Against the Titans. Peter Nguyen
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