God’s Law

by Albert Hartl

 

Publisher’s Introduction

 

God’s Law is translated from the Third Reich original Das Gesetz Gottes. It was publised in 1940 by Nordland Verlarg, the publisher of many significant SS works.

 

The author, SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Hartl, wrote under pseudonym Anton Holzner. Das Gesetz Gottes was his third book.

 

Hartl was a former Catholic priest who left the priesthood and the church, and became an SS officer. His works present a non-Christian religious perspective.

 

 

Original Introduction

 

Providence rules over the fate of people and folks.

 

This affirmation of a higher power should stand at the beginning of this book.

 

Countless Germans - laymen, priests and monks – have waged the most difficult inner and outer struggles for their simple belief in a God since natural German faith has been supplanted by foreign missionaries.

 

Millions of people struggle today for the Almighty and his laws. “God’s Law” reports of this.

 

This account has grown from my own personal experience and the same experiences of more than a dozen friends - former Catholic priests and monks – which correspond to reality in their overall result and in their individual features. My wife, who stood at my side in building a new world, also participated in the composition of this publication.

 

Natural faith incorporates the highest moral responsible within it. From that arose the obligation to publish this book.

 

 

Part One

 

For a child, God manifests himself in the works of creation and in father and mother.

 

Plain, natural and free are child’s faith and child’s piety.

 

1.

 

Everybody is very proud of Peter. In games, he is always the winner. When it’s about getting into mischief, he is always their ringleader. Often, very often, he then silently suffers the blows for all, that is why they often call him “prince”.

 

The grownups in the village also like him a lot; they find that he is different from other children. When he, wearing his little sailor’s jacket, clenching his fists somewhat defiantly in his pants pockets, comes along the path bare foot, they cannot help but to say a right friendly word to him.

 

But the friendliness is not one-sided, quite the opposite. There is actually nobody in the village whom Peter does not know, there is actually nothing that he does not like infinitely.

 

The houses in the village, the people, the horses of the priest, the cows of Prozenbauer, the little creek, the meadows and fields, all that belongs to Peter’s child’s world. It is small in space, but it offers him so much breadth and size than he cannot imagine it any prettier.

 

2.

 

Peter Schaedl’s home village lies in the Bavarian mountains. The priest, the teacher, the backer and the butcher live in the few houses. A smithy and several farmyards also belong to it. This little village enjoys a great reputation; it has the reputation of a splendid, model village, because it has the highest church tower far and wide. The mountain upon which it lies is not unknown. The people in the valley say that the residents there have the thickest skulls. The story might have some truth in it, but up in the country one does not speak of it.

 

In any case, all kinds of stubbornness is already showing itself in Peter’s little head. When the maid orders him to do this or that, and the lad does not like it, then he simply throws himself to the ground, if possible on his back, in order to protect the most sensitive part of all children. But the maid also sees with the same aggravation that the teacher’s son and the priest’s dog are the most impertinent ones in the village.

 

Often when Peter, on assignment from his father, must take a letter in the most severe winter to a peasant in another town and he has hardly left the village, he positions himself on the snow-swept country road and stomps and tramps his feet, and from pure rage he shouts very loudly against the sharpest wind. But by the time he has reached the peasant, he has long since reconciled with himself; then so much good spirit and joyfulness again laughs from his little heart that he is not allowed to leave again until he has eaten some nice, thick honey bread. On the way home a peasant often comes with a sleigh or wagon, then Peter can steer the horses.

 

When the father learns of Peter’s defiance, he always says the same words to him. With a serious wrinkle on his brow, he says: “Thick-head”, or “You young rogue, you”. But Peter senses in the words, next to the seriousness, simultaneously a certain pride of the father, and hence he remains like he is.

 

3.

 

In school Peter is one of those who always sit up front in the first row. Why, he does not know himself; he actually does nothing for it.

 

Often, a small troop of boys rushes into the schoolroom. On their roaming they have forgotten that they only have a short recess, until suddenly their conscience tears them from play and admonishes them of their duty. Many a peasant then sees a child racing round the corner of the school building shaking its head. Tense and a little afraid, they stand in the classroom. Things were never any different.

 

Peter stands in their middle and accepts the punishment full of calm and ease. He is not especially well-behaved otherwise as well. Just like the other boys, he takes pride in racing through morning prayer, fast and unclear. Boys must not pray so well-behaved as girls; that is Peter’s opinion.

 

Now and then, when Peter and some other boys have to stay after school due to unruliness, the schoolmistress must take the bicycle to the next village, because she also teaches there. When she has then tightly closed the door and hardly left the building, it is always Peter who makes sure that the others, and especially he himself, very quickly leave through the windows unscathed.

 

Once he stood up during class and roguishly said something bad to the schoolmistress. The others laughed slyly full of malicious pleasure. But then he had

to stand in front of the pulpit, present his hand and receive several slaps. But Peter does not let himself be shamed by a young woman, so he goes back to his seat with beaming smile on his face, even if it is hard for him.

 

Never, however, has Peter had to sit with the girls as punishment. He has often reflected why the other boys tolerate that; he would rather ran out of the classroom and never come back...

 

Probably it is his natural talent, which always balances and makes up for everything, so that he is always among the best pupils. When the school administrator once came to the village for an examination, he decided that the boy should immediately skip a grade. But the father strictly countermanded and proscribed that; Peter is unspeakably happy about that.

 

4.

 

When the family has eaten their noon soup, Peter’s path takes him to the smithy. The old man there is so fond of the boy that he is sad, if he does not come. The blacksmith is actually the only one who really knows the boy, as he says. When Peter can barely see over the anvil with his big, brown child’s eyes or watches for hours as the glowing iron is beaten, then he is full of questions and interest for the man’s work. If he does not happen to know much new about the peasant’s cows and pigs, both talk little, but they understand each other well. What the old blacksmith especially treasures in the boy is the roguishness and gaiety on the one side and the seriousness and kindness on the other.

 

One day construction work is done on the smithy. During the noon break, the workers go over to the inn; they drink their beer there. Only one of them stays behind day after day and consumes his meager bread. Peter observes that for some time. Because he knows that the man has many children and that he may hence be so poor, he suddenly runs home in order to fetch one of his self-earned pennies from his savings can. When he has returned to the construction site, he places the money as if he has lost it. He repeats this several times. But one day the man seems to have noticed him doing it, since then Peter has no longer been at the smithy for a long time.

 

5.

 

Peter’s freedom is almost unlimited. In the countryside is common practice anyway that the children are left on their own a lot, since Peter’s father places great value on his children growing up with much freedom and independence.

So each of the children, as well as father and mother, go their own way, all on their own. Nonetheless, the family lives with great agreement and harmony according to the traditional laws of their ancestors.

 

Like grandfather and great-grandfather, Peter’s father as well is a strict teacher. He has silently hoped for two things from his son: that he becomes a good pupil and a good fellow. Already now, in his earliest childhood, the boy seems to fulfill both wishes. More than once he has made it clear to the boy that he must treat him, as a teacher’s son, more strictly in all things, of whatever kind, than any other child in the town. Peter has understood his father in this point as well, just as he also understands his son in all things. Not in the teacher, but indeed in the father, Peter has his very best comrade. He is not treated by him like a small child, rather valued as a good friend and equal. It is not the custom for Peter to show it in outward things, but all the love, all the respect and all the pride that Peter is able to summon up are for his father.

 

Peter’s mother stems from an upright Bavarian family. She is loved by her children such as children can love only their mother. She is a pious woman who has made it her most eminent task to use all human powers to secure for her children a good place in heaven. She was all the happier, when she reached the age of five and, according to custom, had to stand at the priest’s side as acolyte. The father had given his consent, because he did not want to take the joy from the child as well as his wife, and besides, he himself, like all teachers in the village, participates in each mass, because he has to play the organ. Peter himself is happy that he no longer, like earlier and the like the other boys, has to knell at the benches so pious and quiet and pray. He has fun with all the splendid and shining implements which he can wield or, if he – wearing his little red coat with the white pointed hood - must stride to the altar, must swing the incense container or hand the priest the wine. And besides, he finds being an acolyte has all kinds of advantages, for it is the custom that Peter gets 10 cents for every mass; and each New Year, he and the other three acolytes go to the church caretaker in order to get the “golden fox”, a gold ten mark coin. Peter then happily returns home with his treasure and saves it well in his saving bag.

 

When now and then a peasant in the village dies, then Peter figures among the big shots. In the afternoon he is then invited to the funeral feast at the farmstead, and according to custom he is owed two half beers. If the little acolyte then comes home so terribly happy and pleased, the mother scolds him in the future he should only take one swallow of beer. But Peter finds beer drinking so nice and interesting, because the adult men do it, and hence he does not like to leave the full glasses standing.

 

6.

 

Among Peter’s most beautiful childhood days is the annual Corpus Christi festival with the procession.

 

Amidst the unbroken, festive bell chiming, everybody gathers around the whole village to participate in the procession. The peasants and peasant women, the girls in white dresses, the boys in blue Sunday pants, the adolescent lads and lasses, clubs and flags and many more people from other villages come along. When the procession leads along paths strewn with aromatic hay and through the waving corn fields, when the sun beams in the clear blue sky and the meadows stand in full flowered splendor, Peter rejoices inside at all the beauty.

 

In the middle of the procession strides the “master” in gold brocade overcoat under a canopy, carrying the monstrance.

 

Peter, who walks directly in front of the priest, forgets what a dignified office he must hold on this day. And although the mother has often told him how he should do it and has given him all the best advice, he does not notice at all whether or not the incense container in his hands swings back and forth.

 

Peter only sees all the splendor, sees the flags wave, sees how the sun reflects in the clan polished helmets of the fire department and in the great trumpets of the band, and how all the implements and flagpole tops shine and glisten. To the right and left of the path lie the many colorful, big and small flowers that the pious people have strewn. And when the long procession of the faithful then turns into the great village street, then the chiming of the church bells mixes with the sounds of the band; then the fire-engine chief, like always at festive occasions, fires the old canon, and the heavy shells resound in a dull roar over all the festivities. Peter wants to shout aloud with joy amidst all the music.

 

When the procession has afterward dispersed, the church bells have made their last swings and Peter’s mass garment already hangs again in the closet, he still stands a long time on the path, gathers up many colorful flowers, is still amazed here and there at all the beautifully dressed people who are on the way home, and is overjoyed with all the festive events.

 

7.

 

Peter should be right pious and well-behaved toward the priest, for he is the one who represents dear God on earth, and he is also the one, who will one day get for Peter a right pretty place in heaven, perhaps right next to dear God; that is what his mother tells him. Full of satisfaction, she observes that the churchyard is one of the boy’s favorite places to stay. Peter likes to be there, for the servants let him harness the oxen, they take him into the field and he is allowed to feed the horses.

 

When Peter meets the priest, he greets him friendly, just like his mother has told him, and just like the other children and the big people also do.

 

He has considered whether we would also actually like to be priest one day, for he is the mightiest, the people usually only say “sir” to him, and they are devoted to him and pay homage to him. What he preaches, is the truth, what he does, is pious, and want he wants, happens. Besides, things never go badly for him, he has plenty to eat and to drink and has the most land and cattle in the village. Peter can only image the king more powerful, but he is so far away that he can form no real picture of him.

 

8.

 

Although the teacher’s boy has spent a large portion of his childhood in the sphere of the priest, he still lives with a very great inner distance from him. As well as he understands the blacksmith and as much as he likes the Loidl and Gosch peasants, as much as he likes the peasant woman in the other town as well, so alien to him remains the priest from the start. Perhaps the reason is that the priest and the teacher of the village are so very much different, and Peter knows that they have had many a quarrel. Indeed, that does not manifest itself to him in daily life, but various events let him surmise it and feel it unconsciously.

