Caesar, like the poor, is always with us. So is Judas. And so are the disciples of Christ. The Tyrant, the Traitor, and the Martyr. These three types of men form the very threads from which the tapestry of history is woven.
Caesar and his followers come in many philosophical shapes and many ideological guises, but they are always animated by the same spirit of secularism, the same spirit of worldliness. They idolize the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist, and they are always at war with the Holy Spirit, the Heiliger Geist. In the 19th century, the followers of Caesar were formed by the fashionable philosophies of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. In the 20th century, these philosophies morphed into the ideological monsters of Marxism and Nazism, the former inciting communist revolutions in many parts of the world and the latter possessing the German soul with diabolical pride. The Nazis, following the example of the Italian Fascists, adopted the Roman salute, the open-hand raised aloft as a sign of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, the New Caesar, and to the Thousand Year Reich, the New Empire, that Hitler had promised and proclaimed.
In response to the rise of the new secularist monsters, Pope Pius XI condemned both the Nazis and the communists. In two encyclicals, issued a week apart in 1937, he condemned the Nazi government in Germany for its persecution of Catholics, its racism and anti-Semitism, and for its tribal neo-paganism. In the encyclical against communism, he attacked the evils of Marxism in general and Soviet communism in Russia in particular. “Society is for man and not vice versa,” he insisted, condemning communism for reversing this right order.
Pope Pius XII, who succeeded Pius XI, ascended to the papal throne as the world descended into war. His first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, issued shortly after the war had begun, condemned the Nazi and Soviet invasion of Poland, which had caused Britain to enter the war in Poland’s defense, as well as condemning anti-Semitism and totalitarianism. The courage of the pope, considering that he was himself living in the midst of Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, is exemplary.
Such courage was present to an even greater degree in the midst of Hitler’s Germany. We think immediately of those Catholic martyrs who were executed by the Nazis and subsequently canonized by the Church, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) and St. Maximilian Kolbe. Their praises are rightly sung and prayers are rightly said for their powerful intercession. Far fewer will think of a lesser-known martyr, Blessed Otto Neururer, who was beatified by St. John Paul II in 1996.
Otto Neururer was born in the Austrian Tyrol on the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25) in 1881. He was the twelfth and youngest child of devoutly Catholic parents. At the age of 21, following the call to the priesthood, he entered the seminary and was subsequently ordained in 1907. A little over thirty years later, in March 1938, the Nazis annexed Austria, subsuming it within the Third Reich.
In the same year, Fr. Neururer advised a young woman not to marry a divorced man whom he knew to be a serial adulterer and congenital liar. After the woman informed the man of her conversation with Fr. Neururer, the man denounced the priest to the local Nazi authorities. A week before Christmas in 1938, Fr. Neururer was arrested and charged with “slander to the detriment of German marriage.”
Three months later, he was sent to Dachau, the first of the concentration camps established by the Nazis, where he was imprisoned with other priests in what was known to camp authorities as the “priests’ barracks.” After six months in one concentration camp, he was transferred to another, Buchenwald, at which the infamous “Hangman of Buchenwald,” Martin Sommer, routinely tortured prisoners.
The “crime” for which Fr. Neururer would ultimately be sentenced to death was the baptizing of a fellow prisoner. He was ordered to be taken to the punishment block where he was effectively tortured to death. He was stripped naked and then hanged upside down. It would take him 34 hours to die. A fellow prisoner, Alfred Berchtold, who witnessed Neururer’s final torture, reported that he never complained, mumbling prayers until he lost consciousness.
Blessed Otto Neururer died and earned his martyr’s reward on May 30, 1940. He was 59 years old. He would be the first priest to be martyred by the Nazis but by no means the last. Over the next five years, more than 2,600 Catholic priests would be killed on the orders of those who owed their allegiance to the new Caesar. Unlike St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, St. Maximilian Kolbe, and Blessed Otto Neururer, they have not been officially recognized by the Church.
These true soldiers of Christ are unsung heroes, to be sure. If they are in Heaven, we can be assured of their prayers. If they are not in Heaven, they can be assured of the prayers of Blessed Otto Neururer, the protomartyr of the Nazi Persecution. May he pray for them. May we pray for them. And may he pray for us.
This originally appeared on Crisis Magazine.
