The Cardinal von Galen Award Goes To
...MARK CRUTCHER!

HLI Conference Banquet Philadelphia Airport Marriott 24-26 May 2002

In the face of great evil, God raises up towers of virtue and conscience in every age which are impregnable to the forces of wickedness. He assures that every tyrant will have a righteous foe to erect walls of conscience in front of the tyrant's power and so preserve hope in the hearts of the potential victims of the regime. God does not abandon His people ever, but sends His servants into the battle to defend the rights of Heaven over against the minions of Hell. The truth and vitality of the Gospel of Jesus Christ resounds through the hallways of history, continuously re-echoed by the saints who have cast off any fear of man in order to give fitting honor to God and His laws.

And our age - so full of evil - is not devoid of its witnesses in the cause of the Gospel.

    One such witness of our age was born of a noble German family in 1878, the 11th of 13 children. His name indicated the very essence of his vocation to protect and defend the innocent: Clemens August, names which mean "Merciful" and "Noble", a veritable lion of God. His birth predated that of Adolph Hitler by 11 years, but his life was inextricably tied to the tyrant's fate by the common bonds of both religion (Hitler was baptized as a Catholic) and race. Divine Providence, in a mysterious way, provided that the tyrant would not achieve the height of his malice without a holy detractor and a defiant voice to challenge his pretensions to be a god. Time and again this prophetic voice was raised in defense of the Truth as well as in defense of the innocent from the moment that von Galen was consecrated a bishop in 1933, the very year that Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.

    The episcopal motto that von Galen chose was the motto of a noble warrior, Nec laudibus, nec timore, meaning "unconcerned about praise and undaunted by fear." It indicated the manner in which he would exercise his episcopal ministry in the midst of one of the 20th century's most brutal dictatorships. To spiritually strengthen his people, he immediately established Perpetual Adoration of the Eucharist in a central church in his diocese and then commenced a campaign of continuous public challenges to the neo-pagan ideology of National Socialism so that his people would not be swept away by the seductive appeal of nationalistic sentiment. He did this with full knowledge that he could at any moment be deprived of his own liberty and rights as a German and as a prelate of the Church. Yet his conscience drove him into the arena of battle with the godless regime.

    In his very first pastoral letter to his diocese in 1934 he challenged the premises of the Hitler youth program and demanded that the Nazis respect the rights of the Church and of parents in the uninhibited religious formation of the young. He followed this in the same year by a personal rejoinder to Alfred Rosenberg's pseudo-scientific frontal attack on the Church and the Christian religion.

    In 1936 he preached a sermon accusing the Nazis of religious discrimination against Christians which was practiced to the point of incarceration and murder. Pope Pius XI called him and other German bishops to Rome in January of 1937 to discuss the grave situation in Germany and to help prepare the encyclical letter Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Anxiety) which brought the evils of National Socialism to the attention of a worldwide audience. Von Galen was also one of the very few forceful voices in opposition to the racial doctrine of the Nazis, and while the German bishops were not sure how to deal with National Socialism, von Galen demanded that the conference of Catholic bishops take a determined stand against the heathen ideology.

    Bishop von Galen's sermons about the evils of Nazism could be transposed virtually without alteration to the problem of abortion and moral decay in American society. The same words could be thundered from every Protestant and Catholic pulpit in our nation today if only we had religious leaders with the same moral courage as the bishop of Muenster. Addressing the issue of Nazi aggression against innocent priests and nuns who were banished from their homes and sent into exile he said,

    "I am conscious that as a bishop, a promulgator and defender of the legal and moral order willed by God and granting to each individual rights and freedoms to which, by God's will, all human claims must give way, I am called upon courageously to assert the authority of the law and to denounce the condemnation of innocent men, who are without any defense, as an injustice crying out to heaven. My Christians! The imprisonment of many blameless persons without any opportunity for defense or any judgment of a court compel me today to publicly recall on old and unshakeable truth: "Justitia est fundamentum regnorum", Justice is the only solid foundation of any state.

    "The right to life, to inviolability, to freedom is an indispensable part of the moral order of society. It is true that the state is entitled to restrict these rights as a penal measure against its citizens, but the state is only entitled to do so against those who have broken the law and whose guilt has been established in an impartial judicial process. A state which transgresses this boundary laid down by God and permits or causes innocent persons to be punished is undermining its own authority and the respect for its sovereignty in the conscience of its citizens."