 

Peter does not know that his mother is a pretty young woman, and if almost daily all kinds of nice things from the rectory are delivered to the teacher’s house, he finds that wonderful and does not think anything of it. But one time he is present, when the father comes home at noon and is very unhappy to find that a good goose from “over there” again lies on the table.

 

The son has a special, silent admiration for his father in one certain point. The teacher Schaedl does not go to confession in the village; for this purpose, he travels once a year to the big city, and he does that for his wife’s sake. Peter only knows that the father comes home on that day with many packages, what else he does in the city, he does not ask.

 

At the outbreak of the great war, the priest spoke of the Russians, who pass through the country burning and pillaging, and said that the people should build caves, take everything along and pray for God’s mercy. Then it was teacher Schaedl who called the people together and filled them with courage and enthusiasm, when he convinced them of the powerful force that protects the borders. And when they all went home bravely and happily, Peter was again very proud that he, too, is one of the Schaedls.

 

Severe storms cross over the heights and nearby villages almost every evening after the summer heat of the high summer days. The mountain creeks surge and churn into the valley, storms race across the land, and hail pelts the fields.

 

On such evenings, Peter stands in front of the door, looks at the darting lightning and hears the crashing thunder, or he stands on the bridge, when the last thunder rolls, and gazes long into the creek’s dirty torrent.

 

But one night, one of the great buildings in the village, struck by lightning, is suddenly on fire. The teacher, like many times already, is the first who comes to help. While he saves people and property at the risk of his own life, and the alarm bells call the surrounding peasants to help, and women and children have assembled in the rectory and pray for support and assistance. But Peter is not among them. Barely comprehending the tremendous power of the forces of nature, he stands on the path in reverence before his father’s action, all alone, amidst the great confusion. All around them there is haste, racing, fetching, bringing, shouting, extinguishing.

 

Peter hears and sees nothing of all that. He only feels the nearness of the mighty fire; inwardly excited and moved, his gaze follows the father, continually exposed to death by fire, working relentlessly with concentrated will.

 

Then his gaze turns toward the sky, which stands out black and threatening against the dark red, glowing ball of fire. For a long time he looks back and forth between sky and earth. His gaze is fixed by the mighty event of the huge fire and then again by the clouds in the sky, which race past like great rags, whipped by the sweeping storm. When Peter then sees the hurrying people, the fleeing cattle, and between all them his father, and then again the broad plain of the fields and forests suddenly dipped into a bright light of lightning, as the rain pours down into the large puddle around him, he is suddenly completely seized. Strange, uncanny, magnificent and wonderful at the same time, a sudden realization comes to the boy.

 

Peter feels that sun, rain, storm, hail, lightning and thunder, that snow and ice are sent by dear God. Now he knows that grass and flowers, that forests and forests, that animals and people are works of his creation, that courage and cowardice, that nobility and baseness, hatred and love, that good and evil are the supreme laws that he gave man.

 

 

Part Two

 

The church world tempts the human child with its strangeness and its splendor. Healthy natures rebel against its unnaturalness and its compulsion of soul.

 

1.

 

“Schaedl, to the directorate!” a shrill voice suddenly shrieks through the study hall, where 200 cloister students, standing behind pulpits, have just engrossed themselves into their books.

 

What is hidden behind these words, Peter cannot yet surmise. It cannot be anything good, if he has to go to the directorate, especially since he was accompanied the whole day by an unsure, fearful feeling. In the belief that one of his boyhood pranks will again come up for discussion, he knocks on the door. “Praised be Jesus Christ” – “In eternity, amen”, comes the reply of the strict director.

 

“Schaedl, I have to inform you that your father has died...”

 

Moments pass before little Peter comprehends the meaning of the words. Father dead? – His big brown eyes look desperately at the face of the director for a soothing word. Perhaps the father is very, very ill – but dead? – Father dead? – Then Peter’s whole numbness dissolves into a great sobbing that shakes his little body. He still hears from the director that he should pray in the chapel instead of howling, and then everything is just like a dream to him.

 

The full reality first comes to him the next day, when he is on the way from the train station to his home village. The path sees longer to him than ever before. His father is so far away from him. He should never see him again, should never hear him speak again, never again be with him in the garden? – They would no longer look together at the pictures from father’s big chest, and he would no longer have any, any comrade?

 

Peter had not seen his father for two years. Back then, the teacher had gone to the great war. In order to know the boy well cared for, according to the wish of his pious wife, he had sent him to the famous cloister school famous far and wide. In Russia’s trenches, however, the father had contracted an illness, and now he had died from it. The burial is the next day. The whole community has come. All the teachers of the surroundings are there. The peasants have come, and also all the clubs with flags are present. Nobody from the area far and wide has allowed himself to be prevented from paying his final respects to the teacher. The procession of mourners is so long that it cannot take the closed path to the cemetery. They walk around the whole village, such as is otherwise customary only holidays. Although the women cry and the men, in sincere grief, now and then hold their hand over their eyes, Peter looks straight ahead and upright. As the eldest son, he walks directly behind the coffin. He is filled with endless pride, for they carry the father to the grave as if in a triumphant procession. Peter now feels very close to him, for him, the father will live on. He cannot imagine that the words about hell and hell fire, which he always had to memorize in the cloister school, should apply to the father; he is quite certainly not dependent on prayers of intercession and requiems, for he has died like many other soldiers who fell in the great war for their Germany. Peter now knows it quite certainly, he wants to be like his father; his father will be his example, for his whole life.

 

After the burial, Peter is reprimanded by his aunt, because he has not cried enough in the procession, but the grandmother takes him under her protection. “Peter is still a child and does not know what death means”, she says. Then Peter goes to his mother again and asks to take him from the cloister school. But her fate has bond her even more tightly to her faith, she has become even more pious, and her will is that Peter become a clergyman.

 

The same day, the boy leaves the home village. The path is long and difficult, but he memorizes it well and will never forget it. He sees every flower, every stalk, all the little animals on the ground, the fields, meadows and forests and the creek, his little creek, which winds past his father’s house.

 

Now and then, peasant folk encounter him on the path; they want to go up to him and comfort him; but Peter evades them, they have all become so strange to him, as if he had never had anything to do with them. An endless grief and the feeling of complete abandonment overcome him, and still, he does not want to see the people. Suddenly, he starts to run off the path into the fields, ever faster, similar to a hunted animal. He sees the village lying far behind him, and far behind as well does he leave his freedom and his childhood.

 

2.

 

Peter cannot come to like the daily cloister routine at all. He is accustomed to shaping his day anew with much manifoldness again and again. But here, each day initially seems the same to him without any variation.

 

Every morning at 5, the father on duty enters the sleeping hall in order to rip the warm blankets from any of the boys who have not jumped out of bed at the first ring signal.

 

Peter is always the first outside, because he is already long awake. Among 50 boys in one sleeping hall, even early in the morning he always finds a few ready for mischief. Even if some still dream fast asleep, and others energetically ask for quiet, for him that is no reason to break off the fun, for first they must soon get up anyway, and besides that, the chapel soon presents ample opportunity to doze off half asleep.

 

One quickly slips into the long pants legs, the black jackets, the shoes and socks, and then it is off to the house chapel for morning prayer. if any care burdens the boy’s heart, it is quickly entrusted to dear God in a short request and afterward all cloister pupils chant the Latin morning prayer while kneeling for the duration of a quarter hour at the prayer bench, the Latin morning prayer.

 

After morning wash comes preparation in the study hall for the instruction, and afterward, celebration of the mass assembles the whole horde of boys again in the house chapel. By breakfast Peter has so much empty space in his stomach that he almost has no time at all to make use of the day’s first period of allowed talking. Peter stuffs everything he can into his mouth, as if he were afraid that it could still be taken away from him. He has often observed boys go without the coffee and black bread. At first, he felt sincere sympathy at the sight of them, thinking they were ill. But now they are dummies in his eyes, because he knows that they only do that as a sign of their special piety and hence also go to the chapel to pray before class. He would prefer a thousand-fold more to devour their rations than to be so pious just once.

 

In class, Peter is not a bad pupil, but there are only a few subjects that he takes on with full enthusiasm. Father Canisius, the mathematician, and Father Richard, the natural scientist, impress the boy as well as Father Gregor, who knows so much in history class, and Father Uto, who can play the violin so beautifully.

 

All the other monks with whom he has class, Peter does not like very much; he can never get along well with them. His fresh and lively manner leads to constant admonishments from his teachers, against whom the young pupil, however, in his children’s bravado and gaiety, resists incessantly.

 

3.

 

“Schaedl, get out!” roars Father Josef, if he catches cloister pupil Schaedl at any “crime”. When Peter has then left the school bench, the father works over the boy’s round cheeks with a mixture of tender pats and slaps.

 

One time the pupils are supposed to write an essay. Peter chews on the pen- holder and gazes contentedly out of the classroom window. His thoughts go from the tall tress and groomed lawn of the cloister park to the meadows and forests of his homeland. Then a great reverence suddenly overcomes him, and he must get a grip on himself, so that he does not act like many a new lad who, when he awakens from his pretty dream in the morning, secretly cries in his pillow out of pure home-sickness or calls for his mother.

 

With measured, silent steps, his head lowered over a prayer book, Father Korbinian has meanwhile probably already ended his tenth round through the rows of pupil benches when he suddenly, reaching Peter’s bench, stops in front of it for a few short minutes without any movement and then suddenly, abruptly and furiously rips out a lock of his hair. Afterward, he carefully puts the boy’s hair into his book and goes on. He has already observed the dreaming boy for a long time, and he wants to punish him this way. Peter looks at the monk in disbelief. Such a thing has never before happened to him; he knows well that back home the boys have a lot of fun among themselves by pulling out the other’s hair, and that afterward there is always a big brawl, but the monk knows perfectly well that he cannot start a brawl with him, and this cannot be a game, either...

 

Almost desperately, he looks at the priest again. But when he continues his walk as self-evident, as if all that were nothing at all, Peter would like most to cry, to cry without end. Never before had he felt like that.

 

He remembers that he had often been punished by his father as well, and when he got a hard spanking, he clenched his teeth so that it would not hurt, but he had never cried.

 

Although the monk’s behavior seemed strangely odd and inexplicable to Peter, Peter controls himself now as well and does not cry. Awakened from his dream, he endeavors to finish his essay. After Father Korbinian has walked around for a long time praying piously, he returns to Peter’s seat and throws the hair down in front of the lad with the words: “Here is your hair. I don’t keep other people’s property.”

 

After the daily instruction, the pupils pass through the long cloister halls on the way to prayer. Peter, still moved and excited by the preceding event, does not keep step with the lad ahead of him. For that, the supervising father orders him to fast at lunch.

 

For that meal, the boy is only allowed to quickly consume a bowl of soup, he must renounce the main course in favor of a well-behaved boy. During the first part of the meal, there is a reading aloud from a pious book, and while the other boys can afterward talk, Peter must kneel in a corner of the dining room and tell his beads.

 

Although Peter can quickly forget this kind of punishment and reprimand, and they impress themselves on him over time, the yearning for youthful deed and pranks again and again takes hold of him.

