Michael von Faulhaber

Michael von Faulhaber (born March 5, 1869, Heidenfeld, Bavaria [now in Germany]—died June 12, 1952, Munich, W.Ger.) was a German cardinal and archbishop of Munich who became a prominent opponent of the Nazis.

Educated at Rome, Faulhaber was ordained in 1892. He taught at the German universities of Würzburg (1899–1903) and Strassburg (1903–11), subsequently serving as bishop of Speyer (1911–17) and archbishop of Munich and Freising (1917–52). He was created a cardinal in 1921.

Repelled by Nazi totalitarianism, neopaganism, and racism, Faulhaber contributed to the failure of Hitler’s Munich Putsch (1923), an attempt to oppose the Weimar Republic with a national revolution. During the Nazi regime he delivered his famous sermons entitled Judaism, Christianity, and Germany (translated in 1934), which emphasized the Jewish background of Christianity and pointed out that the teachings of the New Testament logically followed those of the Old. He further emphasized that the German tribes had become civilized only after Christianization and asserted that Christian values were fundamental to German culture. Throughout his sermons until the collapse (1945) of the Third Reich, Faulhaber vigorously criticized Nazism, despite governmental opposition. Attempts on his life were made in 1934 and in 1938. He worked with American occupation forces after the war, and he received the West German Republic’s highest award, the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit.

Among his other published works is Die Sittenlehre des Evangeliums (1936; “The Moral Teachings of the Gospels”).