, and of the whole gang he is the only one who knows why he has to kill me. There was nothing about a “complicated man” or “complicated thoughts” or “ideology,” but the “fig leaf is off.” But only for Herr Freisler. We talked as it were in a vacuum. He made not a single joke at my expense, as he had done with Delp and Eugen. No, this was in grim earnest: “From whom do you take your orders? From the Beyond or from Adolf Hitler? Who commands your loyalty and your faith?” All rhetorical questions, of course. Anyhow, Freisler is the first National Socialist, who has grasped who I am, and the good Müller [Gestapo chief] is a simpleton by comparison.¹⁶⁷

Overall, Moltke’s last letter to his wife about the trial showed relief, gratitude, and joy. In this trial, he recognized that Freisler had confessed the incompatibility between Nazism and Christianity. It was an incompatibility that the regime had always been at pains to conceal or deny, but now the hostility was out in the open:

Was it clear what he said there? Just think how wonderfully God prepared this His unworthy vessel . . . . [H]e endowed me with this socialistic leaning, which freed me as a great landowner from any suspicion of looking after my own interests. Then he humbled me as a great landowner as I have never been humbled before, so that I had to lose all pride, so that at last I understand my sinfulness after 38 years, so that I had to learn to beg for forgiveness and to trust in his mercy . . . . Then he endowed me with faith, hope, and love, with a wealth of these that is truly overwhelming. Then he let me talk with Eugen and Delp and clarify things. And, then he gave to Eugen and Delp, through the hope, the human hope they have, the weakness which makes their case secondary, and thereby removed the denominational factor; and then your husband was chosen, as a Protestant, to be above all attacked and condemned for his friendship with Catholics, and therefore he stood before Freisler not as a Protestant, not as a big landowner, not as a nobleman, not as a Prussian, not as a German—all that was explicitly excluded in the trial . . . but as a Christian and nothing else.¹⁶⁸

In this remarkable letter, Moltke points out that he received the gift of friendship from the imprisoned men of the Kreisau Circle, including Delp. These men when they entered into friendship with one another became gifts to one another, summoning each other to walk the pathway to the fullness of life.

After the two-day trial, Delp was sure of his fate. The prosecution had asked for the death sentence. He began to write his farewell messages to family, friends, and brother Jesuits. In a letter, dated January 10, 1945, and addressed to von Tattenbach, Delp wrote,

Now I really have to write you a farewell letter. I see no other possibility anymore. The Lord wants a sacrifice. All these hard weeks have had as their purpose a schooling in inner freedom. Up to now, he has kept me from breaking down and going into shock. He’ll also safeguard me get through the final hours. He often carries me as if I’m a child caught in a dream . . . . The trial was a big farce . . . . It was a gross insult to the Church and the Society. A Jesuit is and remains a degenerate. It was a retaliation for Rösch’s disappearance and my refusal to renounce my vows . . . . What I experienced at the hands of the Gestapo I noticed here again: this intense onslaught of hatred against the Church and the Society. So now at least my cause has received an authentic purpose.¹⁶⁹

The German word for “schooling” used in Delp’s letter was Erziehung.¹⁷⁰ Delp’s experience in a Nazi prison was analogous to St. Ignatius of Loyola’s experience of Manresa in Catalonia in 1522. In the Jesuit tradition, this experience has been perceived as a decisive stage in Ignatius’ spiritual formation. Ignatius tells the readers of his autobiography that at Manresa “God treated him at this time just as a schoolmaster treats a child whom he is teaching.”¹⁷¹ Under God’s teaching, Ignatius’ mind was enlightened and his understanding was deepened. He was transformed from a soldier in the service of the Duke of Nájera into a spiritual soldier of Christ and his mission was to serve under the standard of Christ the Eternal King. Similarly, Delp’s prison experience was a decisive stage in his spiritual formation. The notion of inner freedom in Delp’s farewell letter to von Tattenbach alluded to the Ignatian charism of realizing the disposition to choose and do God’s will. Indeed, in recognition of this time as a period of being gifted with God’s presence, Delp entered into the realm of grace in which the path and the will of God was step by step disclosed. This patient willingness to learn and receive from God corresponded to the Ignatian concept of indifference, according to which one is freed from inordinate attachments and passions to love God first and foremost.¹⁷²

All creaturely indifference possesses a mysterious magis that points to God. In a letter dated January 11, 1945, and addressed to his mother, Delp said,