 

When all the 200 boys of the cloister school must form a long double-line after the noon meal, in order to be “driven to stroll” for half an hour, as it is called in the pupil’s jargon, when the sun shines, the birds sing and the sky is so blue, then it is most difficult for Peter to be good. He often has the burning wish to climb one of the park’s tall trees, like he always did at home, if he felt like it. Once, out of sheer joy at the delightful thought, an impertinent whistle suddenly erupts from him. Because he actually did not think anything about it, he gives a friendly smile to Father Benedict rushing toward him. But while he walks next to the little sinner, he takes his earlobes between his fingers and twists, squeezes and pinches them around for minutes until they are fire-red. Peter clenches his little fists, he is boiling with rage and a hatred against this man that he would like most of all to go at him with his fists. But Peter is powerless against this monk. He does not understand why the monk takes such joy in tormenting him... And while the other pupils hardly notice the whole thing, thick tears of rage and pain roll down the boy’s cheeks. But the more Peter expresses his rage, and the cooler the monk’s smiles, the more firmly does he pummel the child’s ear between his fingers.

 

The cloister pupils have free time in the afternoon, during which they may read, draw, write or paint. Father Franz, from whose nose drops of tobacco constantly run, usually has supervision in the large reading hall.

 

Already on the first day, when Peter had barely passed his entrance examination, Peter had gotten into a fight with another little test-taker, and as both youngsters rolled on the floor of the cloister hall, it was Father Peter who came along. Since that day, he has never taken his eye off Peter, and never fails to observe him suspiciously. If Peter breaks the holy silence or otherwise does something not allowed, Father Peter comes, and Peter must take not just one, rather several pinches of strong tobacco and stuff it into his nose. But the monk shakes with laughter and delight when the strong tobacco brings tears to the boy’s eyes.

 

What Peter likes least of all is that all of them, after there was already class in the morning and afternoon, must do their home work in the great study hall, standing behind pulpits. Often, when he is all too bored and tired, he very quietly calls one of his fellow pupils to the side, they give each other signs, hide themselves behind the back of the boy ahead and enter a pleasant conversation. “Schaedl to the pillar” resounds almost every other day, and then Peter, if he was not good, must walk, his books under arm, to the large pillar in the middle of the hall, kneel there and learn his Latin for the remainder of the class.

 

But Peter’s naughtiness is also often punished with beatings. If he often does not rightly know why he is punished, that is especially true for the blows he receives from Father Konrad.

 

That Father is known to have his favorites among the cloister boys. In the beginning, he also showed a lively interest in Peter. He gave him the pet name “Schnauzerl”, gave him a lot of sugar candy and was always especially nice to him.

 

One day Peter is supposed to go to the Father’s room and fetch himself some chocolate. When Peter stands in the room and watches intently to see what nice thing the Father will give him, he suddenly grabs the boy and puts him on his lap. For Peter, that is terribly uncomfortable. At home he only rarely was allowed to sit on even his father’s lap, and that was when he still wore a skirt and wax apron and still had his finger in his mouth. Because Peter is not accustomed to it, he quickly slides off the Father’s lap and goes through the door. Since that day, however, Father Konrad is as if transformed, almost daily he reprimands or hits the boy.

 

Even the worst punishment that exists in the cloister is not spared Peter. A walk to the village, allowed in his view, brings it to him. That he must spend half a day in a dark room with bread and water does not bother him particularly, but he is upset that the punishment is supposed to result in a bad note in his record.

 

Peter goes to the director and wants to complain. He had always been allowed to say anything he was thinking to his teacher in the village school, and so he now presents his case to the director as well without any concern. The well-meant explanation of the honorable monk is followed by Peter’s counter-explanation. Argument and counter-argument from oldster and boy now collide, until he can only save himself from the thick-skull by pushing him out the door with the words, “You scoundrel, now get out of here!” But for Peter that is no reason to go. He remains a while in front of the door of the feared director, knocks again and then enters the room anew with the words: “Director, sir, I still do not understand the punishment”. The man resorts to kindness. With much patience, like a kindly old father, he quite calmly explains the situation to the boy, and Peter’s defiance is thereby gradually broken.

 

Peter does indeed have respect for most of the cloister’s monks, because they are his teachers, but not a genuine reverence toward them, and although many of them have applied their special methods of punishment to him daily, he no longer has any pronounced fear of them. After a special incident, he downright afraid of only the raging fury of Father Hieronymus.

 

It is the last day before the start of vacation. Peter Schaedl, Bruno Stadler and Friedel Sachs were naughty and as punishment had to kneel on the floor before Father Hieronymus. Full of rage, he walked back and forth repeatedly, scolding. Peter does not feel much affected by the hefty curses, he thinks about being on vacation already the next day.

 

With big, energetic steps, arms crossed on the back, the monk crosses the room, scolding incessantly. The indifferent behavior of the boys angers him greatly. Full of outrage, he steps toward the boy being punished kneeling in front of him: “You scoundrel, you, you probably don’t care, if you’re being punished. Well, just wait, I’ll help you”, and with these words be gives the boy such a hard blow to the face that he almost loses his balance. Peter remembers he only received such a blow just once, perhaps, from his father. Peter’s face still glows like fire, and his head spins, as an unwanted tear rolls down his cheek.

 

“What, and then howl right off and be sensitive? “ the Father almost oversteps himself and, in rage, lets the boy feel some more hard blows. Peter swallows the bitter tears and stares ahead with a dark gaze. Father Hieronymus does not like it that the boy still expresses his defiance and thick-headedness, he should kneel on the floor and be humble. Panting in the room, totally enraged without any taming, he roars again: “So, he still wants to be obstinate, I will drive that out of you!”

 

Under the constantly renewed slaps and blows, Peter’s rage gradually recedes, he becomes ever more indifferent to the situation, he automatically does what the monk demands of him.

 

But Peter has experienced one thing that day, something that had until then always been alien to him and that he had never felt, he has learned to hate a person in the bottom of his heart and with all his strength.

 

4.

 

As the cloister school’s pupil, Peter may indeed only spend his vacations at home in his black seminary uniform, and although he feels the homeland so totally differently than before, the freedom that he enjoys, full of memory of his earliest childhood, still has a redeeming and happy effect on him.

 

When Peter is back in the cloister school, Peter sets aside some of the money that his mother gave him and only turns in some of it.

 

Because neither his mother, to whom he has constantly made it clear that in the long-run life in the cloister school is unbearable for him, nor any of the monks or his comrades understand him, he quietly hatches a plan, and one day he escapes through the back door of the kitchen, where entry is forbidden even to the monks, to say nothing of the pupils, to freedom and runs off.

 

But the joy suddenly and abruptly comes to an end when a hand snares Peter’s collar from behind and does not let go of him. A Father drags him along, and whether Peter wants to or not, he must again return to the cloister school.

 

The patience of his educators has come to an end due to this final degree of disobedience.

 

Although the impression from many punishments, debasements and blows remain deep seated in Peter, and although his boy’s soul has been deeply shaken by this or that incident and he has often been almost desperate and unhappy, his unbending youthful manner, his gaiety and naturalness again and again lift him above every misfortune, every aggravation and every baseness. Peter Schaedl is still the always laughing, singing, whistling boy who is always ready for new pranks. Now as before, he cannot understand that as a 12 year old one is not allowed to laugh and shout. It does not want to sink into his head that he may not speak when he wants to and other similar things.

 

Under these circumstances it is not surprising that the lively, fresh lad from the Bavarian mountains has within a short period acquired a substantial record of punishments.

 

Be it that he once climbed a tree instead of playing the assigned games, that he once sent impertinent letters home, that he soon gave a mocking nickname to one of the monks and is then obstinate, or that he always holds his head so cocky. All that combined contributes, at any rate, to the deepest outrage of his teachers and educators, and after the failed escape attempt a letter one day goes to Peter Schaedl’s mother, in which it is written that the boy must leave the cloister school, since all pedagogical measures have failed and his temperament is not to be tamed.

 

But the reply to that goes like Peter knows his mother for so long: a single request to try it again with the boy, since he cannot be that ruined and bad.

 

5.

 

So it comes to pass that Peter Schaedl remains in the cloister school. And since he can think of nothing else, he makes the attempt to reconcile himself a little better to the external circumstances of this daily routine. For this, he does not utilize any especially great will and good resolutions, rather he shows, almost unconsciously, more indifference toward the things that he previously only encountered with iron struggle and stubborn resistance, and turns to other interests.

 

If the cloister school brought nothing but this hard, bitter daily routine, then Peter would certainly repeat his escape attempt in a more perfected form, then he would in the long run never endure the constant being pious and good, the eternal indifference of praying, being silent, learning. But he gradually discovers many new things in the cloister school and finals many interesting things that occupy, fill, excite and enrich him.

 

First, it is the cloister itself. It was once the hereditary seat of the royal house, and many monuments, many graves and many pictures bear witness to more than a thousand years of German history, to old noble families, to great men, to wars and victories, to joy and distress, to warriors and thinkers, to women and marriages, to monks and artists. Testimony to Germanic and Christian history is given in most manifold portrayals within these castle and cloister grounds.

 

Especially on Sunday afternoon, when the pupils are given two hours off to make confession and for pious reflection, Peter finds rest and time, unobserved and unnoticed by all the others, to sneak off on a journey of discovery. Then he finds ever new niches with only inscriptions and symbols, ever new testimony to an old time.

 

Hours of complete joy are also brought to Peter by the cloister’s musical events, which take place from time to time, regardless of whether they take place in the church or the festive hall.

 

When a mass by Orlando di Lasso, Bach or Haller is played, if Peter sings along with his high soprano vice in Haydn’s creation or in songs of the Bavarian marksmen, then he rejoices inwardly, then his heart is so free and happy and festive that he forgets the cares of daily life. That is an experience for him which repays him for a long time for all suffering.

 

It is similar for him later during the two to three hour Sunday hikes. When the path leads along numerous fish dikes, through great hops gardens into the infinitely wide forest, when Peter again and again has something new to see on the right and on the left, and when he is even given permission to leave the ranks and play in the forest, then he is in his element, then he forgets that he is a cloister pupil.

 

6.

 

From time to time, when his path leads through isolated cloister halls and corners, Peter encounters many a monk who was previously unknown to him. Often they get into little conversations.

 

The abbot of the cloister is a long grayed, dignified elder. Only seldom do the pupils see him, for he is very distant to them. But he often shows a special benevolence toward Peter.

 

One year during Christmas vacation, Peter did not travel home to his mother, rather experienced the holidays in their special radiance and in their whole solemnity in the cloister.

 

It is midnight mass. The church altar radiates with the most beautiful floral decorations, and on both sides stand might fir-trees, still with fresh dew and fragrant scent. Dozens of candles are burning and flickering in the whole room. The church is filled with people from the surroundings. About fifty monks stand motionless in the choir section with their long, black, billowing Benedictine cowls. Left of the altar, however, stands the abbot in gold brocade with headband and staff in front of his throne seat. About twenty clerics surround him, likewise dressed in white and gold brocade. Twelve little candle-boys in white-red garments, among them Peter Schaedl, accompany the ceremonies, soon standing, soon kneeling, then again slowly and ceremoniously striding. The incense mixes with the fragrant scent of the fir-trees and with the sweet aroma of the hot-house flowers and penetrates all the senses. The music resounds from the large, far famous organ with hovering chords.

 

Peter Schaedl is totally under the spell of this hour. He feels like he is in the outer court of heaven. If the child Jesus would now come to him smiling, take him by the hand and invite him to walk through heaven, to a visit with dear God himself or even with the most blessed Mother Mary, he would accept that not as a miracle, rather as a firm reality.

 

The abbot must have observed the boy in this blessed dream state, for the next day he says to him: “Remain as good as you were at Christmas mass, like a true Christian child.”

 

The old prelate meets with the boy one more time and pays special attention to him.

 

In the cloister there is a small chapel, of which many secretive things are said. No stranger and none of the pupils is allowed to enter it, even for the monks it is accessible only in the rarest cases. When guests come from the royal house or from old noble families, then they may enter the secretive room for a very short time.

