Ordained at Dachau

A bit of good amongst so much evil:

Leisner was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and in Dachau his condition began to deteriorate. Fearing that the great dream of his life — to be a priest — would never be realized, he and the priests in his cellblock secretly sent a petition to a local cardinal (aided here, and in so many areas, by a heroic nun known as the “Angel of Dachau,” Sister Imma Mack.) The cardinal granted permission for a French bishop detained in the camp to perform the ordination, and asked Sister Imma to deliver a ritual book and chrism needed for the rite; Sister Imma was told to return these items, along with written documentation of the ordination, if they were able to celebrate it.

A number of prisoners, including some non-Catholics who worked in different work areas of the camp, made full sets of vestments for the bishop and Deacon Leisner. The ordination was celebrated in 1944 in secret, and the documentation was smuggled to Sister Imma, who then delivered it all to the cardinal. (The photograph here shows the newly ordained Fr. Leisner moments after his ordination. It is one of the few taken to capture this incredible event.) But Fr. Leisner’s health was so weak, he was only able to celebrate mass, again in secret, once. Shortly after the camp was liberated, he was sent to a hospital for the terminally ill, where he died in the summer of 1945. He was 30 years old...

It is fascinating to consider the sort of co-operation that had to exist among prisoners–Catholic and non-Catholic–for this ordination to have happened. At any moment, anyone involved was exposing himself (or herself) to life-threatening risk. But then again, these people were all resisting an unambiguous evil, living in a place–and an era–where relativism did not have such primacy over our reason, as it does now.

No one living in a Nazi prison camp had difficult discerning good from evil. The “luxury” of being confused on something so basic only comes in times of “relative” peace and prosperity, when the focus is on things much less urgent than merely staying alive for another day, and we feel free to ponder our personal moralities to the nth degree...