Pope Offers Olive Branch to Lutherans : Jesuit Priest Who Defied Nazi Regime Beatified in Munich

Pope John Paul II offered an olive branch to West Germany’s predominant Lutherans on Sunday and elevated a courageous German Jesuit priest who was persecuted by the Nazis to the status of blessed, one step short of sainthood.

In a 2 1/2-hour Mass at Munich’s Olympic Stadium, less than a mile from the Olympic Village where Arab terrorists massacred 11 Israeli athletes in 1972, the pontiff beatified Jesuit Father Rupert Mayer, who was one of the few German Catholic clergymen to speak forthrightly against the Nazis and on behalf of their victims during the Nazi era.

Later, after canceling a planned helicopter flight and another outdoor Mass in nearby Augsburg because of a freak snow and sleet storm, John Paul went further than ever before to make a peace offering to the Lutherans, whose founder, Martin Luther, broke with Rome in 1517, setting off the Protestant Reformation.

Augsburg figures prominently in history as the birthplace in 1530 of the Lutherans’ Augsburg Confession, which was rejected by Rome but was quoted approvingly by John Paul last Thursday in Cologne.

Lutherans and other Protestant denominations make up 49% of the West German population, Roman Catholics 45% and Jews 1% with the remainder unaffiliated.

‘God’s Unfathomable Wisdom’

Suggesting in his Augsburg sermon Sunday night that the Reformation had a positive side, the pontiff declared, “Wasn’t it perhaps even necessary, we might ask here in Augsburg, in accordance with God’s unfathomable wisdom for religious schisms and religious wars to occur in order to lead the church to reflect on and renew its original values?”

He called on Catholics to “bear witness, together with the brothers and sisters who are separated from you, to the Christian hope that has been given to us so that here in Augsburg, where a separation took place. . . , the life-creating word of God may bring the Christian denominations and churches back together again.”

In another passage of the sermon, the Pope said of the once-rejected Augsburg Confession that its 450th anniversary celebrated in 1980 “provided us with a reminder of how broad and firm the common foundations of our Christian faith still are.”

While acknowledging intractable remaining differences, particularly concerning the sharing of the sacrament of Communion, John Paul said, “There is still a lot that we can do together--why should we continue to travel separate roads when we are now able to travel them together?”

Unseasonable Snowstorm

The Augsburg Mass was delayed for more than an hour when the pontiff’s helicopter flight from Munich was grounded by the unseasonable snowstorm. It also had to be moved inside the 10th-Century Augsburg Cathedral, where only a few thousand of the tens of thousands who had braved the elements in an open sports field, the originally planned Mass site, were able to participate.

In beatifying Father Mayer in Munich, the Pope picked a popular 20th-Century German religious figure whose life was one of protest against anti-religious persecution.

Mayer became a Jesuit and professed it openly at a time when the scholarly Catholic religious order was outlawed in Germany. Later he served as a military chaplain to German forces in World War I, lost a leg and was decorated with the Iron Cross.

Early during the rise of Nazism, Mayer went to Nazi meetings to protest Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s ideology and is said to have met and protested to Hitler himself.

Arrested twice in 1937 and 1938 for his fiery sermons against the persecutions conducted by the regime, Mayer was finally sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin.

But, fearing that he would be viewed as a martyr when his health began to fail, the Nazis moved him into involuntary house arrest, and silence, at a Benedictine monastery in Bavaria. He died about six months after being liberated by Allied troops in 1945.

‘Human Rights, God’s Rights’

John Paul said of Mayer that he recognized godlessness in the Nazi leaders and knew that “human rights and God’s rights belong together. Where God and His laws are not respected, man’s rights, too, will not be respected.”

The pontiff suggested that the Hitler regime was motivated by the devil.

“There are times when the existence of evil among people is particularly apparent,” the Pope said. “Then it becomes even clearer that the powers of darkness that reside in and operate through man are larger than him. They come from outside and envelop him.

“It seems that people today almost do not want to see this problem. They do everything to put the existence of those ‘rulers of this world of darkness,’ those ‘tactics of the devil’ . . . from their minds.”

The pontiff speaks often of Satan as a tangible presence in life. He devoted a special series of sermons to the subject in Rome last summer.

John Paul will wind up his five-day pastoral visit to West Germany today with meetings in Augsburg and Speyer, then fly back to Rome from Stuttgart.