 

No pupil knows whether ghosts haunt this chapel at night, whether figures from ancient times appear. It is said that the abbot and Father Odilo, called “the great silent one”, are the only people who spend much time there. None of the pupils also knows the chapel’s correct name. Most are only briefly interested in it, and then it is forgotten again. Some of them often call it the chapel of the ancestors, but most of the monks say prelate chapel.

 

One day on his explorations, Peter winds up in this chapel, which is otherwise locked, and which one can only open with a gold key, as is told. He cannot actually see anything special in it, and yet there is something in the room that certainly captivates him, so he sits down on one of the empty benches and looks around silently. The walls are decorated with ornaments with delicate colors. In part, they are plant imitations that flow into each other and are intertwined, in part there are spirals or angular, simple figures. Between them there are wavy lines and other simple decorations.

 

Peter cannot find any real meaning behind it, just like he still cannot fully grasp many things in the pictures and on the tombs, but yet, he sees something mysterious behind the things, and they simultaneously seem self-evident to him. On the arched dome ceiling of the chapel, the sun is portrayed with many stars, but between them many crests and letters, of which Peter does not know whether they are of Greek origin or are supposed to represent German letters from the oldest times.

 

Peter still sits alone in the darkness of the old chapel when suddenly the heavy door slowly opens and the cloister’s abbot enters the shrine. At first, the elderly man is startled and very surprised at the sight of the boy, but he is not angry: “Go now to study, I want to pray here a little, and tomorrow you come to me”, he says to the young pupil petrified with terror and fear. The next day Peter is serious when he goes to the venerable Father Abbot. Without much ado he says to him: “Christian child, examine your heart, whether you are not called upon to join our cloister and become a son of Saint Benedict. I will do everything for you in order to ease your path into our community. You can come to me anytime and count on me.” Peter is very moved by the abbot’s words.

 

Next to the abbot, Father Odilo is the most venerable member of the cloister. He speaks with his brothers as little as with strangers and is everywhere called “the great silent one”. Many say he is dumb, others say that he possesses amazing knowledge, especially in the area of history he knows of things that are not to be read in any book. Sometimes one sees him walking with a stick seeking underground watercourses. Members of the royal family are supposed to come to him in order to seek advice in their special affairs. When he comes upon the boys, he looks at one or the other with a kind smile, but usually his eyes and his senses seem far away.

 

For Peter, Father Odilois is the great saga figure of his youthful years, who makes many unreal things from books and fairy-tales become alive for him.

 

Father Dominikus as well, the glowing patriot, plays a big role in Peter’s days. When the monk follows the political events inside and outside his land every day and always just has prayers said for the well-being, for the victory and for the strength of his own fatherland, Peter’s boyish heart beats with full understanding and feeling for the Father’s good cause. But when in 1918 the revolution overthrows the throne and ends the war unfavorably, Father Dominikus is broken by the failure of his prayers, becomes mentally ill and dies prematurely. This fate has a lasting effect on Peter Schaedl.

 

7.

 

So Peter Schaedl initially lives in a constant opposition of daily routine and festive mood, in a permanent up and down. If he had just felt free and happy, then soon afterward everything that he does is just compulsion and humiliation. If he is once fulfilled and interested, he is soon afterward dull, inwardly empty and tired. If he wants to rejoice today, then tomorrow he could just cry. If for a short time he feels protected, embraced and treasured, soon afterward he is again terribly alone and hated by many. Peter has never before in his young life felt such contrasts as now. He does not know what he should do, he feels that he is unhappy, that days come and go, that everything passes by him without him being able to undertake a decisive intervention, a fundamental change. Peter feels completely subconsciously that he is powerless. From time to time, a great hope comes over him, he waits and waits, but he himself does not know for what.

 

He is supposed to become a priest or even a monk, but everything that he reads in his pious books leaves him totally cold. He participates in all religious exercises, but they say little to him, and the daily framework of this life is detestable and loathsome to him. His inner nature still rebels against the borders within which his young life is squeezed like between four walls. He does not want to act so piously as is again and again demanded, he does not want to recite the memorized prayers hundreds and hundreds of times. He does not want to be good and serious and sedate. He does not and does not want that. He wants to shout aloud, as loud and as long until he simply cannot do so any longer. He wants to be happy and joyful, go on adventures, hear and see interesting things, think up impertinent pranks, laugh, shout to his heart’s desire, lie in the grass and look at the sun, he wants to stand in his life as a full-valued person and not be treated like a toy.

 

8.

 

A few years have passed since the death of village teacher Schaedl. At first, the boy thought about his father in many sad hours, and when he came home on vacation, something was greatly missed by him there, and he also noticed that since his father’s death many things had changed at home.

 

Peter’s childhood ended with his father’s death. Initially, he had not sensed that at all, but as he became older and more aware over the years, he clearly felt that there could never be a continuation of his previous childhood.

 

In the most recent period - since he often lives under the spell of free, happy hours and then again in the middle of the hard daily routine, which bring so many exhausting manifestations for him - his memories of his father are often intersected by strange thoughts, which previously only seldom, but now ever more frequently pop up.

 

Peter, unsatisfied with himself, must often think that he has become a terrible loser. Again and again, he mentally envisions his father’s life, and the son cannot forget the words that the man had often spoken. “One must always stand one’s ground, wherever one is placed.” Several times a day Peter thinks about it, and he begins to apply these words to his present existence. Gradually he becomes convinced that the monk’s are completely right, when they again and again educate and discipline him so strictly. The pious mother reinforces this feeling in him through her letters. Once she wrote to the director: “And even if a thick-head is ever so big and the boy still so fresh, seven to nine cloister years are still mightier, especially if a boy is all on his own.”

 

Peter senses that it is pointless to continue to rebel against the compulsion of the cloister. After all, he must again and again think that he is a scoundrel, a sinner and villain. At each confession he must hear it, in each religion class it is presented to the young seminary pupil, every punishment is supposed to show him that he is a pitiful sinner, an earthworm, who must do penance for his and his parents’ sins.

 

From the start, Peter has asked a hundred times: “What is sin, how have my parents sinned?”, but he has never much understood the answers to that, and when he continued to ask, he had to memorize the answers.

 

The most ugly things about the corruptibility of people and their vices are presently to the boy daily, and in opposition to that the works of the saints of the church radiant constantly in pictures and writings as shining examples.

 

All pious doctrines and sayings, all punishments and acts of penance, all prayers and religious events, the compulsion and the distress, the severity and the bitterness of the last years have made the boy tired, he is passive, indifferent toward his previous interests, and he has lost his will.

 

Very gradually, the thickheaded romp capitulates to the world in which he stands alone and abandoned since his father is no longer with him. The fresh prince of the village becomes a quiet cloister pupil who endeavors to fulfill the demands of the cloister seminary.

 

Peter himself does not notice that the monks now doctor him with much mildness, kindness and with much wisdom in order to make him even more submissive, even more pious.

 

Step by step, he becomes accustomed to learning even what he does not like. The young seminary pupil applies his energy and drive for action more and more to intellectual works. In his free time, he no longer draws caricatures, also no longer writes any letters home, rather devotes the time to learning Greek and Latin. He translates French lectures, voluntarily learns the English and Italian languages, although he has no special talent for it.

 

Since the older classes have permission to get up early, Peter is at the wash basin already at 04:00 in order to then work.

 

The pupil takes holy communion daily, and Sundays he attends mass three times. Each day of the week he tells his beads or the way of the cross, and each week he confesses his sins. With unstoppable zeal he pounces on all means that are offered to him and that lead to the path to piety and wisdom. Again and again, he is immersed in pious books, and from time to time he takes holy oaths.

 

Peter Schaedl also renounces the last earthly joys solely to serve his motto: “Pray and work”, that is what he seeks.

 

Through good works, work and prayer the boy gradually gets to the Abitur examination. But his healthy freshness has given way to a nervous, overworked appearance, his impertinence to softness and his natural faith to a forced piety. The exuberant joy has become a serious, sedate, quiet adolescent.

 

“Over the course of his stay at our institute, Peter Schaedl has developed into a young man of sedate, very solid character”, stands written in the exit certificate upon leaving school. When Peter then wants to travel home to his overjoyed mother during vacation, his prefect says to him: “Mr. Schaedl, in the last years you were the most diligent seminary pupil of the house. God will reward you for it one day.”

 

Peter Schaedl now feels like he is in a different world that is actually not his own. He lets himself drift as if in a dream that leads far away from reality.

 

His confessor and spiritual guide tells him that this is the kingdom of mercy, in which those wander who walk upon God’s tracks. Peter thanks God daily for this mercy and counts himself happy that he has managed to tame his unruly nature.

 

 

Part Three

 

Holy faith in the Highest conveys invincible strength.

 

But sincere incorrect faith as well has already led many people and families to many a righteous work.

 

1.

 

Peter Schaedl is a final year student of theology in the priest seminary.

 

The chubby-faced, fresh, always happy and sunny boy with his overflowing vitality has – through a nine year cloister and seminary education – become a slender, serious and reserved young theologian, whose original temperament only rarely shows itself.

 

What once seemed to him an unbearable compulsion is now his most sacred obligation, to which he devotes himself with all his energy and a full heart.

 

Peter Schaedl wants to become a holy priest, he has sworn that to himself. And at the same time, he wants to be life-knowledgeable, a modern priest. But this double goal costs hard struggle and difficult work.

 

Peter believes he has become acquainted with life. In order to be able to one day perform real manual labor and at the same time earn money for the many books at the university, he works weekdays since the Abitur examination as a peat-cutter and on Sundays as an assistant waiter in a large amusement park.

 

Early in the morning each day he hikes with two comrades to church, takes communion and attends mass. Then he goes to work. He works with shovel and pickaxe as well as possible. The hands get many blisters and the upper torso a painful sunburn. Peter does not have much conversion with the co-workers, because the foreman pushes for swift completion. But that cannot prevent the three theology students from learning from the conversations, especially during lunch break, that the workers are dissatisfied with everything. Peter gets along very well with everybody, but he does not know much about their cares and he does not know them. He only knows that most of them are decent fellows, and that their dissatisfaction about the existing conditions, about which the grumble daily, cannot be unfounded.

 

During this period of semester break, when he is an assistant worker, Peter has two experiences that will occupy him greatly for many years. It is a humid August day and Peter finds the work more oppressive than ever before. All the brown bodies of the working men are bathed in the sweat of hard work; the heat could almost drive them to desperation. In the late afternoon, relief is finally in sight. Three storms draw together, from left and right and from the high mountain they draw closer and closer. Lightning darts from the thick storm clouds, thunder growls and throws its echo from one mountain to the other. Directly over the peat-cutting site, which is located in front of the mountains, three storms collide with uncanny force. Soon shrill and edgy, soon light and shining far, the lightning darts to the ground or glides along the sky, and right afterward the thunder bangs as if the whole earth wanted to collapse. At any moment, the lightning can strike the group of workers and take its toll.

 

One of the men suddenly jabs his spade full of fury into the ground and curses: “You Lord God, up there, if there is one, strike here, hit, show what you can do! Or are you just as poor as us?!”

 

Utter silence is the result of this terrible challenge from the worker. For a few seconds, each holds his breath. Peter’s back runs hot and cold.

 

A new lightning bolt strikes the ground and a blow follows again, somewhere nearby a tree collapses in splinters.

 

Slowly, the storm distances itself and a brief rain shower purifies the air. Work and daily routine continue.

 

But Peter Schaedl is deeply shaken by this for long days afterward, that a human being can mock God in such a manner and challenge his power. He now knows that he will one day have to work very hard as a priest and to atone for these blinded and misled people. The young student sends countless prayers to heaven for these blasphemers.

