“What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity.” Thus spake Friedrich Nietzsche, the West’s most influential modern philosopher, in his 1888 book The Anti-Christ.
The refrain has echoed throughout the century since. Media mogul Ted Turner, no philosopher, put the now common notion into a more modern idiom: “Christianity is a religion for losers.”
Some of Nietzsche’s admirers have tried to rescue the often self-contradictory thinker from his own incoherence and exaggerations by pointing out that his Superman—the extraordinary creature he hoped would appear to save civilization—still retains a certain noblesse oblige towards the weak. In this view, Nietzsche was only condemning a mistaken indulgence of mediocrity; he admired, for example, strong Old Testament figures. Yet mercy and compassion are inextricably connected to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and, for that matter, to Allah the All Merciful and the Compassionate Buddha.
No. Nietzsche posed a clear question, and it deserves a clear answer: Are the religions that place high value on humility and compassion—which is virtually all of them—the enemies of excellence and heroism?
The Nazis, drawing on and sometimes distorting Nietzsche, believed so. In his table talk, Hitler argued that it was “decisive for our people whether they have the Judeo-Christian faith and its flabby morality of sympathy, or a strong, heroic faith in god in nature, in god in one’s own people, in god in one’s own fate, in one’s own blood.… One is either a Christian or a German. One can’t be both.”
Yet religious people within Germany gave evidence that this alleged opposition of humility and compassion to heroism and virtue was quite crudely misconceived. We are familiar with the brave resistance, for example, of the two great Protestant pastors Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller. If Christian humility and compassion are just timidity and love of mediocrity, then these two death-defying men must have been very poor Christians indeed. And there were thousands of others whose stories still need to become better known because, precisely out of their right understanding of humility and compassion, they boldly opposed false notions of self-esteem and valor, often to the point of death.
One of the most remarkable and stunningly heroic was the German Jesuit Rupert Mayer. Father Mayer was a living refutation of the Nazi claim that the “negative” Christianity of the churches, Catholic and Protestant, with its piety, sense of sin, and self-denial, was incompatible with the strong virtues the Nazis admired. Mayer was early attracted to the religious life in his native Bavaria and was deeply trained in the traditional Christian virtues. He showed what these meant in practice. In World War I, as a chaplain to the German army, he distinguished himself by his fearless movements on battlefronts where he administered the sacraments to the dying and used his body to shield wounded men.
Mayer was mangled so badly during one clash he lost his left leg. Hans Carossa, an eyewitness, was moved to poetry by Mayer’s courage and serenity as he lay bleeding: “The man lying there in his own blood maintained, even in the most wretched condition, the air of uncommon superiority over himself…. When people like us died, something not quite settled, not quite finished always remained. But this man floated like a sonata by Bach, conjured out of the darkness in clearly drawn lines and in a state of complete release.” Mayer was the first priest to receive Germany’s Iron Cross, first class, as well as other medals for valor.
That poise, self-possession, and courage were not merely the result of necessity on the battlefield; they also appeared in his everyday life. As National Socialism began its rise to power in Germany, Mayer, out of commitment to the very humility and compassion the Nazis despised, confronted the brutal movement head on. As a matter of pastoral concern, he made a point of attending political meetings that might affect believers in Germany. He did so not as a political activist but as a legendary, battle-tested priest who felt a responsibility to be a pastor over all dimensions of the life of his flock. When 21 young people of the Catholic Association of Saint Joseph were massacred by marauding Nazi bands, for example, he took to the pulpit counseling a firm response, animated not by revenge—which was the Nazis’ spirit—but by Christian love. One of his constant themes: If they feel our love, they will believe what we say.
Christian charity, however, did not prevent him from drawing a firm line against all those then in Germany, Communists and National Socialists most prominently, who were preaching a different gospel. He attended meetings of both groups and offered religious commentary and criticism.
Understanding the threats that Nazi views on nationalism, race, and the Bible presented, Mayer tirelessly and publicly proclaimed that a Christian could not in good conscience be a Nazi. At a German political rally to discuss that question, the pro-Nazi audience became so agitated before Mayer had said more than a few words that he had to be taken out of the room surrounded by bodyguards. His prominence brought him to the attention of the Nazis even before they took power. After they were asked to form a government, Gestapo agents came to his sermons and took notes. Mayer was not the kind of man to be intimidated: He spoke out without the least hesitation, even though friends warned him he was under surveillance.
Given his fame, however, the Nazis had to be careful not to make a martyr of him, which would have sparked a popular uprising in Bavaria. When World War II broke out in 1939, however, the regime arrested Mayer and other potential opponents, ostensibly for political crimes. The Gestapo usually sent priests and ministers to Dachau for some unknown reason; thousands of them from more than a dozen nations died there. Perhaps because Mayer might have had a bad influence among so many like-minded colleagues, he was sent instead to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. His head was shaved, and he was forced to follow camp discipline, but even there he was treated with no little respect. Still, he lost so much weight that the prosthesis for his amputated leg no longer fit properly, and this added to the trials of life in a concentration camp.
