Bl. Clemens August Graf von Galen

Clemens August von Galen was born in 1878 at Dinklage Castle in northern Germany, the eleventh of thirteen children in an old noble family. He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Münster in 1904 and spent most of the next twenty-three years in working-class parishes in Berlin, where people remembered him for looking after the poor.

He became Bishop of Münster in 1933, the year Hitler took power. From the pulpit he challenged the Nazi state openly. In three sermons in the summer of 1941 he condemned the state's confiscation of Church property and the secret killing of disabled people under the so-called euthanasia program. He became known as the "Lion of Münster."

Pius XII made him a cardinal in early 1946. He died a few weeks later, on March 22, 1946. Benedict XVI's representative beatified him in 2005.

Clemens August Graf von Galen was beatified in 2005.

Beatification allows public veneration, usually in a particular region or religious family. Canonization extends it to the whole Church.