His Eminence Aloisius Joseph Muench
Diocese Roman Catholic Diocese of Fargo, North Dakota
See Bishop of Fargo
Enthroned 1935
Reign ended 1959
Ordination June 8, 1916
Consecration October 15, 1935
Created Cardinal December 14, 1959
Rank Cardinal-priest
Born February 18, 1889
Died February 15, 1962 Rome, Italy
Buried Fargo, North Dakota
Denomination Roman Catholic
Aloisius Joseph Muench was an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as Bishop of Fargo from 1935 to 1959, and as Apostolic Nuncio to Germany from 1951 to 1959. He was elevated to the cardinalate in 1959.
Muench was the most powerful American Catholic and Vatican representative in Allied-occupied Germany and subsequently in West Germany from 1946 to 1959 as the liaison between the U.S. Office of Military Government and the German Catholic Church in the American occupation zone (1946–1949), Pope Pius XII's apostolic visitor to Germany (1946–1947), the Vatican relief officer in Kronberg im Taunus, Germany (1947–1949), regent in Kronberg (1949–1951), as well as nuncio to Germany.[1]
According to Barry's biography, Muench focused on three goals: the Vatican mission for Catholic displaced persons and prisoners of war (funded by American donations brokered by Muench); maintaining the validity of the Reichskonkordat (a 1933 treaty between the Vatican and Germany); and the autonomy of German Catholic schools.[9]
Historian Michael Phayer views Muench's dual appointment as significant: "Muech's position was extraordinary. At one and the same time, he was President Truman's Catholic liaison to OMGUS and Pius XII's personal envoy to zonal Germany. Serving two masters, he listened to Rome, not Washington from the moment of his arrival in Germany".[10]
Muench's pastoral letter One World In Charity was published in installments (in the U.S. first in January 1946, and in occupied Germany one year later).[11] The 10,200 word letter was read from the diocese of Fargo's pulpits weekly on the five Sundays between Shrove Tuesday and Passion Sunday, and then translated into German and printed first in German language newspapers in the United States.[12]
One World appeared in both religious and secular publications alongside statements denying Germans' complicity in the Holocaust, especially the concept of collective guilt.[11] Muench received several letters from German Catholics commenting on One World; they regarded him as one who understood German "suffering"
One World referred to the Allied authorities as "other Hitlers in disguise, who would make of [the German] nation a crawling [Bergen-]Belsen.[14] One World argued that responsibility for the Holocaust lay only with a very few war criminals who had "revived the Mosaic idea of an eye for an eye".[14]
According to Brown-Fleming, Muench's sympathies in his writing matched his actions as one of the most active participants in the Vatican's "postwar clemency campaign on behalf of convicted war criminals".[14]
In at least four instances, Muench became involved in restitution disputes between Catholic Germans and Jews regarding property seized during the war; in each instance, Muench sided with the German Catholics, contacting highly placed German and American officials on their behalf.[16] Muench wrote in a September 1946 letter that "some of these gents exploit the fact that they were in concentration camps for their own benefit, although some were there because of an unsavory past".[17]
Muench was also an opponent of interreligious dialog efforts that included Jews, opposing the organization of chapters of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) and the International Conference of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), among others, in occupied Germany.[19] In a 1948 letter to Carl Zietlow, a Minnesotan Protestant pastor of the NCCJ, Muench described the organization as unneeded because: "regarding anti-Semitism" he had "found very little of it".[19]
According to Phayer, for Muench as well as Pius XII, the "priority was not the survivors of the Holocaust, but the situation of the German Catholic refugees in Eastern Europe who had been driven from their homes at the end of the war. Incredibly, Bishop Muench actually felt that their lot was comparable to that of the Jews during the Holocaust".[20]
In February 1950, Pius XII instructed Muench to write a letter in support of clemency for some convicted German war criminals to General Thomas Hardy, the head of the U.S. Army European Command, who had the final word on all clemency decisions; with his new appointment as papal regent, Muench was to speak as a direct representative of the pope.[22]
As the Vatican urged Muench to press harder against the U.S. authorities, Muench wrote to Undersecretary Montini (future Pope Paul VI) warning him that Rome was on "dangerously thin ice".[25]
Muench often preferred to work behind the scenes; for example, a letter from one of Muench's secretaries provided Father Franz Lovenstein the contact information he had requested "with the understanding, of course, that you are not to use his name in connection with any letters or briefs that will be sent to those gentlemen".[29] For example, in the case of Hans Eisle (former SS, convicted of medical experimentation on prisoners) there is some evidence that Muench's intervention with General Clay in the summer of 1948 resulted in the commutation of Eisle's execution (scheduled for June 1948) and Eisle's eventual release in 1952.[20][30]
Nunciature (1951-1959)Muench's role as apostolic visitor was upgraded to nuncio when the Allied High Commission permitted the Federal Republic to form an independent foreign affairs ministry in March 1951.[31] On March 9, 1951, Pope Pius XII appointed Bishop Muench papal nuncio to Germany with the title of archbishop.[32] Muench viewed it as no small honor to hold the nunciature formerly occupied by Pius XII himself.[20][33]
There is much evidence of genuine camaraderie between Pius XII and Muench. He met Eugenio Pacelli (the future pope) for the first time while Pacelli was nuncio to Bavaria, when Muench visited Munich as a student representative of the Catholic Central Verein of America (CCVA).[2]
Muench mourned the death of Pius XII in October 1958, telling friends that the pope "treated him with the affection and love of a father to his son".
The correspondence between Muench and Pius XII focused almost exclusively on the various opinions shared by the two men, often with great levity. / According to Brown-Fleming, in one private audience between the two in May 1957 Pius XII told Muench a joke about Hitler dying, going to Heaven, and meeting the Old Testament Prophet Moses, who forgives Hitler; Hitler then asks Moses if he set fire to the burning bush himself, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Reichstag fire, which apparently elicited a "big laugh" from Pius XII.
Muench's papers from course of his work in Germany are well preserved. This makes them one of a very few collections of papers from German, American, or Vatican Catholic dignitaries of that time period that are "fully accessible to historians".[40]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloisius_Joseph_Muench?oldid=0
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