c. 1996 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY (RNS)-In Nazi Germany, when words were often perilous, Monsignor Bernard Lichtenberg waged a dangerous campaign of dissent.

The elderly priest defied Gestapo threats and openly prayed every night in a Berlin cathedral for the safety of the Jews as they were being beaten, jailed or carted off, never to return. Lichtenberg’s personal crusade lasted three years. Finally, in 1941, as he prepared to publish a statement comparing Hitler to the antichrist, Lichtenberg was arrested and jailed.

Upon his release two years later, Nazi security forces seized him without explanation and dragged him off to the Dachau murder camp near Munich. As his train pulled into the prison, Lichtenberg, who had a weak heart, collapsed and died of heart failure. He was 67.

On June 23, Pope John Paul II will make his first appearance in a unified Berlin to beatify as Catholic martyrs Lichtenberg and another war-era priest, the Rev. Karl Leisner, in what has become a common ceremony in his 18-year pontificate.

Less common, however, is the Roman Catholic Church’s elevation of heroic men and women of Nazi Germany or the other axis powers such as Austria and Italy from the World War II era. In fact, the pope has beatified only one other German priest who showed heroism during the war and has never celebrated the beatification rite for any Austrians.

That is changing. The pope recently beatified an Italian cardinal, Ildefonso Schuster, who had backed Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini until the early 1930’s but became an ardent foe with the adoption of anti-Semitic laws in 1938.

Following the celebration in Berlin for the two priests, the pope will travel to Austria in November to beatify the first two Austrian priests from the war.

The spurt of church recognition of holy men from former Nazi countries comes at a portentous time. While Israel and Germany have forged close ties and Catholic-Jewish relations are on the mend, the fires of racial prejudice continue to burn.

Germany has been in the midst of one of the most visible hate trials in years. American white supremacist Gary Lauck has been in a Hamburg courtroom, facing charges of inciting racial hatred toward Jews and other minorities.

Across Germany, an emotional debate is raging, spurred by a new book that contends anti-Semitism in Germany was much more prevalent among ordinary Germans than many historians have believed. Many Germans have tried to refute the charges leveled by Harvard professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his book,”Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.”They call it unbalanced, historically inaccurate and stereotypical.

The Rev. Peter Gumpel, deputy of the Vatican Postulator General’s office, an administrative body that conducts research on candidates for beatification and sainthood, said the beatification ceremonies were not timed to offset the negative images of the Lauck trial or the Goldhagen book. He noted that scrutiny of the two German prelates began before the 1978 investiture of this pope.

Unlike Lichtenberg, who was a well-known prelate, Leisner was only a deacon when he was sent to Dachau in 1944 for speaking out against Hitler.

After some of Hitler’s associates tried to assassinate the Nazi leader, Leisner was overheard saying he regretted that the effort failed.

Leisner was ordained a priest in Dachau by a French bishop, becoming the only known Catholic to be ordained inside a concentration camp. But he suffered from tuberculosis and died in 1945. He was 30.

The pope has shown a strong thirst for saint-making, which he sees as a way to make the church’s message more personal to its followers. He has beatified 742 men and women and canonized 276 saints. In comparison, his seven predecessors in the 20th century beatified only 79 individuals and canonized 98 saints.

Last weekend (June 1-2) the pope canonized three saints. French missionary John Gabriel Perboyre became the first saint who died on Chinese soil. He was killed in 1840 for refusing to renounce his faith. The others included Italian Egidio Maria and Spaniard Juan Grande Roman.

Beatification is the first step toward sainthood and is reserved for martyrs, and also for holy men and women for whom a miracle can be proven. Saints are canonized upon two proven miracles. Declared martyrs need only one miracle to achieve sainthood.

Despite the large number of people Pope John Paul II has declared holy, selecting men and women from Germany, Austria and Italy presents obvious problems. While the pope has improved relations between Catholics and Jews, the church remains highly sensitive to charges that it did not do enough during the wartime pontificate of Pius XII to help Jews, or that Catholic teachings may have inflamed hatred toward Jews.

The Vatican is preparing a document that will examine the extent to which Catholic attitudes and teachings fostered anti-Semitism.

The fence-mending may help reconciliation efforts, but festering wounds are easily rubbed raw. In 1987 the church, somewhat clumsily, critics contend, beatified as a martyr Edith Stein, a Jew from the Netherlands who had converted to Catholicism and joined a religious order. She was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 and died there.

Jewish groups were incredulous that the church claimed Stein was killed for refusing to denounce Catholicism. Stein died, they said, for the same reason that 6 million others perished-because she was born a Jew.”Are most Jews willing to accept the (German) beatifications? By and large no,”said Robert Goldman, who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and heads the Anti-Defamation League’s German program in New York.”I think that understandably Jewish groups are reluctant to see or hear or read anything positive about Germans during the Hitler period because of the awfulness that the mass extermination meant and did.” Nevertheless, Goldman said,”I think one should be very careful not to condemn the Catholic hierarchy in total. There were among them some very gutsy people. And it took more guts to resist in Germany.” (STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)”I understand the resentment,”said the Vatican’s Gumpel, who is 72 and grew up in Nazi Germany. But he added,”there are people born after this period who never lived under dictatorship. They can’t imagine what it was like.” Wilfried Hagemann, general secretary of German Catholics, a lay group, said that unlike the Stein case, the beatification of Lichtenberg and Leisner”will certainly improve relations with the Jews.”Of Lichtenberg whose past he has studied, Hagemann said,”He died because he loved the Jews.” The beatification, he said, will celebrate not only the men but the best among all people in a country where thousands of Germans risked their lives to save the innocent.

As a revived Nazi movement lurches forward, he said, the beatification will be a welcome signal against all forms of racism and religious intolerance.”This is a very clear political sign,”he said.”It is a clear recognition that to be a Christian in Germany, one cannot be a neo-Nazi.”

MJP END HEILBRONNER