Woman who defied Hitler was in her conscience inspired by a saint

04-06-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

The White Rose (German: Weiße Rose) was a non-violent, intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany which was led by five students and one professor at the University of Munich: Willi Graf, Kurt Huber, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl. The group conducted an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign that called for active opposition to the Nazi regime.

Cardinal John Henry Newman (now St. John Henry Newman) was an inspiration of Germany's greatest heroine in defying Adolf Hitler, scholars have claimed. New documents unearthed by German academics have revealed that the writings of the 19th-century English theologian were a direct influence on Sophie Scholl, who was beheaded for circulating leaflets urging students at Munich University to revolt against Nazi terror. Scholl, a student who was 21 at the time of her death in February 1943, is a legend in Germany, with two films made about her life and more than 190 schools named after her. But behind her heroism was the "theology of conscience" expounded by Cardinal Newman, according to Professor Günther Biemer, the leading German interpreter of Newman, and Jakob Knab, an expert on the life of Sophie Scholl. Correspondence between Scholl and her boyfriend, Fritz Hartnagel, a German army officer, showed she gave two volumes of Newman's sermons to him, when he deployed to the eastern front in May 1942.

On arriving in the town of Mariupol, Russia, Hartnagel saw corpses of Soviet soldiers who had been shot by their German guards and began to hear reports of mass killings of local Jews. He later wrote to Scholl to say that reading Newman's words in such an awful place were like tasting "drops of precious wine.” “What a fallacy it is to take nature as our model for our actions and to describe its cruelty as 'great'," he said in a letter of July 1942. "But we know by whom we were created and that we stand in a relationship of moral obligation to our creator. Conscience gives us the capacity to distinguish between good and evil." Mr. Knab has identified Hartnagel's words as being taken verbatim from a sermon given by Newman called "The Testimony of Conscience”. Newman taught that conscience was an echo of the voice of God enlightening each person to moral truth in concrete situations. Christians, he argued, had a duty to obey a good conscience over and above all other considerations.

Lieutenant Hartnagel's convictions later led him to protest the mass murders of the Jews. On January 22, 1943, he was evacuated on the last plane out of Stalingrad before the city fell to the Russians in a battle that would mark a turning point in the war. But by the time he returned to Germany, Sophie was dead, executed along with Hans and her friend, Christoph Probst, in Stadelheim Prison, Munich, after making her own protest against Hitler's tyranny. Under questioning from the Gestapo Scholl said she had been compelled by her Christian conscience to peacefully oppose Nazism. Sophie and Hans both asked to be received into the Catholic Church an hour before they were executed but were dissuaded by their pastor who argued that such a decision would upset their mother, a Lutheran lay-preacher.

Sophie, a Lutheran, was introduced to the works of Newman by a scholar called Theodor Haecker, who had written to the Birmingham Oratory in 1920 asking for copies of Newman's work, which he wanted to translate into German. On reading Newman, Haecker converted to Catholicism, and he later became such an outspoken critic of Nazism, that he was forbidden to publish his work by the regime. Early in the Second World War he became a good friend of the Scholls and a direct inspiration of the White Rose movement, which opposed Nazism by circulating thousands of leaflets telling German Christians that they had a "moral duty" to rise up against Hitler, the "messenger of Anti-Christ”. The movement, made up mostly of German students, also condemned the persecution of the Jews in 1942 - the year Hitler began to implement the Final Solution - as the "most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history St. John Henry Newman believed conscience was "sovereign" but not "autonomous"." The conscience is the spokesman not of the individual personality or temperament but of God," he said. (END)

Telling Right from Wrong

It’s not uncommon to hear people, including unfortunately some Catholics, who approach morality from a strictly personal viewpoint: “I’ll decide what’s right and wrong for me” or “The Church can’t tell me what to do. I decide according to my own conscience.” The Conference of Catholic Bishops of Ireland years ago published a masterful summary of Catholic teaching about telling right from wrong. These principles of Catholic teaching follow below:

Morality deals with the quality of human actions after deliberation and free will/choice. These actions can be good or bad. Conscience is the voice of God echoing in the heart of each person, prompting the person to do good and avoid evil. It judges the quality of our action and is helped by the virtue of prudence. Because we are all wounded by sin, original sin and personal sin, knowledge of what is right and wrong and actually doing what is right cannot be achieved without personal struggle or help from outside. Our will is weak and prone to sin. Morality is not simply personal. We often hear the cliché about “consenting adults in the privacy of the home” not affecting the world at large. This is nonsense. Human society is a spiritual reality and is affected by the good or bad decisions of those who make up society.

The principles of right and wrong are objective, universal, and indivisible. They are to be always found in all peoples though not practiced by all. (Rom 1:18). They are insights into the requirements of our humanity, of conscience, which measure and guide the actions of individuals and communities. They constitute what pre-Christian philosophers called the natural law, and they are definitively articulated, summarized, and clarified in the Ten Commandments. (Ex 20:2-7: Deut. 5:6-21)

Christian morality is about Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever. It concerns our becoming Christ-like and acting in a Christ-like manner. It is concerned with ultimate happiness in the life of heaven. Christ has established His Church to continue His work until the end of time and to teach with authority in His Name. The moral teachings of the Church in Christ’s Name, as articulated by the Church’s teaching authority, the Pope and the bishops in union with him, are directed to the individual consciences of all Christians and humanity in general. It is not a set of rules for Catholics. It is the articulated way of living in Christ which Catholics accept as coming from the Lord.

We are created in a certain way as rational beings composed of body and soul. When we act in accord with the way God created us this is good. When we act against the way God created us this is bad. When we sin, we act against ourselves and it’s not simply about a set of rules. God tells us to avoid certain behavior because it will harm us and cause harm to others.

There is a false understanding of conscience as though conscience is the source of what’s right and wrong and can invent moral principles. Conscience is the faculty to decide what to do according to God. It does not determine what is good or evil. God determines this.