Advent from a Prison Cell

The recent (and sadly flawed) movie Bonhoeffer reminds us that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and Lutheran theologian, is rightly revered for his courage in resisting Nazism—a path that eventually cost him his life. But his “politics” derived from, and was secondary to, a much deeper Christian faith. In a November 1943 letter from Berlin’s Tegel Prison, he wrote that “life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent; one waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other . . . [but] the door is shut, and can be opened only from the outside.” That image of Advent burns in the memory. Bonhoeffer makes fruitful reading in any season. His Advent sermons are especially valuable this time of year.  

Yet there’s a voice that’s arguably even more powerful than Bonhoeffer’s on the meaning of Advent. Every December for the last decade, I’ve skimmed through the Advent meditations—collected here and here—of Alfred Delp. This year I read them slowly and methodically, without distraction. They’re riveting.

Born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1907 to a Lutheran father and Catholic mother, Alfred Delp was raised Lutheran but entered the Catholic Church in his teens. He later joined the Society of Jesus and was ordained a priest in 1937. He had a talent for scholarship and a keen interest in Catholic social teaching and history. He served at Stimmen der Zeit, the German Jesuit periodical, until the Hitler regime shut it down. He was then posted as a pastor near Munich, where—like Bonhoeffer—he helped Jews flee the country. A vigorous critic of National Socialism, Delp became (with the approval of his Jesuit superior) a member of the Kreisau Circle, a group of influential regime opponents. Circle members opposed tyrannicide. Instead, they sought to lay the groundwork for a new Germany shaped by Christian humanism after the inevitable Nazi defeat.  

The Kreisau Circle had no role in the July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life. But its members—including Fr. Delp—were arrested along with hundreds of others in its aftermath. It’s worth noting that Delp was warned to go into hiding by his superior shortly before being detained. He refused and stayed to perform his parish duties. Jailed and permanently manacled in his Tegel Prison cell, Delp was singled out for especially harsh treatment as a priest and a Jesuit. It’s unclear whether Delp and Bonhoeffer—confined at the same time in the same facility—ever met. Accused of seeking to “re-Christianize” Germany and undermining National Socialism, Delp was convicted of treason in a subsequent show trial and hanged by the Third Reich on February 2, 1945, two months before Bonhoeffer met the same fate. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered in an effort to erase his memory. In a moment of divine irony, Roland Freisler—the fanatical Nazi judge who condemned Delp to death—himself died the day after Delp was hanged. His courtroom took a direct hit from an American bomb.

In the six months between his arrest and his judicial murder, Alfred Delp wrote a small corpus of astonishing work. As Thomas Merton later observed, “[Delp’s] meditations ‘in the face of death’ have a sustained, formidable seriousness unequalled in any spiritual book of our time.” His thoughts on Advent and Christmas, written in the midst of relentless Allied bombing, looming German defeat, and the anxiety of a pending kangaroo court trial, are both profound and deeply moving; a mix of raw clarity, beauty, and inexplicable joy.

From his cell exactly eighty years ago this month, Delp wrote that a true Advent spirit has nothing to do with sentimental nostalgia or superficial pieties. Rather, it’s “a time of being deeply shaken, so that man will wake up” to his real identity, to his God-given dignity and purpose. It’s a time for each of us to examine ourselves and the world with radical candor; a time to renounce the arrogance, the distractions, the delusions of power and personal sovereignty with which “man is always deceiving himself.” Only in such a way can we open ourselves to the real joy of Christmas, to the birth of the One who quite literally saves us. Delp stressed that

Being shaken awake is entirely appropriate to thoughts and experiences of Advent. But at the same time there is much more to Advent than this. The shaking is what sets up the secret blessedness of this season and enkindles the inner light in our hearts, so Advent will be blessed with the promises of the Lord. The shaking, the awakening—with these, life . . . becomes capable of Advent. It is precisely in the severity of this awakening, in the helplessness of [our] coming to consciousness, in the wretchedness of experiencing our limitations, that the golden threads running between heaven and earth during this season reach us; the threads that give the world a hint of the abundance to which it is called, the abundance of which it is capable.

In the final few days before his death, as he awaited execution, Delp wrote that

I will do what I so often did with my fettered hands and what I will gladly do again and again as long as I have a breath left: I will give my blessing. I will bless this land and the people; I will bless the Church and pray that her fountains may flow again fresher and more freely; I will bless all those who have believed in me and trusted me, all those that I have wronged and all those who have been good to me—often too good. . . . May God shield you all. I ask for your prayers. And I will do my best to catch up, on the other side, with all that I have left undone here on earth. Towards noon I will celebrate Mass [in my cell] once more, and then in God’s name, take the road under his providence and guidance.

A column like this one must finally fail in its purpose because it cannot do justice to the man, his life, or his writing. But in the time remaining to us in Advent 2024, we can at least choose to use that time well. Read Alfred Delp.