Stay brave and upright. It is the Lord God who decides our destiny. We want to give ourselves to him without being bitter. I understand that this is difficult for you, dear Mother, but it must be borne. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for every single thing that you have given to me and have been for me . . . . Stay strong, dear Mother. Pray for me. When I am with God, I will always pray and plead on your behalf and make up for all the love I have failed to give. We will see each other again. After a little while, we will be together again. Then it will be forever in God’s joy.¹⁷³

In another letter, written on the same day and addressed to Marianne Hapig and Marianne Pünder, Delp wrote,

Now I am going down the other path. Whatever God wills, let it be done and surrendered into his freedom and goodness. That was no court of law, but an orgy of hatred. . . .

Due to the manner of the trial, my life has received a purpose for which one can live and die . . . . If I have to die, at least I know why. Who else today [among the many who are dying] knows that much? We are going to be killed as witnesses for these four truths,¹⁷⁴ and if I am allowed to live, I know what my sole goal is in the future.¹⁷⁵

In these two letters, Delp acknowledged that the ever-greater God expresses himself in the concrete lives of men and women who testify on his behalf. The role of Christian discipleship is embodied in a self-sacrifice that reveals the nature of God, and the disciple receives the strength to live this self-oblation seriously and consciously.

In the mid-afternoon of January 11, 1945, after a two-day trial, the German People’s Court in Berlin, Germany, convicted Alfred Delp to death for high treason against the Third Reich.¹⁷⁶ According to the verdict, Delp was convicted, along with Helmuth James von Moltke, of being one of the foremost conspirators in the Kreisau Circle, an anti-National Socialist group. The court sentenced Delp and Moltke of weakening Germany’s defense through their clandestine meetings, discussions, and creation of plans to seize power in a post-National Socialist Germany.¹⁷⁷ Their activities, the court claimed, fostered a defeatist mentality that aided the enemies of Germany. As a consequence, Delp and Moltke were judged to be accomplices of Germany’s enemies. In particular, Moltke was convicted of being the lead conspirator, and Delp was convicted of devising plans for a state that abolished private property through the implementation of Catholic social teaching.¹⁷⁸

While Delp was awaiting execution,¹⁷⁹ he wrote two more reflections on the Lord’s Prayer and the Holy Spirit.¹⁸⁰ After composing these two prison meditations, Delp continued to engage in writing letters to friends, family, and Jesuit brethren. Delp’s letter written to Franz von Tattenbach on January 18, 1945, offered a glimpse of his inner peace despite suffering from anxiety:

I’m still alive . . . . An interior strength allows me more and more hope and confidence. As I sit here waiting for my execution, though, I certainly do not want to trivialize the situation and go into nervous breakdowns. The time for breakdowns is definitely past (in Plötzensee, they are only physiological and, therefore, do not count). I live in great peace and freedom . . . . Perhaps the last salutary humiliation involves accepting life as a grace. Maybe the entire thing (awaiting execution) concerns the meaning of waiting, and yet, the acceptable time will come. Only God knows. I cast my entire existence on Him.¹⁸¹

Despite the hostile conditions that confronted him, Delp continued to encounter a greater peace, and a vital aspect of that peace was his friendship with Moltke.

On January 23, 1945, Delp’s friend and companion, Helmuth James von Moltke, was hanged in Plötzensee Prison; prior to his execution, Moltke wrote letters to his Freya and his friend Delp. Writing to Freya, Moltke revealed the profound impact Delp had had on him by acknowledging humorously that he was dying “as a martyr for St. Ignatius of Loyola.”¹⁸² In his letter to Delp, Moltke beautifully expressed the gift of friendship that emerged between them while in prison:

Dear Friend,

In order to clarify a point, I want to say the following: the Lord has led us here marvelously. He also showed us in the last couple of months in human relationships the places that he could prepare and make favorable twists and turns. He showed with various signs that he is with us . . . . And he can make good for us at the gallows in Plötzensee, as in the freedom [we experienced] in Kreisau or elsewhere . . . One thing, however, is most certain, we must without ceasing dare to pray . . . . Who can know that to which all this is necessary in the plan of the Lord. For us only one thing is valid: to commit ourselves joyfully in his guidance, even if we must go into the dark and are not able to see the path before us.¹⁸³

In these two notes, Moltke revealed the mutual bond between Delp and him that beckoned forth the good in each other. Moltke saw both Delp and him as God’s gift to each other, in which they were able to enjoy the presence of each other, and, under Divine Providence, were willing to witness the Gospel under harsh conditions. Their friendship, in this case, was a grace, enabling the two to participate in God’s redemptive work. Moltke’s “thank you” to Delp became a sort of eucharist, in which he communicated an appreciation to God for Delp’s presence.