But the prison camp could not bend Mayer’s will in the slightest. He was interrogated about his contacts with various people. He absolutely refused to discuss any of his conversations with anyone because, as a priest, he regarded them as confidential and believed silence about them was necessary for trust in the clergy. His accusers hinted he was in touch with monarchists and other opponents of the Nazi government. Mayer would not even comment on such suggestions, either to confirm or deny them. Frustrated that Mayer’s fame prevented them from pressuring him further, his interrogators relented.
The authorities at Sachsenhausen had a problem on their hands. They could not brutalize the rock-hard priest as they did other prisoners. His very presence in the camp set a bad example. In a deal with church officials, they decided to send him to a kind of forced seclusion in the monastery at Ettal, where he would be nominally free, but had to refrain from all public activity. It was a hard thing for Mayer to accept this compromise because he knew that people would be scandalized by his apparent acquiescence. Mayer was determined not to lead anyone astray, even passively. He was ultimately persuaded, however, by the fact that he would cause trouble for the monastery, the Jesuits, and intercessors if he resisted the arrangement they had worked out. Mayer was freed from this uncomfortable situation only when Allied forces liberated the monastery. He immediately returned to his active life, but the imprisonment had taken its toll. He died shortly thereafter in the midst of a sermon. In 1948, when his body was transferred to its current resting place, 35,000 people paid tribute. In 1983, the Vatican beatified him for heroic virtue.
Mayer’s story is not a common one because heroic virtue is not common, even among religious people. Some might argue Mayer’s case is the exception that proves the Nietzschean/Nazi rule that compassion and humility sap the heroic virtues. But in fact, classical religious traditions teach the need for compassion and strict truthfulness, humility and unyielding courage in the face of evil. Sadly, many religious people themselves in recent years have overlooked these truths. They have so exclusively emphasized the need to turn the other cheek, to seek dialogue, to be peacemakers, that they have lost sight of other parts of their religious heritage.
Someone may, for instance, choose to be a pacifist and turn the other cheek to physical assaults. But can an entire society in good conscience fail to protect innocent people from criminal assault within or aggression from without? Considerations like these have led almost all the religious traditions to see the proper carrying out of policing or defense, even when it involves the just use of force, as not mere violence but a noble responsibility.
Similarly, even when force is not used, mere dialogue and a desire for peace may lead to complicity with evil. We have obligations actively to oppose evils like racism, oppression, and slavery. Hundreds of thousands of religious people had no trouble combining the softer traditional virtues of humility, compassion, and self-denial with the harder traditional virtues of truthfulness, firmness, and courage in the twentieth century. We need only think of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Eastern Orthodox), Natan Sharansky (Jewish), Nelson Mandela (Protestant), Mahatma Gandhi (Hindu), the Dalai Lama (Buddhist), and a host of other distinguished names to realize how thoroughly false is the opposition between these two sets of virtues. Indeed, absent the religious virtues, or their functional equivalent, it is difficult to see what the more martial virtues would be for, other than the self-aggrandizing thuggery that was so woefully common in the century just past.
The virtues only make sense when they are put into the right relationship with one another. Courage is a good thing, but not in the service of injustice. And people can be wrongly compassionate, as Nietzsche detected, if they are willing to indulge mediocrity and shirk the sometimes difficult obligation of truth-telling. But on the other side, many people have taken ideas like Nietzsche’s to mean it is compassionate simply to put the handicapped, the lesser breeds, or the mediocre out of their misery. Out of that seductive lie came the seeming necessity of the Holocaust, eugenics, and “class struggles.”
Often enough, the new immoralists were not content with merely killing the opposition, because religious virtues were a standing rebuke to repressive regimes. Therefore, such regimes not only tried to eliminate but also to convert, or at least humiliate, heroic religious figures, particularly in socialist and Communist regimes that had atheist public creeds.
In Rumania, the Communist regime engaged in what may very well have been the worst case of brainwashing in modern times, the Pitesti Experiment. A thousand young people, most of them Rumanian Orthodox chosen precisely because they were serious about their faith, were subjected to severe Pavlovian conditioning to make them reflexively anti-religious. All gave in to the pressure (though some later recovered) after prolonged mistreatment and forced blasphemies too graphic to be described. Even heroic virtue, the totalitarians learned, can often be overcome by the systematic application of ruthless methods.
