The Bread of Life

Corpus Christi, 2020

Readings for Year A: Deuteronomy8:2-16;  I Corinthians 10:16-17; John 6:51-58

This Sunday we celebrate Corpus Christ, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, when we give God thanks for the gift of the Eucharist and, in a special way, for the real presence of the Lord under the appearances of bread and wine. I have been struck in recent weeks by the example of a man for whom in the most difficult of times the Eucharist meant everything and whose life can be a real encouragement to us all to remain faithful in the midst of our own present difficulties. 

 At the end of May, The Tablet published an article about a truly remarkable man. On 2 February 1945, Fr Alfred Delp was executed by the Nazis in Plotzensee prison in Berlin, just 37 years old. The actual reason for his condemnation, he wrote, was “that I happened to be and chose to remain a Jesuit”. For the Nazis, he said, a Jesuit was “a priori an enemy and betrayer of the Reich”.

 Alfred Delp joined the Jesuits in 1926 and was ordained in 1937. In 1941, he became pastor of St George’s church in Munich  where he secretly helped Jews escaping to Switzerland. When the Nazis produced a propaganda film about their enforced euthanasia of the handicapped, Delp denounced the policy from his pulpit. A member of the Kreisau Circle which planned for the future of Germany after the defeat of Nazism,  Delp was arrested in late 1944 and was transferred to Berlin where he was tortured by the Gestapo. He was accused of being a party to the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, a charge of which he was later acquitted.

 When in prison, friends and parishioners from Munich smuggled in pens and paper. Delp kept a diary and wrote letters and a series of reflections on the Advent season which tell of the depth of his faith. Just days before his sham trial took place in January 1945, he wrote these remarkable words, “This experience we are all passing through must surely at least produce one thing, a passionate love for God and a desire for his glory”.

 Where did his remarkable courage come from? There were the prayers of his brother Jesuits, the support of his friends and his parishioners in Munich and the companionship too of his fellow prisoners who would bang on the walls of their cells as a signal that they were beginning to pray. But what is very evident is that it was his devotion to the mass and to the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist that gave him the inspiration and strength he most needed.

 His parishioners would hide in their parcels altar breads and wine and when his hands were unshackled Delp celebrated mass in his cell. After mass on Christmas Eve 1944, he wrote that “somewhere within me the ice has been melted by the prayers for love and for life”. He wrote too of kneeling in prayer in his cell before the Blessed Sacrament. During his trial, he kept the host with him and before the final session at which he was condemned to death, he celebrated mass and took communion for what he thought would be the last time: “I wanted to be prepared”, he wrote.

 His devotion to Christ in the Eucharist clearly bore fruit, as it always does, in his becoming more like Christ, the one “who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many”. Following his execution, his clothes were given to his mother who kept them in a box under her bed until she died in 1967. We can hope that one day the Church will officially recognise the holiness and heroic witness of Alfred Delp and that he will become a saint for whom Christ was truly the bread of his life.

Fr Michael Holman S.J.