 

During the semester as well, he prays not only at the assigned prayer times full of sincere reverence, rather frequently seeks out the seminary chapel in all silence, stands praying for a while before a pious picture in the park, slides the rosary between his hands evenings and mornings. And even during work, he thinks in short prayers about his Lord God.

 

Often, when he is mentally tired, he simply recites through a memorized prayer a dozen times. Often, he re-reads prayers from a selection of pious books, often his praying is also purely mechanical lip work.

 

But the young theologian knows from the works of intellectual literature and the words of his spiritual guides that there is also a higher level of prayer: Man’s observing and examining immersion into God.

 

Whenever sees himself ripe inside for that, whenever he feels “grace” within himself, he devotes himself to this higher level of prayer. Then he kneels in a quiet corner of the chapel, closes his eyes and images himself with all his senses in “God’s proximity”. He knows he is very close to him and is completely filled with the greatness of the creator. He feels himself united in a mighty chorus with the millions of people on earth who all in their own manner pay homage to God at that same hour. He feels his praise of the creator to be in harmony with the rustling of the forests and seas, with the song of the birds, with the blossoming of the flowers, with the might of the mountains, with the greatness of the stars, with the sounds, colors and forms of all arts.

 

Such an hour of God’s proximity gives the man striving for perfection, the priest in training, ever new strength, always gives his work new elan and lets him overcome every resistance of his human weaknesses.

 

A special time of prayer in the priest seminary is the annual Shrovetide. When the poster pillars of the big city proclaim the Shrovetide balls every evening, when the Shrovetide procession moves through the streets of the city and exuberant festiveness fills the people, then the young theologians are told about the ugly sins and vices that are committed during these days, and they hear what pain has been inflicted on God by the evilness and wantonness of people. When they hear of the bitter consequences in the beyond, of the horrible pains in hell that await the ruined sinners, then a quiet yearning for the Shrovetide joys of the world can only occasionally come up in the young student for the priesthood. At first, his heart is filled with pity for the people, and without all too great effort he devotes himself to hours of prayer and atonement and other pious exercises, which are carried out in the seminary during Shrovetide.

 

Peter Schaedl has a second experience as worker-student that seems even more unique and odd than the first one.

 

Peter is lodged with several other temporary workers in the servant quarters of an estate in the vicinity of the peat-cutting site.

 

One Saturday, he is invited by the estate owner to his house for a glass of beer. Peter feels comfortable and safe in the pretty rooms of the estate owner, and so both men get into a stimulating conversation.

 

It has already gotten late when the estate owner’s children and his niece, who is a guest, enter the room in order to say “good night”. While the father is occupied with the children, the young theologian casts a shy gaze at this girl, whom he finds as beautiful as few other girls. Then she comes to him, shy and blushing, and offers him a gentle handshake, and Peter believes he hears a very soft “good night” from her. This moment completely confuses the student, he has never before experienced anything similar. This evening takes a strange turn for him from the moment when that young niece enters the room.

 

During the next few days Peter is completely absorbed with the memory of that evening. As much as he resists with prayers and good resolutions, he must again and again remember the girl’s appearance. He could not say how old this girl was, he also could not describe her face, he only remembers that she had brown hair and wore a blue dress, and that she was as slender as a deer.

 

He sees her once again. One evening when he is on the way to church, she looks out the window of the master’s house. When Peter looks up at her, she suddenly disappears. Or had she not nodded slightly with her head? –But perhaps that is more of the young man’s hoping and wishing than reality.

 

Full of yearning, the young theologian walks around the vicinity of the manor evening after evening. But one day as he is walking in the shadow under the old chestnut tree, he can see the faint outline of a girl next him in the darkness. Peter greets and his greeting is reciprocated. He cannot make out much, but suddenly he again feels that strange, warm and tender handshake, he feels the same hand that he felt that past evening lying in his. Peter hardly dares to look at the girl. For a few short seconds he feels very close to the young creature, when he suddenly feels her full, fresh lips on his. But before he can think of anything, the figure has again disappeared into the darkness.

 

Never before, as far back as Peter can remember, did he get a kiss. Not from his parents, not from his siblings, form none of his relatives, let alone from any girl. Peter is terribly ashamed, because he believes he has done everything wrong and stupidly, and acted ridiculous during this evening encounter. For days the young student torments himself with this thought, and his only wish, his full yearning is to see the girl again or perhaps even speak with her. But then the young priest in training is gripped by fear. In the religious books he has read it, and he still remembers the words of his priestly educators: “Through a single kiss one can contract the worst diseases for one’s whole life. A single kiss can put a terrible curse on the whole body. But worse yet are the consequences for the soul. Even for the common man, a kiss is a serious sin of unchastity and is punished with eternal damnation, but for a young person who wants to devote himself to God’s service, it is a discharge of deep and harmful depravity.” The young theologian is confused and unhappy the next few weeks. He never again sees the manor master’s niece, because she has journeyed away. He totally forgets all the beauty and uniqueness of the evening event. Full of fear, he awaits the outbreak of a bad disease and feels like a poor, wretched sinner burdened with a great guilt. Even confession, absolution and penance can no longer free him from this burden.

 

When Peter returns to the priest seminary at the beginning of the semester, he can hardly still look his superiors in the face.

 

Under the influence of his education, the evening event becomes for him a terrible sin, a perceived guilt that he carries with him, which he tries to eradicate through tireless industriousness. At the university he plungers into a jumble of lectures and exercises. Aside from his theological and philological disciplines, he attends lectures about psychology, pedagogy, art and the history of literature in order, after all, to also become a well-educated and contemporary spiritual guide.

 

In the lectures on the history of literature, Peter meets many a nice female student and gets into conversations with many a female singers or actresses. And each time, he is terribly reminded of his first closer encounter with a young girl.

 

He cannot comprehend that these girls are not supposed be fullvalued human beings. He finds that dear God has equipped them with many right attractive talents. But that, after all, is the devil in them, that is what Peter has learned, and he remembers again and again that the female creature brings terrible dangers. When the seminary’s regent then again and again admonishes: “Gentlemen, you must get to the point where every woman is repellent to you from the start”, Peter finds this admonishment self-evident. Peter Schaedl knows that his mother and his two sisters are pious souls who complacently love God and God’s children through blessed mercy. Aside from them, he also knows other pious women from whom a young theologian has nothing to fear. But the majority of this gender is not to be trusted, and beauty is from the start one of Satan’s means to blind!

 

Based on this knowledge crammed into him, Peter wages a defense struggle full of pride and fanaticism against all human thoughts and feelings that want to arise in him from time to time.

 

2.

 

What scholastic philosophy, what exegesis, morality and dogma all cram into the young brain in the course of study cannot be fully digested by the brain. Many doubts, much vagueness and many questions arise again and again in the student’s mind. But Peter now has no time to ponder the questions more closely. Regulations demand from him the taking of so many exams that the theology student must always only strive to get good test grades and thereby assure himself a shining priest career.

 

At the same time, he is also aware from religion class that any doubt on the truth revealed by God, church and Bible is a serious offense and nothing else than an evil temptation by the devil.

 

And finally, the spiritual guide, an elderly Jesuit Father, stresses that all the doubts that try to arise during the years of study will fade away by themselves and be solved in the fulfillment of the priest profession and in the blessed work of priest life. Hence Peter Schaedl as well victoriously casts off all the doubts that want to arise in him against the often right hard to grasp doctrine of the church.

 

He believes he has finally won the battle with confession and communion, with prayer and work and with the “weapons of the holy spirit”, when the young man in him tries to stand up against the young theologian.

 

Occasionally, admittedly, when he takes a walk in the park at dawn, when he is especially entranced by a work of art, when he reads a classical book or if he goes too far in conversations with others and expresses the problems that interest him, then he is depressed that at the age of twenty he piously walks around in the serious theology robe. Then he is gripped by the yearning to be able to be free and proud, full of energy and gaiety, and many times he thinks he must throw away the rosary, prayer book and all theology in order to do something great. He wants to plunge into a struggle and fight for victory and laurels.

 

3.

 

The spiritual guide in the priest seminary has often said that for every young theologian the time comes when he strays from the church’s doctrine, when an inner emptiness arises within him and lack of faith seizes him. Peter Schaedl has gradually come to feel so secure in his profession that he believes he will certainly be spared from this condition.

 

Logically, this day does indeed come one day.

 

Suddenly, he can no longer pray, he can no longer believe. His inside seems to him completely empty, as if burned out. Through years of work, he has killed the human being within him, and the theologian in him seems to totally collapse.

 

In the rosary, which he has slid through his fingers many thousands of times, he sees only a senseless, mechanical prayer cord.

 

The tabernacle, before which he has knelt with so much reverence, because according to the church’s doctrine the true God resides within it in the form of the consecrated wafer, now seems to him nonsense and swindle.

 

Daily communion, which was previously for him the enjoyment of the true body of Christ, the son of God, fills him with mockery and aversion.

 

The belief in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost and the miraculous conception is for him suddenly idol worship like the faith of any heathen folk.

 

All Christ’s miracles, all dogmas of the church, all secrets of the Bible repel him. In the middle of the most sacred ceremonies he could laugh aloud with mockery and despising. His whole previous world has collapsed. He knows that he is now godless, without reverence and without faith. But he no longer has the strength to again resurrect his faith. He now wishes to plunge into life and enjoy all earthly desires that he previously only knew from the pedantically precise portrayals of moral theology.

 

Everything that was previously sacred and sublime to the young theologian is for him now only the object of mockery, contempt, hatred and repugnance.

 

He no longer sees any path into the future other than just desire and pleasure in order to then find a fast and beautiful death.

 

In this state, he must outwardly still endure all the pious exercises of the priest seminary, for he still cannot bring himself to make a decision for his life.

 

Quite mechanically, he goes along to confession and portrays his condition like a patient who has long since accepted his illness. The priest hearing the confession talks about the devil’s great temptation and threatens hell.

 

Peter Schaedl laughs inside. Why should he fear evil and hell, both of which no longer exist for him.

 

A few days later, the priest in training Schaedl decides to go to confession to a different priest. This one treats the matter medically and describes Peter’s condition as a nervous manifestation and result of overwork at study and prayer.

 

Later he confesses to still another cleric. This one refers him to Christ, who himself on the cross as the son of God experienced the same condition of inner emptiness and abandonment by God.

 

Peter has no understanding for this pitiful son of God, he shows him no salvation. Weeks pass without the slightest change in the condition of the godless theologian. Finally, he decides to seek out his actual spiritual guide from the Jesuit order.

 

While the previous listeners to the confession seemed somewhat shocked by the theologian’s condition, the Jesuit takes Peter’s account lightly and with a smile like something self-evident. He explains that this condition of godlessness and inner emptiness is a natural reaction with every theologian who devotes himself sincerely and deeply with great zeal to study. He advises the young man not to think anymore about it, to let a few weeks or months pass and then come to him again. The visit goes like a medical consultation. A few tame jokes about politics end the conversation, which gets Peter to again lock away his already written request for dismissal from the priest seminary.

 

Following the Jesuit’s advice, Peter spends the next weeks with light activity. But his condition does not change.

 

One evening, it is semester break, Peter hikes alone up a small hill that rises at the edge of the big city. He looks across the many church towers, and all his hatred and contempt toward God and religion begin to eat his heart again.

 

Spread out before him lies the city’s sea of houses. Shining golden in the light of the evening sun, the river meanders past the mighty buildings. With eternally fresh energy, it springs from the mighty mountains, whose outline becomes clear on the horizon. Peter Schaedl looks for the mountains before which his homeland is located. He cannot help but to think about the creek, the forests and fields that belonged to the world of his childhood.