Moltke’s death led Delp into an intensification of anguish. After the execution of Moltke, on the same day, Delp poured out his soul to Oestreicher:

Today is a tough day. Now all my friends and companions are dead. I am the only one left, the only one in chains. I do not know what is the reason behind it; however I do not expect anything good. Perhaps it is a necessary bridge to a stronghold? I am exhausted with sadness and terror. Humanly, it would be easier to be dragged [to the gallows with my friends] . . . . More than ever my life stands absolutely on God. For me, every exertion of reason is gone. I pray and trust and surrender and abandon myself to the Lord.¹⁸⁴

In a letter to Marianne Hapig and Marianne Pünder, dated January 24, 1945, Delp wrote:

Good people, this was a tough week. I believe the hardest of all . . . Sometimes you would like to switch off [the anxiety] for an hour, but that is not just possible. In addition, Buchholz¹⁸⁵ has corrupted my imagination. In the midst of the anguish over my friends’ death, he told me exactly what happens when one is hanged. I think it would have been sufficient for me to experience it on the spot. Well at least, I know it now . . . . Next week, the First Friday devotion to the Sacred Heart and a Marian feast are on the same day. Please pray.¹⁸⁶

In these letters, Delp’s anxiety manifests itself as a terror (Schreck) which isolates and leaves him restless and in great perplexity. Despite his apparent extended intensification of his own “Gethsemane,” Delp did not abandon his faith in God. In fact, his trust in God increased in the midst of his anguish. Though his gift of himself to God did not lessen his fear, Delp’s suffering became part of his witness against the evil of his time; his suffering was a participation in Christ’s redemptive work. Even the terror of the Nazis can be met with faith, hope, and love.

In Delp’s last letter to his fellow Jesuits, he wrote:

Dear Brethren,

The actual reason for my condemnation was that I happened to be and chose to remain a Jesuit. There was nothing to show that I had any connection with the attempt on Hitler’s life, so I was acquitted on that count. The rest of the accusations were far less serious and more factual. There was one underlying theme—a Jesuit is a priori an enemy and betrayer of the Reich. So, the whole proceedings turned into a sort of comedy developing a theme. It was not justice—it was simply the carrying out of the determination to destroy. May God shield you all . . . and I will do my best to catch up, on the other side, with all that I have left undone here on earth. Toward noon, I will celebrate Mass once more and then in God’s name take the road under His providence and guidance.¹⁸⁷

Delp’s last correspondence was a letter to Marianne Hapig and Marianne Pünder written on January 30, 1945; he wrote only four words, “Pray and have faith.”¹⁸⁸ The letter was written on a prison order form. On February 2, the day of the Feast of the Purification, Alfred Delp was hanged at Plötzensee Prison. His last words to the chaplain were “in half an hour, I’ll know more than you do.”¹⁸⁹ No official reason was given for the three-week delay in Delp’s execution. On February 10, Father Tattenbach, and the secretary of St. Georg’s Parish, Luise Oestreicher, went to Berlin from Munich with the hopes of retrieving Delp’s personal belongings and receiving his ashes. They were able to retrieve his clothes in a suitcase, but there were no ashes to be received. On February 15, 1945, the official notice of Delp’s death was sent to his mother, Maria Delp.¹⁹⁰ It read, “The clergyman Alfred Delp was sentenced to death by the People’s Court of the German Reich. The sentence was carried out on February 2, 1945. The publication of a death notice is forbidden.”¹⁹¹ Maria Delp kept the suitcase with her son’s clothes under her bed until her death in 1968.