    In many sermons he was known to use mocking references to Nazi leaders. In reference to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, who walked with a limp, he railed from the pulpit, "The lie is limping across Germany!" He taunted the Nazis saying that when they would come to arrest him they would find him standing in the doorway of his cathedral dressed in full bishop's regalia with miter and crosier. And in a famous riposte reported by Robert Royal in his book Twentieth Century Martyrs, von Galen is said to have gotten the better of a Nazi detractor who interrupted one of his sermons screaming,

    "What right does a celibate, without wife or children, have to talk about the problems of youth and marriage?" Von Galen immediately replied, "Never will I tolerate in this cathedral any reflection upon our beloved Fuhrer!" This witty riposte not only defended the Catholic clergy, but underlined the absurd incongruity of Hitler's propaganda encouraging good Nazi mothers to bear large numbers of pure Aryan children for the Reich when he himself was unmarried and childless (pp. 155-156).

    It was for this reason that Bishop von Galen earned the respectful title of the "Lion of Muenster" from the people who drew hope from the wellsprings of his ferocious courage.

    Bishop von Galen will most be remembered, however, for his single-handed exposure of the Nazi euthanasia program which was systematically exterminating mentally handicapped Germans who were, in their terminology, "unworthy of life". It is largely due to von Galen's forthright vetting of the program and other acts of malfeasance by the Nazis that Hitler vowed to personally hang the bishop when the war was over. It was also due to von Galen's use of his own bully pulpit that public sentiment was galvanized against the program and caused it to grind to a screeching halt, never to be resurrected again; well, at least not in Germany. His preaching against euthanasia was strident and would likely put the fear of God even into Jack Kevorkian. He said,

    "If the principle that man is entitled to kill his unproductive fellow man is established and applied, then woe to all of us when we become aged and infirm!... Then no man will be safe: some committee or other will be able to put him on the list of 'unproductive' persons, who in their judgment have become 'unworthy to live'. And there will be no police to protect him, no court to avenge his murder and bring his murderers to justice. Who could then have any confidence in a doctor? He might report a patient as unproductive and then be given instructions to kill him! It does not bear thinking of, the moral depravity, the universal mistrust which will spread even in the bosom of the family, if this terrible doctrine is tolerated, accepted and put into practice. Woe to mankind! Woe to our German people, if the divine commandment 'Thou shalt not kill', which the Lord proclaimed on Sinai amid thunder and lightning, which God our Creator wrote into man's conscience from the beginning, if this commandment is not merely violated but the violation is tolerated and remains unpunished!"

    Bishop von Galen's three great sermons in the summer of 1941 were preached in churches in his own diocese and caused such great admiration and resolve among his people that they were secretly reproduced and distributed all over Germany, much to the chagrin of the Nazi regime. The sermons were even translated and sent beyond the borders of Germany. The bishop was prepared for the drastic consequences that could be visited upon him for his public defiance. But because of his popularity and the threat of the alienation of the whole population of the Westphalia province from the war effort, the Nazis did not touch von Galen but instead arrested 37 of his clergy and deported them to concentration camps, ten of whom lost their lives there. The bishop was deeply affected by this loss but accepted this devastation as the price exacted by fidelity to the Truth. How he wished he could have been taken instead of his brothers, but it was not to be.

    At the end of the war Bishop von Galen did not wait until the Allied forces advanced to his destroyed city. He personally drove out to meet the troops and welcome them, whereupon he entered in to regular contact with the provisional military government for the assistance of his people, giving encouragement and hope to both sides.

    On the 18th of February 1946 Pope Pius XII presented Bishop Clemens August von Galen with the red hat of a Cardinal of the Catholic Church in recognition of a decade of determined public resistance to National Socialism, and when the great "Lion of Muenster" arose to receive that distinction from the hand of the pope, the crowd in St. Peter's Basilica greeted him with thunderous applause because his courage was recognized throughout all of Europe by then. Upon return to Muenster, his own people welcomed him with profound exultation, and there on the steps of his bombed out Cathedral he made his last public speech. The following day the Cardinal fell seriously ill and died a week later on the 22nd of March 1946, less than a year after Adolph Hitler killed himself in a Berlin bunker. At the time of his death, the president of the regional association of Jewish communities wrote, "Cardinal von Galen was one of the few upright and conscientious men who fought against racism in a most difficult time. We shall always honor the memory of the deceased bishop."