 

Gradually, his eye finds rest in the green of the trees and meadows than cover the hill’s slope. But then Peter’s gaze is entranced by the setting evening sun. Glowing red, it has again concentrated its brightness before disappearing. Peter watches this sunny furnace amazed. He feels like he did as a small boy gazing into the fire of the huge fire and so clearly sensing God’s greatness and power. Again, he is entranced by this blaze of light. Never before has he experienced the sun so powerfully. Peter is completely captivated by the sight, and he is as solemn as at the most sacred church ceremonies. Suddenly, Peter feels happy and free.

 

The sun proclaims to him that there must be a final, highest, divine power behind every force of nature.

 

The young theology student Peter Schaedl has again found the faith in the divine, in a higher power, and with that he also happily absorbs all the church’s doctrines, for if there is a God, then for him that can only be the God of the Catholic church. In the following days, when he again devotes himself with enthusiasm to study, he meets a circle of radical young theologians who want to reform the priesthood in genuine natural piety and to protect it against any despotism. They want to become the elite troop in the world clergy under the leadership of exceptional Jesuits. They hold their meetings in old castles; on hikes through Tyrol, Hess, Bavarian and Silesia they are chained to each other under the leadership of their guardians from the Jesuit Order. The romanticism of the hiking youth movement is directed into church lines.

 

Peter has joined this circle. He experiences beautiful hours on the vacation trips after the efforts and struggles of the semester. He feels overjoyed in this union of religion and nature.

 

In the course of this period the young theologian Schaedl achieves the highest position of honor in the priest seminary. He is named General Prefect and simultaneously becomes the confidant of the seminary’s student council. The student is aware than he must set a good example in every way. He seeks by all means to live accordingly. In the official address that he must now occasionally deliver, he seeks to preach high ideals in order to lead the seminary’s students as humans being as well to the most radiant heights and the priests in training to final perfection.

 

Peter works and administers wherever he can, he feels overjoyed in his new comprehensive and great activity.

 

But time passes faster than he could ever measure it, and then there are only a few days before the so-called higher consecrations, which then should bring for him the irrevocable priest oath, the obligation to the closest bond with the church for all eternity.

 

Peter shuns this step, and again he faces the collapse of his priest career.

 

He goes to the elderly Jesuit Father who is responsible for all matters of spiritual guidance. The young theology student greatly admires the Jesuit, for he possesses exceptional characteristics as a human being; he comes from a noble family of the most ancient origin, and he enjoys world fame as a scientist.

 

“Father, Sir, I cannot go through with the consecrations”, Peter declares. “I no longer feel called upon for the priesthood. I cannot fully agree with all the church doctrines inwardly. I feel unsuited, although I cannot define it in detail.” This admission is terribly difficult for the young theologian: he, who enjoys the unlimited trust of his superiors, who has the place of honor among all theologians of the seminary, must now cause such difficulties.”

 

But Peter has hardly spoken the words when the elder suddenly kneels on the ground; he grips the hand of the doubting theologian, kisses it and speaks: “My son, if you are not worthy to step to the altar, then nobody is worthy. You are, after all, an angel! You can hear God’s voice in my voice and calmly and unconcerned accept the consecration.”

 

Peter is hot and cold at the same time. The world famous Jesuit Father, before whom he has so often knelt in reverence at confession, this Jesuit now kneels at his feet. Inexperienced Peter does not for a moment doubt the words of the Jesuit, and all his reservations are smashed with one blow, and he is ready to take the consecrations.

 

4.

 

Priest in training Schaedl devotes himself completely to the tasks of the week of preparation. Mental drills, feasting and prayer fill them.

 

The exercise lectures at the start deal with the nature of God Almighty.

 

They continue with the concept of God’s son Christ, his suffering and his resurrection.

 

The ugliness of sin and the wretchedness of man contrast sharply to the divine greatness. The image of hell is shockingly portrayed in a dramatic highpoint.

 

The church as the sole path out of this darkness is the motif that forms the radiant introduction to the second part: the priest as medium between God and man appears as the most sublime ideal of human effort. Rights and duties of the priesthood form the conclusion of this ideal, vivid and desired.

 

The whole huge building of the priest seminary is filled with serious silence during the solemn week.

 

Several times a day all the theologians of the house pray for the consecration candidates out of inner solidarity.

 

The fasting promotes the psychological susceptibility for the coming days.

 

Call to joint prayer hour after hour, one of the must diverse melodies of the Gregorian chorus – the “Attende domine”, which proclaims sin and repentance in solemn melancholy – resounds daily in a dual chorus between consecration candidates and the younger theologians.

 

The decisive hour has arrived. The priest seminary and its surroundings radiate in the most beautiful decoration of flowers and flags. The cathedral’s bells ring full and mighty over the city. Two hundred young theologians between the ages of 18 and 24 walk serious and measured in black robe and white chorus shirt through the church toward the high altar. At the end of the column walk the consecration candidates with lowered head and with a countenance glowing ascetically from fasting and emotion, holding their garments and insignia in crossed arms.

 

The councils of the house follow, priests from near and far, the prelates and dignitaries of the cathedral chapter and finally the bishop himself with his closer entourage.

 

The places of honor orthe cathedral, however, are filled with the closest relatives and family members of the consecration candidates.

 

Peter Schaedl knows that this is the happiest day in his mother’s life, that she was capable of any sacrifice for this hour, and that she thinks she now has heaven in hand for her son and for herself.

 

After the bishop has began mass, the consecration candidates are called by name one after the other and each answers with “Adsum” (I am here) and steps forward.

 

The bishop speaks a final admonishment. “Since you, dearest son, are supposed to be elevated to the sacred consecration of the subdiocese, you must again and again reflect what a burden you want to voluntarily assume today! Until now, you are still free and could if desired cross over to the earthly side. But once you have received this consecration, you can no longer take back your decision, rather must always serve God, whom to serve is to rule. You must hold to chastity and always remain obligated to serve the church. Consider that as long as there is still time, and if you want to remain with your sacred decision, then step forward in the name of the Lord!”

 

None of the candidates steps back. All are moved and spellbound by the experience of the hour, and none dares to become weak before the public, before his God, before the priests and the bishop.

 

The chorus begins to sing the Most Holy litany, and the candidates throw themselves to the ground, stretched out long. They bury their Dices in their hands and remain lying on the ground, in silent prayer, while the litany resounds over them...Take pity upon us...take pity upon us...hear us...request for us, request for us...spare us...save us...take pity on us...

 

These cries for help penetrate into the hearts of the young priest candidates like mighty blows.

 

Whatever bonds to homeland, family and parental home, to folk and world were still left in them, now fall away from these men as they lie as sinners on the ground in order to then again arise with burning enthusiasm, to step before the bishop, and to receive from his hands the insignia of their new dignity as God’s representatives.

 

Months pass. For Peter Schaedl, they are like a dream. Then the priest consecration itself comes. It is even more solemn than the higher consecrations. And afterward they travel to the homeland for the “primiz”, i.e. the celebration of the first sacred mass of a just consecrated priest.

 

Peter would have gladly spent that day at the place of his childhood, but his mother has been living for years already in another town. And now that town claims the right to the festival.

 

Peter is received at the train station by the whole community. He must quickly put on the priest robes in the waiting room, and then he joins the triumphant procession through the town. First, little girls recite poems and give him flowers. Right and left of the roads, the many various church clubs have gathered with their banners and flags. Women’s federation and mother’s club, young girls federation and male youth, voluntary fire department, veterans association and even the gymnastics club take pride in marching along in the procession. The brass band of the town plays, and they proceed through arches of triumph and along streets decorated with garlands, past houses festively decorated with many flags to the church. There, the new priest must himself deliver a short sermon after the address of greeting by the local priest. Then he bestows sacred blessings for the first time, which counts a hundred-fold to the pious people, coming from these freshly salved and newly consecrated hands.

 

At home, however, mother and siblings kneel before their “honorable” son and brother, and now, since the young priest is supposed to bestow blessings on his mother, his hands tremble and his eyes become moist. It seems almost impossible to him to bestow this blessing as confidently as he delivered his first sermon and as flawlessly as his first public appearance went.

 

Peter must visit all relatives, all acquaintances and parish members during these days in order to give the new priest blessing. He repeats the blessing formula a hundred times: “By the placing of my hands and the summoning of all the saints, you are blessed by Almighty God, the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost.” He places his hands on elders and blossoming young people who kneel before him during these words. A handshake and the words “Peace be with you” always conclude the blessing. Many people, young and old, use the opportunity in order to pour their heart out to the young priest, in order to ask his advice and in order to ask for his prayer. Richly laden with gifts, he returns home each day. The day of the first mass itself was similarly festive as his arrival. The town’s priest had made a lot of effort to make everything as splendid as possible. People have been coming from the surroundings for hours. All the official offices are represented, and all the relatives have put in an appearance. 200 close and distant relatives are counted this day, cousins and aunts and uncles alone. The 24 year old priest is celebrated like a great celebrity.

 

According to the long custom, a delicate little girl is also supposed to be selected for Peter’s first mass as a little bride. In white dress, with wreath and veil, she is supposed to stand at the side of the priest, who swore to remain unmarried. To the great dismay of the many small candidates, Peter Schaedl has rejected this custom. Since he has already renounced a real bride in his life in the form of his oath, he also wants nothing to do with this symbolic little bride. Pious aunts admittedly immediately became fearful and whispered softly that such disrespect for custom could not turn out well.

 

The day of the first mass does not bring great emotional experiences for the young priest, to his great disappointment. Given the great hubbub of the day they could not emerge in any manner. And so the festival has only an outward impression for him. But for the young priest it means the last close gathering with family and relations; after the closing of the festival he leaves them all and then belongs solely to the church.

 

5.

 

Peter Schaedl’s first position is in a factory town. He is an industry chaplain. The dry priest, his superior, who is much respected among his colleagues, takes him in like a father.

 

“Chaplain, sir, on the Bahnhofstrasse 78, on the fifth floor, a man lies dying; he has not confessed for forty years; try your luck. He is an old communist. But the wife will probably throw you out; I’ve already been brushed off.” That is the first spiritual assignment that the young chaplain gets from his superior.

 

Peter goes to work with apostolic zeal. He acquires the necessary insignia, buys a bottle of wine and climbs - a prayer on his lips – with pounding heart up the four stairs.

 

When the wife opens the door, she immediately says: “My husband can die without a priest. We are not criminals and have nothing to fear.”

 

“I just wanted to ask about your husband’s condition and drop off this bottle of wine.”

 

“Well then, come in”, the wife replies to Peter’s words. As the chaplain converses with the sick man, he immediately declares that he will die in five days; the doctor told him that and he feels it as well.

 

The young priest wants to ask about his earlier life, since he is new in town.

 

The gravely ill man describes his simple life, his little joy, his work and his mistakes, “Now you have made a little confession, after all”, the young chaplain says when the man has finished his story. “Now we can also formalize this confession.” The priest pulls his stole from this pocket, puts it around his neck as a symbol of his power.

 

“For all I care, if it is so simple and if it’s fun for you”, the sick man consents.

 

The next day Chaplain Schaedl gives the dying man communion, salves him with the sacrament of the rosary and is witness for the first time to a human being silently and calmly departing this life. He naturally counts this as a success of his priestly effectiveness.

 

For years, the young priest stands at a death bed two or three times a week. Each of these fates, each death is a great hour for him.

 

The formulas of church acts recede behind the impression, the experiences of the moment.

 

In the background of each of these dying people, Peter sees his father struggle with death. Admittedly, he was not present, but he can nonetheless form a precise picture of his father’s death.

 

He knows that his father, weakened in body and soul by the long illness, was greatly tormented in the last minutes of his life by his most bitter enemy. The town priest had come back then and spoken to the father about heaven, hell and final Judgement Day in order to then force confession from the man.