But not always. In Communist China, Bishop Francis Xavier Ford, a Catholic missionary who had spent over 30 years serving the Chinese, was tortured and brainwashed for 11 months. Fellow prisoners later reported that the mistreatment was so severe that Ford was on the verge of forgetting his own identity and was only able to hang on to it by repeating to himself: “My name is Francis Xavier Ford.” In spite of everything, he did not crack. It appears that he died around February 1952. We are not sure because word of his death only leaked out about six months later. He must have persevered to the end, though, because the Communist Chinese would otherwise have made a public spectacle out of his recantation.
Many twentieth-century regimes tried to organize spectacles humiliating to religious people. For example, on November 22, 1927, a man dressed in street clothes was led through a crowd of photographers and politicians on his way to a firing squad in Mexico City. The photographers were present for this illegal execution—there had been no trial or even formal charges—because the Mexican President, Plutarco Elias Calles, the most rabidly anti-Catholic leader in the world at the time, wanted them to record the humiliation of a man desperately pleading for his own life. Calles badly miscalculated. The man walked calmly to the place of his death, asked to be allowed to pray, and then, in a voice neither defiant nor desperate, intoned the words Viva Cristo Rey! Long Live Christ the King!
Through photographs distributed worldwide, the Jesuit priest Miguel Augustìn Pro thus became the most famous martyr in Mexico’s anti-Catholic revolution early in the twentieth century. But Pro was hardly alone. Thousands of his co-religionists bravely accepted death in resistance to oppression, though few people anywhere, especially in the United States, remember it today.
President Calles was not only wrong about how Pro would die, he was wrong about Mexico as a whole. Though anti-clerical propaganda long tried to portray the Mexican clergy as corrupt, few of them, few enough to count on one hand, renounced their beliefs or caved in to government pressures, even facing death. In fact, many went the extra step of calmly forgiving their executioners before they died.
Their serenity stands in sharp contrast to the savagery of the supposedly progressive forces of the revolutionary Mexican government. President Calles, who admired both the Communists and Hitler, banned Masses, expelled all the Mexican bishops, and ordered massacres of simple believers who continued to frequent churches. The governor of the state of Tabasco, Tomas Garrido Canabal, was so fanatical in his hatred of the Church that he named his children Lenin, Lucifer, and Satan.
Father Pro, then, knew very well what he was risking when, operating underground, he continued saying Mass, hearing confessions, and running Communion stations around Mexico City. Thousands came secretly to the sacraments. By a providential combination of circumstances, he was the perfect man for the job. As a young boy he had always loved plays and practical jokes. His natural talents as an actor and his steady nerves served him well when he had to deceive the police. Pro would dress up as a dapper young man when he spoke with women’s groups; the police didn’t expect a priest to be so stylish. If he was visiting car mechanics or drivers, he put on overalls. In one case, he was bringing the Blessed Sacrament to a house where plainclothes detectives were waiting outside. Not wishing to give them the satisfaction of stopping him, he boldly pretended to flash an officer’s badge. The detectives saluted him sharply as he left the house, mission accomplished, never suspecting the deception.
Like many other martyrs, even in jail Pro ministered heroically to the other prisoners. He led them in prayers and songs and kept up everyone’s spirits. The night before he died, he gave his mattress to a sick prisoner while he himself slept on the cell floor.
When Pro’s body, along with that of his brother Humberto, who had also been executed, was taken back to his father’s house, the elder Pro revealed the kind of family the Jesuit had sprung from. He ordered no one to mourn, because, he said, there was nothing sorrowful in such heroic deaths. Though the Mexican government had forbidden any public demonstrations, 20,000 ordinary Mexicans crowded into the streets outside the Pros’ home for the funeral. As the coffins were brought out, someone shouted: “Make way for the martyrs!” The crowd fell silent. But as the coffins were driven through the streets, there were shouts of Viva Cristo Rey! everywhere. It was a popular tribute both to religious principle and to human heroism.
In Pro’s case, religious heroism was publicly revealed as such. But quieter religious heroism involving resistance and death occurred on every continent in the twentieth century except for Australia and the Antarctic. For the most part, we still have only a sketchy idea of those who resisted and died in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Nazi Germany, the Spanish Civil War, Communist China, North Korea, Vietnam, the various massacres in Africa, and the troubled proxy wars of Latin America. Retrospectives on the twentieth century have been almost uniformly blind to the massive numbers of religious victims—probably numbering in the millions—of various sorts of bloody conflict.
Many of those who died did so as a result of memorable heroism; their religious beliefs would not allow them to compromise with new forms of brutality masquerading as enlightenment. Contradicting Nietzsche, they lived lives of great compassion for the weak and downtrodden, combined with heroic witness to human nobility. Only a few lived to see the victory of the truth. But even those who died were not merely defeated; they kept alive something that deserves to be better known and remains of great value to us all.
Page created on 11/15/2005 12:00:00 AM
Last edited 11/15/2005 12:00:00 AM
