Dear Friends,
Thank you once again for your cards, emails, texts, and practical thoughtfulness during CJs and my recent medical convalescences. As they say today, we did not have this on our bingo cards for 2022!
However, during this time, I’ve enjoyed building on threads from the fall sabbatical and one way that I’ve done this is through reading. Among the books related in some manner to what CJ and I experienced this fall, are two related to the Nazi-era theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Having read UVA professor Charles Marsh’s book on the Civil Rights movement in the south, I picked up his biography of Bonhoeffer titled Strange Glory. This led me to a follow-up book with the intriguing title, Keys to Bonhoeffer’s Haus by Laura M. Fabrycky. Both are excellent and highly recommended if you would like to learn more about this agonizing period in 20th century history.
This October our paths happen to cross that of Bonhoeffer when we hiked from Oberammergau to Ettal Abby one rainy morning. We learned that Bonhoeffer spent several months at the Abby as he was sorting out his response to the collapse of the church in Nazi Germany. The Abby provided time for writing, daily prayer, letter writing, and conversation with the monks. Out of this period would come Bonhoeffer’s work Ethics, published posthumously in 1949 by his friend Eberhard Bethge.
As we made our way around the Abby, we were struck by a bust in the chapel of another figure from the same period. This was of Fr. Rupert Mayer, SJ. This Bavarian Jesuit priest, himself an opponent of Adolph Hitler, was banished by the authorities to Ettal Abby where he lived until the war’s end in 1945. He led a remarkable life, though he did not carry the theological weight of his contemporary, Bonhoeffer. In 1995, Pope John Paul II beatified Mayer, giving him the title Blessed, a few stops short of sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. (An interesting aside, the Girls School chapel at Regis High School in Parker is named The Blessed Rupert Mayer Chapel.)
I would like to share with you about Mayer’s life from what I’ve learned during this period of my own “forced retreat” and convalescence here at home.
To that end, I invite you to the Growing Faith adult class on Sunday, January 15 at 9:15 in the parish hall. You will learn the details of Mayer’s remarkable life and witness during a time of crisis in church and society, but be prompted as well to reflect on our own witness to Christ.