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