Conclusion

Alfred Delp’s martyrdom reveals a commitment and an experience that were very personal. At the center of Delp’s intense experience is his faith and love for a universal truth embodied in the person of Christ. His journey was not an ascent toward a utopia but a being led by Christ’s love into the darkness of the human condition. For Delp, the mission that led to the fulfillment of the human person involved the possibility of losing his life. His violent death was not the destruction of the self but a testimony to a more in-depth and broader vision of human fulfillment. His martyrdom was the result of accepting oneself as God’s gift. This sacrificial death was not an escapist notion that considers the body to be a tomb. Such a notion would lead to the quest for disembodiment and an abandonment of the world. It would lead to wallowing in the misery and sinfulness of the world. The resultant reaction would be the self-seeking heroism amid a nihilistic context that Delp warns us of. Furthermore, Delp’s letters from Tegel Prison revealed anxiety in the face of torture, pressure to renounce his Jesuit identity, and impending death. Despite his undergoing anguish, Delp’s faith in Christ did not waver. In fact, his trust in the Divine increased and his friendship with the members of the Kreisau Circle, especially Moltke, deepened.

Accordingly, the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, a contemporary of Delp, sheds light on the issue of human agency amid tribulations and the salvific relationship with Jesus Christ. Although it would be difficult to build a direct causal connection between Delp and Balthasar, the themes in Delp’s writings treated in this book, such as anxiety and Christian discipleship amid Promethean strivings, anticipate and dovetail with Balthasar’s theology. For example, a Balthasarian reading of Delp’s witness in the ensuing chapters addresses the problem of the human seizure of absolute power and freedom, understood as titanism, heralded in the writings of Jünger. Also, a Balthasarian understanding of the phenomenon of anxiety in Delp’s writings offers insight on how one can experience at the same time interior anguish and dryness while committing oneself to a more profound love and coming to a greater likeness of Christ.

The hermeneutical key that makes Balthasar a fitting facilitator between Alfred Delp’s grappling with martyrdom at the end of his life and Ernst Jünger’s appeal to martyrdom encountered at the start of this chapter is the kenotic love which characterizes the Triune God and shapes the human person. Balthasar interprets the inner life of God as an eternal emptying-of-self in love and gratitude among the Three Persons. The Incarnation is the continuation of the Son’s eternal kenosis of thanksgiving to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ love for the Father takes the form of filial obedience to redeem humankind from sin and the consequences of sin.

The grace that comes to the Christian entails Ignatian indifference—a disposition that Delp referred to in his prison letters. Indifference characterizes the disciple’s receptivity before God, the surrender of self to Christ and readiness to undergo whatever mission God wills. Balthasar himself described the modern age as beset by titanism—“sophistical short circuits in reasoning” that has served over time to convince human freedom to seek fulfillment in itself, involving the idolatrous drive to be gods and to reject God’s sovereignty. A striving for power now constitutes the human being who should be constituted by his or her receptivity before God and fellow neighbor. The temptation toward absolute autonomy, which brings forth a relentless struggle for power, overtakes a person’s indifference.

Thus, Delp’s decision to witness Christ unto the very end amid the anguish and fear of death was an attempt to heal the human condition from the short circuits in reasoning. He did not view his self-sacrifice as an annihilation; instead, he grasped it as a response in loving obedience to the will of God. Jünger, in contrast, understood self-sacrifice within the human bid for self-mastery. Again, it bears recalling that the common mark in Delp and Jünger’s writings concerns the question of the resolve of the person before the challenge of death. Whereas Delp surrendered his fear of death to Christ, Jünger makes the intellectual case to overcome this fear in violent self-seeking. The following chapter examines the logic of titanism—the pursuit of absolute power, the rationalization of violence as an end, and the identification of technology as a means to power—in Jünger’s writings from the 1920s and 1930s. As embedded as it was in the specific situation of Germany, Jünger identified the dark side of the human person that glorified war in the age of industrial-techno slaughter. In chapters 3, 4, and 5, one will enter into a theological read of Delp’s witness in response to Jünger’s challenge to recreate the human person into a titan, a being who usurps divine power and freedom.

NOTES

1. David C. Durst, “Translator’s Introduction,” in On Pain, n.d., xxxv.

2. Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern: aus dem Tagebuch eines Stoßtruppführers (Berlin: Mittler & Sohn, 1926), 282.

3. The term “modern life” describes the totalizing effects of modernity from the nineteenth century in the industrializing world. This is not restricted to the increasing mechanization of commerce, transport, and production but includes the codification of secular authority, the rise of capitalism, bureaucracy, and professionalization in the human, social, and medical sciences, while men and women undergo an experience of fragmentation and alienation. Against the tide of the disorientation, commodification, and the loss of identity, extreme right or fascist intellectuals advocated a revolution to recreate a sense of belonging and certainty. See Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007).