 

Peter knows that the last minutes were the most painful of his life for his father, and that he had to endure them only because was no longer in full possession of his physical energies, which would have been needed against this his blackmailer.

 

This memory is seen by the heart of the young chaplain so much each time that he can never torment the dying people with confessions of sin and he is not able to threaten them with hell and purgatory. He seeks to help them with a few words, tells them about life in the beyond, of the great, kind and understanding God and that nobody of good will needs to tremble before death.

 

When then the life of the one has gone out, Peters also always knows how to give comfort and good advice to the other members of the family, and so he is often more generous toward the people than is allowed him by formal church law.

 

After the completion of this and similar proceedings assigned to him, Peter always feels an inner satisfaction. And he also feels this satisfaction at his other work.

 

When he sits almost every Saturday from early afternoon until late’ in the evening in the confession booth, then he has the happy feeling that he can assist human hearts tormented by doubt and distress with advice and deed, and, above all, as God’s representative, through absolution of sins, lift from them the burden of sin, to reconcile them with God again, and to be able to again open to them the path to heaven.

 

When the young chaplain stands at the pulpit and gradually notes that the visitors of his sermons become ever more numerous, when he stands and senses how people of every age and position listen to his words full of reverence and are uplifted by his words, this gives his work new impetus.

 

Daily mass forms the center of his priest activity. Following church doctrine with blind faith, the young chaplain remembers each day the inconceivable miracle that he himself has the grace and the authority to perform. He can daily with a few words transform a peace of bread, the sacred wafer, and the little wine in his goblet into the genuine body and the genuine blood of Christ. Christ, however, is genuine God. The Almighty has hence put himself in the hands of the priest in order to save as many people as possible from the eternal death owed to sin.

 

At each of this sacred acts, Peter Schaedl is filled with the sublime awareness that at whatever hour of the day somewhere on the broad globe this same sacred secret is celebrated by hundreds of Catholic priests. The presentation of mass sacrifice around the globe hence takes place in an endless chain day after day and year after year and bonds the priests of the whole world into a great totality, which –across the borders of countries and folks – is based in the beyond. He senses the same powerful energy and strength at eternal worship or at breviary prayer. He is happy in the awareness that in each diocese, according to a precisely set plan, every day and every night, in churches or in cloister chapels, in uninterrupted mutual relief, the “Most Holy” is honored in the “displayed monstrance” in the same “eternal worship”. He considers it more a work of grace than a natural concentration of energies, if at breviary prayer his feelings soar, because several hundred thousand priests pray daily for two hours long xactly the same words in the same Latin language.

 

One of Peter’s daily duties is also religion class at the secondary school. The only difficulty that exists for the young chaplain in this work appears to be giving instruction to the little ones. But he knows all the better how to be a good teacher and guide to the older pupils in matters of faith and life.

 

But the chaplain understands especially well how to deal with the poor, the sick and everyone needing help. He has turned many parish children - who were totally alienated form the church – into pious church-goers again, he has again reconciled many people with the church.

 

Despite all his work, Peter Schaedl has not neglected to think about the health of his soul, to correct his own mistakes and to do penance for his own sins.

 

Despite all mistakes and weaknesses, he can proudly maintain one thing about himself, that in the first years of his priesthood he was a priest with honest enthusiasm, honest intention and struggle, and that he endeavored to live and act in accordance to doctrine and law of the Catholic church.

 

 

Part Four

 

If a world falls into ruin, then that is not proof that it was worthless from the start, rather only that it has fulfilled its world historical meaning in the eternal providence plan of the creator.

 

To leave this broken world and to work along on the building of a new world is not betrayal, rather obedience to God’s law.

 

1.

 

Peter Schaedl has advanced swiftly in his church career in just a few years. He has quickly advanced from big city chaplain to religion teacher at a school of higher learning.

 

Years of zealous fulfillment of duty have passed. The days and years of the first priestly enthusiasm have long faded and made way for tenacious work. At the same time, the doubts, struggles and distress of the student period have followed the young religion teacher into his priest life.

 

Old puzzles pop up again, eternal questions of humanity move the young priest always anew. The laws of life put their demands on Peter Schaedl almost every day. But he endeavors incessantly to bring God’s natural laws into harmony with the doctrines of the church, he seeks to stand in life and at the same time to be able to remain in the church, he wants to be life-affirming and bound to the church in the same way.

 

But there is so much that could make him doubt the validity of his profession and his world, but also so much that holds him firm and reinforces him on his old path. Peter Schaedl wants to undertake exercises for his emotional solidity according to church regulations.

 

He has selected the Bavarian resort Altotting for this.

 

Heavy wooden crosses in all sizes lean on the hall of pillars that leads around the chapel of grace. Men and women load them on their shoulders in order to, praying with the rosary, hobble around the church on their knees.

 

The young priest sees such a group of hand-worked countrywomen at this drill. During his earlier, frequent pilgrimages he had never thought it at all strange. But this fleeting sight stays with him, and he now sees and observes many things that he had not noticed earlier.

 

He imagines that these women, who now, bent under the burden of the crosses, sob upward toward their Lord God, were blossoming, upright, young German children of man not all that many years ago.

 

He hardly dares to imagine that he could ever see his mother and sisters kneeling on the ground so miserably and pitifully.

 

After Peter Schaedl has been observing this sight for a long time, it suddenly comes to him that he has never seen a priest among these cross-bearers. And when he then thinks of himself, he knows that he would never participate in this exercise.

 

The priest is shocked when the countrywomen tell him after conclusion of the prayer: Their walk to Altotting took ten hours. Dry bread, warm soup and a glass of beer was supposed to fortify them for the return trip, which they wanted to start during the coming night. The previous week, hail had destroyed the harvest of their small fields. That is why they had paid for masses in Altotting with their meager savings and done penance on their knees for their own sins and those of their family members, and implored heaven to help them through the next winter.

 

The drill lectures of the capuchin monk are no longer able to extinguish this experience in the priest. Again and again, he sees with his mental eye the humbled people crawling with the wooden cross. But when on the second drill day he reads in the drill book by the founder of the Jesuit Order: “I observe all the decay and ugliness of my body; I view myself as a festering wound and a boil from which so many sins and evils and such an ugly poison break out”, he finds a connection between these subjugated women and the doctrines of the church. When the Father then speaks of original sin, with whose curse all human beings are burdened, of hell and its torments, the young priest can no longer comprehend how a great God should find pleasure in so debasing his most sublime creature, man, to subjugate and torment him such as he experiences and feels during these days.

 

The church view of man as a pitiful, guilt-ridden earthworm has totally collapsed within him due to his observations during these days.

 

Peter further reads in his drill book: “I see with the eyes of my power of imagination the length, breadth, height and depth of hell, I see those mighty blazes and the souls as if enclosed in burning bodies; I hear with my ears the crying, howling and screaming; I smell with my sense of smell the smoke, sulphur, garbage and decaying things; I taste with my sense of taste bitter things; I feel with my sense of touch how the flames engulf and burn the souls.”

 

No, fear of hell should in the future no longer influence Peter’s moral action.

He wants to follow the voice of his conscience. He wants to fulfill clod’s law, but he must inwardly reject the church’s law.

 

At the bottom of his heart he feels that he has over the course of time become a heretic; but his oath binds him to the church, and hence he must outwardly subordinate himself to it and obey.

 

2.

 

Peter’s oldest sister wants to marry. The very honorable brother is, upposed to perform the marriage. The ceremony takes place in the clean, clear church reminiscent of antiquity.

 

The brother speaks to the sister and her husband and to all the relatives about spring and its joy, about summer and its oppressiveness and heat, about life’s autumn with it harvest and its fruits. Then he tells them about God, who guides our path in sunshine and rain.

 

Peter himself is just as moved as his family members. He may consecrate his sister for a path that he closed to himself. He senses how beautiful it must be, if two people continue God’s work of creation; mod join in order to carry the bloodstream of our ancestors into the distant future.

 

The young priest Schaedl speaks the Latin formulas and prayers of the marriage ceremony. But suddenly, he stops in the middle of his words in order to quickly read a few lines farther in the ritual “... Sit amabilis viro suo ut Rachel; sapiens ut Rebeca; longaeva et fidelus ut Sara... “ Peter Schaedl’s face turns red. He had already giving the blessing for their life bond to dozens of young, blossoming people, but only now, when he reads the blessing formula in front of his sister, does he become conscious of the terrible meaning of these words. “... she should be dear to her husband, like Rachel; wise like Rebecca; long-lived and loyal like Sara.” The three Old Testament Jewesses Rachel, Rebecca and Sarah are supposed to be examples for his sister?

 

Peter remembers precisely the places in the Bible where these women are discussed. Rachel, whom Isaac’s son Jacob purchased for good money aside from his other wives, and Rebecca as well as Sarah, who were both presented by their husbands Isaac and Abraham as their sisters to other men in the hope for great profit, these Jewesses are supposed to be an ideal for every Catholic woman?

 

Any German woman would have to be ashamed to be named with these Jewesses in the same breath, and the church recommends precisely them at the marriage ceremony as example. Peter knows that history and literature offer so many glorious testaments to German womanhood that it seems puzzling to him what this debasement with Jewish ideals is supposed to mean. He no longer understands why the more than 20,000 Catholic priests do not rebel against so much degradation of German blood. But he knows that he himself, after all, has gone along with it; he has often enough read aloud the same church prescribed text and afterward pocked a nice payment for it.

 

For a long time Peter ponders and contemplates this problem! He feels ever more distinctly a tension between his folk, into which he has been born, and whose son he wants to view himself for his whole life, and the church to which he is bound. During all his deliberations, Peter must always think about one of the ugliest experiences of his priesthood. He had to baptize the syphilitic child of a baptized Jewish couple shortly before it died. It was buried like a little angle with all the honors of the church. But at the same time, German men who had sacrificed their life in many political fights for their folk were buried outside church-consecrated ground, without church blessing, in the criminal section of a cemetery.

 

Precisely this event was suited to make Peter Schaedl reflect most deeply.

 

Almost daily, this fondness for his folk, his admiration and enthusiasm for its history brings him into conflict with the demands of the world church. It becomes ever more clear to him that in the doctrine of the church the folk is an empty, unreal concept.

 

3.

 

Peter Schaedl kneels at the sacrament altar of the glorious baroque church. He has just ended his mass. It is just seven in the morning, but he rests his head on his hands, heavy and tired, and tries to pray.

 

Twenty years have passed since Peter Schaedl, hardly more than a child, came to a cloister school; he has been a priest for five years now.

 

He hardly stands in the middle of life and all of manhood with his productive energy lies before him. But Peter Schaedl is tired. His priesthood has not solved the puzzles that his youth and study period put upon him. For five years he has worked, prayed, hoped and waited, but the doubts and difficulties, the struggles and puzzles have become every bigger after the first years of priestly idealism.

 

He now feels like a prisoner, chained to his profession, to consecration and his oath.

 

Like so often before, he now kneels before the tabernacle in order to pray. But the longer he is a priest, the less does he want to believe that the Almighty is supposed to be in this little wooden house, that he lets himself be locked into this tabernacle. He cannot comprehend that human hands can banish the Lord God in a piece of bread, the sacred wafer, and that this miracle is in its turn dependent on whether or not the sacred meal is baked with pure wheat flour. And are all the hundreds of rubric regulations of the liturgy supposed to influence the transformation of the sacred wafer into the body of Christ?

 

God is supposed to have sacrificed his son and through his martyrdom saved men?

 

The devil had therefore gained so much power over earth through sin that the master of heaven and earth had to have his son crucified as a tribute to the devil in order to assure for man a life goal in the beyond?