    The prophetic voice fell silent, but his noble example of defense of the innocent in the face of such great evil will live for ages. His course was run, his work finished. The purpose for which he came into the world - to witness Christ before Belial - was accomplished. The great Lion of Muenster was welcomed with joy into the kingdom of the great Lion of Judah (cf. Rev 5:5).


The first recipient of the Cardinal von Galen Award

    An award in the name of Cardinal von Galen is established today not so much for the purpose of giving honor to a person of similar courage (although that is certainly true) but more importantly for the purpose of showing the world that the moral conscience still reigns free and supreme in the face of an even worse evil: the systematic destruction of innocent babies through abortion. Ironically, at the Nuremburg war crimes tribunal after the Second World War, abortion was declared a war crime in no uncertain terms; forty years later it had become a fundamental human right.

    The totalitarian, coercive, seductive power of godless American philosophies has reached its demonic tentacles into the very soul of modern man and has caused destruction on a more massive scale than even the Nazi extermination camps. Jesus Himself warned us not to fear those who could destroy only the body but to be very much afraid of those who have the power to throw both body and soul into Gehenna (cf. Mt 10:28). There are some in this world who, like the Lion of Muenster, refuse to accept even the slightest compromise with the devil, and it is to all the witnesses of conscience in the pro-life movement around the world that this award is dedicated.

    The first recipient of this award is known for his refusal to compromise with the vicious murder of innocent babies at the hands of the strong. Maybe you have heard his familiar witness: We're not here to put up a good fight, we're here to win because winning is how the killing stops!

    We saw his ingenuity in 1993 through "Project Choice", a stealth survey of abortion providers who candidly answered questions about what tactics of the pro-lifers were the most effective against their totalitarian regime. He wrote the names of the abortion providers in invisible ink on the return envelopes so that he could identify those killers who had responded to the "anonymous" survey. Then when he had their answers about what worked best against them, he turned around and gave the information to the local pro-life groups so that they could do more of the same!

    His analysis of the social and moral degradation of our culture is remarkably lucid. In his work entitled Access he explains the problem,

    "It is now clear that - marketing people showed the pro-aborts that the key to victory was in controlling what people do, not what they believe. They [showed] the abortion industry that they could win without convincing one single person that abortion is a great and noble thing. All they had to do was convince the American people that, regardless of their personal beliefs about abortion, they shouldn't join us in trying to outlaw it.

    "Armed with that philosophy, the pro-aborts decided to switch gears. They would no longer argue that abortion wasn't murder, or that the unborn weren't human. 'Choice' and 'Who decides' were to be their new mantras. Meanwhile, the pro-life movement continued to scream, 'Abortion is murder,' and totally missed the fact that the pro-aborts were no longer saying that it wasn't." Today the public's attitude is, "We know that abortion is the killing of a baby, we just don't care.?"

    More than 15,000 conscientious men and women have been recruited into the abortion wars through his "Pro-Life Activist Seminars" which convincingly taught us the elements of moral warfare in a free society. We all learned that being "clever as snakes and innocent as doves" (cf. Mt 10:16) today means suing abortionists for malpractice, inviting clinic workers to report tax violations, and telling medical students what a life of misery awaits them if they get involved with such a disreputable practice as killing babies.

    We also saw the ugliness and coercive force of the abortion industry laid out in painstaking detail before our very eyes through his Lime 5 exposé and the shocking revelation of the industry's dirty little secret of selling the limbs and organs of aborted babies for exorbitant profit. His newest investigative effort, the "Child Predators" Program, has the potential of blowing the lid off the abortion industry by unmasking its cover-up of the abuse and exploitation of minors.

    All of this conscientious work has happened because of one man and the dynamic organization he has created to exhort, admonish and hold accountable all those who make a business of killing God's innocent children. Like Cardinal von Galen, he has spoken out in timely and creative ways and given a whole generation of people hope in the thick of what at times appears to be overwhelming odds and meager victories. The babies have no stauncher advocate than the man who has dedicated his whole life to keeping them alive.

(Life Talk theme song begins)

Don't take my word for it. The abortionists themselves pay him the best tribute. To them he is:
    "the new bad boy on the block"
    "the most dangerous anti-abortionist in America"

They admit:
    "I can't impress upon any of you how seriously you need to take this organization" and
    "Life Dynamics is the scariest anti-choice group around"

    To us he is the worthy recipient of the first Cardinal von Galen Award, and it gives me the greatest pleasure to present this award tonight to...
Mark Crutcher!