4. Ernst Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Form, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming, trans. Bogdan Costea (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 173–87.

5. Jünger, The Worker, 92–93.

6. Helmuth James Graf von Moltke was the founding member of the Kreisau Circle. This was the name given to a group of men who opposed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The Kreisau Circle got its name from the group’s frequent meeting place—an estate in Kreisau that was owned by Moltke. Of the six members of the Kreisau Circle, who were tried on January 9–10, 1945, three were sentenced and put to death: Helmuth James von Moltke, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Franz Sperr. The other three, Eugen Gerstenmaier, Franz Reisert, and Josef Ernst Fürst Fugger, were given prison sentences. Their involvement in the Kreisau Circle was not seen as of such prominence as that of Moltke, Delp, and Sperr.

7. The German word for “empty” is “hergeben” which can mean “to give away,” “to hand over,” or “to yield.” In the reflexive, the word can mean “to lend oneself,” “to lower oneself,” or “to prostitute oneself.” In the context of this letter, “hergeben” communicates the Christian notion of self-emptying.

8. Alfred Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 4: Aus dem Gefängnis, ed. Roman Bleistein (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1984), 110.

9. Delp’s letter underscores Michael P. Jensen’s Martyrdom and Identity’s argument that Christian martyrs witness to both their relationship with Christ and their self-understanding. See Michael P. Jensen, Martyrdom and Identity: The Self on Trial (New York: T&T Clark), 2010.

10. A. Sims, Symptoms in the Mind: An Introduction to Descriptive Psychology (London: Saunders Ltd., 2003), p. 335, quoted in John R. Cihak, Balthasar and Anxiety (New York: T & T Clark, 2009), 2.

11. Roman Bleistein, Alfred Delp: Geschichte eines Zeugen (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1989), 23.

12. Bleistein, Alfred Delp, 27.

13. Rerum Novarum (RN), published by Leo XIII on May 15, 1891, emerged out of critical discussion on the modern forces of change and upheaval in industry, science, and labor along with the increasing disparities between rich and poor. Workers were no longer protected by guilds or supported by public institutions of religion. RN defended the right of private property, criticized unrestricted capitalism, argued for a living wage for workers, and affirmed the right of labor to organize and, when necessary, strike. For further analysis see: Richard Rosseau, Human Dignity and the Common Good: The Great Papal Social Encyclicals from Leo XII to John Paul II (London: Greenwood Press, 2002), 9–54.

14. Mary Frances Coady, With Bound Hands: A Jesuit in Nazi Germany: The Life and Selected Prison Letters of Alfred Delp (Chicago, Ill: Loyola Press, 2003), 6.

15. Bleistein, Alfred Delp, 1989, 33.

16. Ibid., 33.

17. Ibid., 44–47.

18. Alfred Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 2: Philosophische Schriften, ed. Roman Bleistein (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1985), 39–148.

19. Regency is a period of apostolic work in between philosophy and theology studies for Jesuits in formation.

20. See Roman Bleistein, Alfred Delp: Geschichtes eines Zeugen (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1989), 50–61 and Andreas Schaller, Lass dich los zu deinem Gott: Eine theologische Studie zur Anthropologie von Alfred Delp SJ (Freiburg: Herder, 2012), 66–74.

21. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 2, 88–90.

22. According to John Cihak, anxiety pervades and characterizes the contemporary situation of the West. The rise of atheism, the dominance of the technocratic paradigm, the demise of hope in human reason due to the World Wars and multiple genocides, and the threat of nuclear annihilation have led people to a sense of fear and insecurity. See Cihak, Balthasar and Anxiety.

23. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 2, 72.

24. The root word in Latin angor means “to choke” and “to feel oppressiveness or apprehension.” The Latin word angustiae means “narrowness, crampedness or tightness,” and angere means “choking in the throat,” or “an oppressiveness in the heart.” See J. Ritter, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel-Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1971), 310.

25. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 2, 93.

26. Ibid., 95.

27. Ibid., 95.

28. Ibid., 97.

29. Ibid., 110.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Anthony Giddens asserts that anxiety is a pervasive character of modernity because of its dynamism. The unmooring of persons from local, pre-given communities brings forth questions concerning the underlying meaning of human life, including the ground and aim of one’s finite existence and the sense of one’s relations with other persons. Consequently, insecurity characterizes the modern individual, “whose sense of self is fractured.” See Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 53–55.

34. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 2, 119.

35. Ibid., 127.

36. Ibid., 143.

37. Ibid., 131.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., 143.

40. Ibid., 147.

41. Bleistein, Alfred Delp, 1989, 59.

42. Quadragesimo Anno (QA), published by Pius XI on May 15, 1931, commemorated the fortieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum. It reinforced the Church’s solidarity with the plight of workers during the Great Depression; criticized the enormous, increasing disparity between the wealthy and the poor; clarified the rights and duties of labor and capital; and suggested a “safe road” for repairing the socioeconomic ills that would avoid the errors of both unrestrained capitalism and collectivism (fascism or communism). It suggested that the right to private property was not absolute and workers with families should be given a family wage. For further analysis see: Christine Firer Hinze, “Quadragesimo Anno,” in Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004), 151–74.

43. Bleistein, Alfred Delp, 1989, 47–48.

44. In the German federal election of 1930, which drew an 82 percent voter turnout, Germany witnessed the rise of the National Socialist to the second largest political party. The Nazi Party dramatically increased its number of seats from 12 to 107.

45. Alfred Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 5: Briefe – Texte – Rezensionen, ed. Roman Bleistein (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1988), 38.

46. The Centre Party represented Catholics and political centrists in the Weimar Republic. Increasing secularization and polarization gradually undermined the influence of the Centre Party. According to Detlev J.K. Peukert, “it is important to note that the Catholic political movement was highly resistant to the electoral blandishments of” National Socialism. See The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 154–56.

47. Alfred Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1: Geistliche Schriften, ed. Roman Bleistein (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1982), 51–68.

48. Kevin J. Wetmore, “Jesuit Theatre and Drama,” Oxford Handbooks Online, July 2016, 9, http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935420.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935420-e-55.

49. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1, 54–55.

50. Ibid., 57.

51. The advancement of aggressive soldierly masculinity, according to Peukert, should be viewed not just against the Weimar Republic’s egalitarian views of men and women but also the deep-seated economic crisis that left millions of men in unemployment and a state of hopelessness. See The Weimar Republic, 105.

52. Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 105–6.

53. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1, 61.

54. Ibid.

55. Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 112–17.

56. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1, 65.

57. Ibid, 66.

58. Ibid., 67.

59. Ibid., 67–68.

60. Ibid., 68.

61. Wetmore, “Jesuit Theatre and Drama,” 2.

62. Ibid., 4.

63. “Sensemaking crisis” refers to an event that devastates a community’s view of and relationship with the world.

64. Coady, With Bound Hands, 14.

65. Agustin Rösch was Alfred Delp’s provincial (South German Jesuit Province) from 1935 to 1944. Rösch missioned Delp in 1941 to be his representative in the Kreisau Circle. After the arrest of Father Delp on the suspicion that he was connected to the attempted assassination of Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944, Rösch went into hiding. He was arrested on January 11, 1945, by the Gestapo and temporarily detained at the Dachau concentration camp. He was sent to Berlin to be tried as a political prisoner but escaped the war with his life as a result of the Red Army’s liberation of Berlin.

66. Ignatiuskolleg was a German Jesuit institution that had been established outside of Germany during Bismarck’s Kulturkampf.

67. A draft of the publication can be found in the archives of the German Jesuit province.

68. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1, 200.

69. Ibid., 198.

70. Ibid., 200.

71. According to Roman Bleistein, since these sermons were written by Jesuit scholastics studying theology and on the track for ordination, the sermons were really theological treatises or essays. Chrysologus afforded the opportunity for young Jesuits to practice communicating their ideas for a wider audience. See Bleistein, Alfred Delp, 99.

72. They were titled: Advent 1935, Religion, Revelation, the Historical Christ, Who Is the Human Person?, the Divine Foundation in the Human Person, Sin and Guilt in the Existence of the Human Person, the Honest Person in Christianity, the Heroic Person, the Church in the Hands of Human Persons, and Christ—the Lord of the Modern Age. See Delp, Gesammelten Schriften, 1:111–94.

73. Renato Moro, “Church, Catholics and Fascist Movements in Europe: An Attempt at a Comparative Analysis,” in Catholicism and Fascism in Europe 1918–1945 (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2015), 76.

74. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992), no. IX, 149.

75. Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 74.

76. Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009), 98.

