BL. MAX JOSEF METZGER, PRIEST AND MARTYR

BL. MAX JOSEF METZGER, PRIEST AND MARTYR - 17 APRIL

BLESSED MAX JOSEF METZGER, PRIEST AND MARTYR

Blessed Max Josef Metzger was born on February 3, 1887 in Schopfheim, Baden, Germany. He studied theology and philosophy, was ordained priest and worked as a military chaplain during the First World War (the "Great War"). He was awarded the Iron Cross on May 6, 1915, and honourably discharged due to ill health in October 1915 (he suffered from pneumonia and pleurisy). He concluded that "future wars have lost their meaning, since they no longer give anybody the prospect of winning more than he loses".

In 1919 Blessed Max Josef established the German Catholics’ Peace Association and sought links to the international pacifist movement, using Esperanto to communicate with the contacts abroad. In 1920 he attended a private audience with Pope Benedict XV, who encouraged him to work for disarmament in Europe. From 1921 to 1924 Blessed Max Josef edited the Esperanto magazine, Katolika Mondo (Catholic World).

In 1928, he assumed the management of a home for alcoholics in Meitingen near Augsburg (Christ the King Institute), which also became the centre of the Una Sancta Brotherhood in 1938/39; the latter, a group devoted to the re-unification of Roman Catholics and Lutherans, had been founded by him in 1938.

Blessed Max Josef was arrested several times by the Gestapo, for the first time for three days in January 1934. A second arrest for four weeks was in connection with the Munich assassination attempt on Hitler. He then moved from Meitingen near Augsburg to Berlin, in order to avoid his persecutors. There he lived and worked in St Joseph, Wedding, from 1939 until his last arrest in 1943. A prolific writer, Blessed Max Josef also drafted a brief memorandum re. a German postwar order. The paper was supposed to reach England via the Swedish Archbishop of Uppsala, Erling Eidem, but the courier turned out to be a female Gestapo agent, Swedish-born Dagmar Imgart, a circumstance that led to his arrest on June 29, 1943.

Subsequently he was sentenced to death for "high treason and favouring the enemy" and was executed after some months on death row on April 17, 1944 in Brandenburg-Görden Prison. Just before his execution he stated: "I have offered up my life to God for world peace and the unity of the churches."

Blessed Max Josef's death sentence was posthumously overturned by a Berlin court in 1997.

Sources:

https://www.ebfr.de/ (Erzdiözese Freiburg)

https://www.gdw-berlin.de/en/recess/biographies/index_of_persons/biographie/view-bio/max-josef-metzger/?no_cache=1

www.gdw-berlin.de (Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Josef_Metzger

https://en.evangelischer-widerstand.de/html/view.php?type=kurzbiografie&id=25&l

PRAYER:

Grant, we beseech you, almighty God, that the venerable feast of Blessed Max Josef may increase our devotion and promote our salvation. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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