77. Roger Griffin, “An Unholy Alliance? The Convergence between Revealed Religion and Sacralized Politics in Inter-War Europe,” in Catholicism and Fascism in Europe 1918–1945 (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2015), 57.

78. Moro, “Church, Catholics and Fascist Movements in Europe,” 91.

79. Ibid., 91.

80. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 2, 146.

81. Delp was pursuing a licentiate in theology, which is considered a second cycle of theology and prepares a person to teach theology in a seminary.

82. Tertianship usually occurs several years after ordination.

83. The journal entries covered his retreat experience from October 8, 1938, to November 6, 1938.

84. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1, 257.

85. Delp’s tertianship reflections on the Heart of Jesus will be examined in conjunction with his prison reflections on the Heart of Jesus in chapter 4.

86. Footnote 193. See Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1, 104.

87. Bleistein, Alfred Delp, 1989, 141.

88. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 103.

89. Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 103.

90. Chapter 3 explores two pieces of writing by Alfred Delp that criticizes Ernst Jünger’s aestheticization of violence (The Achievement of War, 1940) and appropriation of the will-to-power ethos (The Image of the Person in the Constitution of the Society of Jesus, 1941).

91. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 2, 301–18.

92. Ibid., 304–5.

93. Ibid., 304.

94. Coady, With Bound Hands, 36.

95. Bleistein, Alfred Delp, 189.

96. Coady, With Bound Hands, 33.

97. Ibid., 33–34.

98. Bleistein, Alfred Delp, 203–5.

99. Delp Alfred, Gesammelte Schriften 3: Predigten und Ansprachen, ed. Roman Bleistein (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1985), 199–201.

100. Alfred, Gesammelte Schriften 3, 199.

101. Ibid., 199–200.

102. Ibid., 200.

103. Ibid., 201.

104. Ibid., 200.

105. In his memoirs, George F. Kennan, the famous American diplomat, holds Helmuth James von Moltke in incredible regard. In his memoirs Kennan recalls,

A tall, handsome, sophisticated aristocrat, in every sense of the word, Moltke was also, at the same time, everything that by the logic of his official environment he might have been expected not to be: a man of profound religious faith and outstanding moral courage, and a firm believer in democratic ideals. I found him, on that first occasion, immersed in a study of the Federalist Papers—to get ideas for the constitution of a future democratic Germany; and the picture of this scion of a famous Prussian military family, himself employed by the German general staff in the midst of a great world war, hiding himself away and turning, in all humility, to the works of some of the founding fathers of our own democracy for ideas as to how Germany might be led out of its existing corruption and bewilderment has never left me. I consider him, in fact, to have been the greatest person, morally, and the largest and most enlightened in his concepts, that I met on either side of the battle lines in the Second World War. Even at that time—in 1940 and 1941—he had looked beyond the whole sordid arrogance and apparent triumphs of the Hitler regime; he had seen through to the ultimate catastrophe and had put himself to it inwardly, preparing himself—as he would eventually have liked to help prepare his people—for the necessity of starting all over again, albeit in defeat and humiliation, to erect a new national edifice on a new and better moral foundation. I was particularly impressed by the extent to which Moltke had risen, in his agony, above the pettiness and primitivism of latter-day nationalism . . . Moltke was not destined to survive the war. It was scarcely to be expected that he should. His opposition to the Nazi regime, never exactly a secret, became more flagrant and more irritating to the authorities as the war ran its course. Himself a Protestant, he defied the regime, for example, by giving refuge in his own home in Silesia to the local Catholic schools and permitting them to carry on there after its own premises had been closed by the Gestapo . . . I record all this because the image of this lonely, struggling man, one of the few genuine Protestant-Christian martyrs of our time, has remained for me over the intervening years a pillar of moral conscience and an unfailing source of political and intellectual inspiration.

(George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925–1950 [Toronto: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1967], 120–22)

106. Michael Leonard Graham Balfour and Julian Frisby, Helmuth von Moltke: A Leader against Hitler (London: Macmillan, 1972), 302.

107. Moltke wrote to a friend, “I may well give up law for the time being. The old jurisprudence, which I have learned and which is inspired by the concept of justice and humanity, is today only of historical interest because no matter how things develop in Germany there is absolutely no chance of bringing back these old ways of establishing what is just” (Balfour and Frisby, Helmuth von Moltke, 54).

108. One of the appeasers, Bishop Headlam of Gloucester (1862–1947), who was the chairman of Foreign Relations for the Church of England wrote, “Moltke seems to me to be a bitter opponent of the whole Hitler regime and to be determined to keep up the Church feud because he thinks, rightly, that it will injure National Socialism” (Balfour and Frisby, Helmuth von Moltke, 71).

109. Canaris was anxious to have someone who could use international law as a check on Nazi violations of rights. In Moltke, Canaris found the resourceful and determined technical expert who could show him how, if at all, it could be done. (Balfour and Frisby, Helmuth von Moltke, 96).

110. It was in the summer of 1940 that Moltke began systematically assembling a group of like-minded men to discuss the principles upon which postwar Germany should be rebuilt. The Gestapo would call this group the “Kreisau Circle.”

111. Bleistein, Alfred Delp, 1989, 258.

112. Ibid., 258.

113. Ibid., 262.

114. Ger van Roon, German Resistance to Hitler: Count von Moltke and the Kreisau Circle (London, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co, 1971), 130.

115. I have translated the text as follows: The starting point for the discussion is the degradation of people and that people are looking for a saving power. The powers called upon to save have failed thus far. There are various reasons for this failure. In part it comes from the destruction of entities which were created to defend the rights of the people and partly from the powerlessness and indecisiveness of those who should have been capable. Indeed, the last entity from which people expected help is Christianity, yet people expect the churches not only to stand up for purely religious and ecclesiastical issues, those pertaining to canon law and the Christian mysteries, but also and, most importantly, to defend people as people. For the people, the efforts of the Christian churches mean the appearance of a final power capable of saving them. For the Church, a significant possibility arises with the responsibility to regain a spiritual leadership with the masses that have become estranged from the Church. The first question posed to the churches aims to discern whether the churches recognize the plight of the people, whether the churches are willing to advocate for the people, and whether they know that as a result of the personal efforts of their ministers they have the possibility to assume the internal leadership of the German people and of the Western people. The second question posed to the churches aims to discern basic human rights that the Church is willing to support. No direct political activity is expected from the churches, however; the contribution of the churches lies in awakening people and in providing people who are able and willing to collaborate. The fact that the involvement of the churches in any given situation will be misinterpreted by today’s state and this involvement will automatically have political effects should not deter the churches from taking on the immense task of the spiritual leadership of the people. The third question posed to the churches should attempt to achieve clarity about the possibility of coordinating the efforts of both the churches and non-church groups and to make effective arrangements to maintain such coordination. The churches should not adopt a political stance, but they [should be] willing to commit to doing justice [in the world]. In doing so, the churches should be concerned about the people as people without limitations. See Delp, Gesammelte Schriften. 4, 403–4.

116. QA introduced the term social justice into the tradition of Catholic Social Thought. The term was coined by the nineteenth-century Italian theologian Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio to replace Thomas Aquinas’ terms legal justice and general justice. The term social justice specified that the goal of social institutions is not competition but the common good. See: Christine Firer Hinze, “Quadragesimo Anno,” in Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations, 167.

117. Roman Bleistein, Alfred Delp: Geschichte eines Zeugen (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1989), 269.

118. Bleistein, Alfred Delp, 269.

119. Delp’s commitment to building a humane liberal democratic society in Germany will be further examined in conjunction with his ecclesiology in chapter 3. Delp’s social and political ideas anticipate Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes.

120. Delp’s writings for the Kreisau Circle are explored in greater details in chapter 3.

121. Roon, German Resistance to Hitler, 241.

122. Ibid., 241.

123. Major Claus von Stauffenberg was part of a conspiracy group that included Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They conspired to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, and Heinrich Himmler and to replace the Nazis with a temporary, military government. The military government would make peace with the Allies and end the war. Though there were debates about the merits of a military overthrow of the Nazis, members of the Kreisau Circle ultimately did not believe and participate in the tyrannicide because they desired to rebuild a new Germany after its defeat by the Allies.

124. For example, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, Hans Bernd von Haeften, Adam von zu Trott were tried, sentenced, and executed in August of 1944.

125. Bleistein, Alfred Delp, 1989, 327.

126. Ibid., 377–78.

127. Ibid., 321.

128. Luise Oestreicher was the secretary of St. Georg’s parish.

129. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 4, 21–22.

130. Ibid., 22–23.

131. Ibid., 24.