 

And this same son of God is supposed, day after day, to be reviled and violated in the sacred wafer, day after day, by irreverent people? And this God is so often lonely and abandoned in the tabernacle! And when the sacred wafer in the monstrance has become old and dry and is about to decompose, then a doubting, tormented priest must consume this body of the Lord so that it is not dishonored by decomposition.

 

Peter Schaedl is supposed to believe all that not just full of reverence and passion, rather is also supposed to convey that full of conviction to a coming generation as clear truth.

 

The young priest does not spend a single day anymore with calm and satisfaction. He cannot perform his duties for a single day anymore with certainty and self- confidence.

 

Every hour, every location seems to bring with them a new conflict. The doubts and questions add up into infinity. Even if Peter tries to combat everything, he is pursued daily by unrest and helplessness.

 

Peter Schaedl can no longer bear the candlelight and scent of incense despite all the splendor of the baroque architecture. For the sun shines outside, and fresh nature begins a new early summer day.

 

He goes outside in order to once more review in his head the lesson for the next school class. But everything that he has put together from books and pamphlets for this day slips his memory. He knows that this time he can only talk about one thing in class: About God’s working and ruling in glorious nature, about the beauty of the flowers and grasses, about the manifoldness of plants and animals, about the greatness of the sun and stars, about the laws that all nature obeys, and about the Almighty who stands over everything.

 

It goes like that then ever more frequently for the young religion teacher and pulpit speaker. He is supposed to talk about whatever dogmatic doctrine of the church, and he no longer finds his own way through theology.

 

He is thereby compelled either to be dishonest by presenting with great pathos something in which he himself does not totally believe; or he must return to the fundamental, basic truth of natural belief in God and preach general truths that go beyond church and Bible.

 

In this condition, Peter feels more and more than within the great circle of the church he represents a loner, a straying person.

 

Once he was close to coming to terms with all the existing facts. He almost got to the point of giving up all pondering and researching. Once he was ready to accept the church, the Bible, his profession and his present life as unchangeable facts, simply to teach what was in the books, to live life according to the guidelines of Catholic morality and to strike to the ground all doubts as well as inner stirrings.

 

Peter knows how quickly he would have soon reconciled himself with this condition, how he would have unnoticeably become satisfied and peaceful, and how easy it would have been to be pious.

 

Back then, it was his young Catholic circle of friends and an essay written by him against satiation and laziness which again and again shook him out of his slackness and again pulled him into the inescapable struggle.

 

For years, the young priest has been praying, day after day, Hebrew psalms in the Latin language, stories and poems from Jewish literature, wise judgement by Salomon, terrible and amazing legends from early Christianity and the Middle

 

Ages, between them invocations and rogations. And this is how he is supposed to spend his whole hour, two hours each day, with prayers with foreign content and in foreign language?

 

According to the letters of the law, all that is required for the validity of the breviary prayer is that it is prayed with the lips; inner participation is not formally demanded. Many colleagues satisfy in this manner the paragraphs of the law in one hour. But Peter Schaedl also knows of conscientious priests who torment themselves daily for four or five hours with the content of the breviary.

 

Day after day, the young priest Peter Schaedl prays for the spread of the Catholic religion, for the conversion of the heathen, for the humiliation and destruction of all enemies of the Catholic church. He prays that all nations and folks should bow before the throne of the sole representative of God on earth, before the Holy Father in Rome.

 

While Peter so asks his God to subjugate his folk, the German folk, as well to the power of the Pope, this folk is at the same time subjugated and hated by other likewise Christian folks. And the Catholic priests and statesmen are at the top of the government and are themselves even the forerunners of the enemies of his folk. But the father of Christianity is silent about this.

 

4.

 

Peter Schaedl sees a new breed develop in his folk, he sees around him people, young and older, possessed by a faith in and a great love for their homeland and their fatherland, people who are full of reverence for their soil and their blood, and who are ready to fight full of passion for their great ideals.

 

The church excommunicates these idealists, and the political bailiffs of the church create in the radiant fighters martyrs of a new movement.

 

Often, Peter would like – instead of his Latin breviary prayer – to jubilantly join in with the German fighting songs that again and again reach his ear from the street. But he fears he will never be able to do it, he will never in his life have an opportunity to be able to stand among the people of this new breed, for the church, after all, has condemned the idea that shapes these songs as heresy. He fears that for his whole life he will, with tied hands, have to observe his folk’s development on the sidelines of all events and hence neither inwardly nor outwardly be allowed to participate in the new growth.

 

In the residence of his superior, Peter meets the mother of one of his pupils just as a troop of boys marches through the street proud and happy. Peter silently stands at the window and looks at the boys, when the spiritual superior proclaims with great pathos “Poor misled youth!” as he again closes the window curtain in front of Peter.

 

Hardly has be spoken the words when the woman breaks out in tears, for her child belongs to this youth, which she knows is not recognized by the church.

 

Peter would like to now intervene, to speak a manly word for this youth and thereby perhaps comfort the woman. But as a priest, he may not, after all, he cannot take the side of this heresy.

 

Peter’s fellow brothers and superiors apparently gradually notice his silent sympathy for the people and the movement that created the new idea, for they miss no opportunity to issue blows, to prick and to throw stones; everything is done in order to make the good cause bad. This behavior by his colleagues, however, only makes the young priest ponder even more deeply, drives him to become better acquainted with the ideas, the leaders and the members of this movement.

 

What he here hears and sees, what he reads, has such a familiar tone to it, seems to him so natural, self-evident and enlightening. Peter believes he sees his own thoughts in all the thinking, and in everything that he hearts, feels and experiences, he thinks he feels a piece of himself, of his life. A new ray of hope, a new goal has hereby come into Peter’s daily life and work, into his contemplation and striving. Now he believes it must be an easy matter to inwardly refresh the church and to purify it from the slag of its former politics, so that it can then form a union with the new spirit and both can fight jointly for the final goal of the Almighty.

 

Some time still passes with Peter genuinely believing in his view. But then he must experience that the church does not want to concede its claim to infiltration and domination of public life and does not want to share it with anybody. The new movement, however, also raises the claim to want to reform all of public life based on the new spirit.

 

5.

 

At his place of work, the searching young priest one day talks with a fellow brother who has the reputation of special piety.

 

“You are a very pious priest”, he tells him in the course of the conversation, “but you lack joy in the church.”

 

These words suffice for Peter Schaedl, he does not ask anything more, these words alone make everything clear to him. It almost fills him with inner defiance and bestows upon him a combative pride. So now he prefers to be pious and to do without joy in the church.

 

From this point in time onward, Peter Schaedl examines all measures, institutions and doctrines of the church with the sharpest criticism. Now Peter closely examines everything in his daily life. Almost like lightning bolts, ever new realizations reveal themselves to him. Everywhere he encounters vagueness, discord, dishonesty, tears and breeches in the world of the church.

 

More and more, the confession stool becomes his greatest torment. He is deeply ashamed when gray-haired men confess their most hidden thoughts, when married women tell him the most intimate things from their marriage and uncorrupted youth constructs a sin from their natural stirrings. With a Latin formula, he, as God’s representative, is supposed to absolve them of all real and imagined sins!

 

All the miracles of church history, which were previously the full truth to him, sink down into unreal legends. He feels it a deception of pious people when several bodies and numerous heads of the saints and the most impossible relics are revered.

 

He finds the hypocrisy of church morality ever more repugnant.

 

The dogmatism with its hair-splitting dissection of God’s essence seems to him a lack of reverence toward the Almighty.

 

Day by day, step by step, in hundreds of diverse forms, the priest encounters the senselessness, mistakes and shortcomings of the world in which he had previously lived. Piece by piece, his belief system, his views, peal away. Blow by blow, everything that was previously for him truth, genuineness and sacred collapses, down to the basic foundation of his faith, the firm belief in a higher power.

 

But one thing appears to the young priest as the pinnacle of the arrogance and the strongest proof against the inner genuineness of the church.

 

When Peter Schaedl often gazes at the stars in the night sky, admires their greatness and at the same time ponders the endless worlds that seem so tiny in the sky and are yet so infinitely larger than the broad lands and seas spanning the globe, or if he in daytime looks up at the shining chain of visible mountains, then he is full of reverence and admiration for the great God who created nature and gave his eternal laws to everything on the earth.

 

Peter is deeply ashamed, when he thinks that he puts on colorful clothes and presents himself as representative of this his mighty God and professionally, for good money, dispenses to the people the grace of this great, eternal God. In such moments he feels himself a swindler, a deceiver, a con man toward God and people.

 

6.

 

The decision of life comes fatefully. Straight and rigid, hard and defiant, Peter Schaedl runs into this fate.

 

He rebels against a spiritual superior who is ready to stomp on the honor of his folk, because the church stands above his folk for him.

 

The church court sentences Peter to cloister arrest for his unpriestly behavior. Peter Schaedl refuses obedience.

 

The church suspends and excommunicates him.

 

Peter Schaedl’s priest life is over. For fifteen years he has prepared himself for this priesthood. For five years he has honestly tried to live it, and the world in which he had lived for twenty years has finally collapsed in ruin. What was so dear to him, what he had fought, suffered and prayed for so long, what had become his most sacred ideal, what he over the course of time put his whole heart into, what seemed sacred and inviolable to him, that has now collapsed, that no longer exists in his life. Now he is no longer God’s representative, no longer venerable, rather the quite ordinary Peter Schaedl.

 

Since the church’s verdict has been issued, since the priest has been expelled form the community of the sole grace-dispensing church, he is suddenly seized by a strange feeling of loneliness. Shaken, Peter looks behind the ruins of his former life and his ideals, and front of him he sees a void, a chaos, a darkness and terrible abandonment.

 

In the following period, Peter constantly wanders about, hunted and pursued. Many of the fellow brothers and other pious Christian feel obligated to mock and ridicule him from the pulpit and in letters as a traitor or Judas. Numerous anonymous letters threaten him with revenge, shame, distress and misery. Yes, even his imminent murder is threatened. The end and the meaning of all these threats and defamation is always the same: Peter Schaedl should himself get a rope and hang himself on the next tree like Judas in order to escape an even worse death and to fulfill his fate as quickly as possible.

 

For Peter’s family members, his step is the most severe blow. They cannot understand him. For them, he has now fallen to the devil forever. Peter’s former fellow brothers, the priests of the church, do their part in order to portray the priest’s fall as contemptibly as possible to the family members. “It was probably a frivolous woman”, they declare, boosting. The pious mother wishes her son were dead; she would prefer that over experiencing this shame and to have to call a fallen priest her son. Day and night, the woman cries her eyes red and does not know what to do. She no longer ever dares to go onto the street, because she is ashamed to show herself there. Peter Schaedl knows this, and it pains him more than many other things.

 

Despised, cast off, hated and scorned, at most still pitied a little by the people who were previously dear to him, who stood close to him, with whom he had walked for 20 years of his life, now he stands before an unknown fate and is compelled at first to look around for a little bread and work. He knows that many a former priest must sell newspaper or shoelaces on street corners, beg a living as travelling salesmen without any experience, spend their lives as miners and helpers in factories and at construction sites. That will now become his fate as well.

 

7.

 

Day and night, Peter Schaedl is tormented by unrest and worry, and they often drive him close to desperation. One cold winter night he wanders, again starving and freezing, along the bank of the broad river. He continues on the street that leads between the water and the train tracks.

 

Off to the side, a few hours distant, lies the cloister that was supposed to serve his recovery. Only mechanically does he still put one foot in front of the other. Is not his whole life blown? Is he not on the wrong track, from which there is no return to the right path? Would it not be best to get rid of himself, now, since his whole life has become meaningless?

 

Peter is gripped by a terrible temptation: To now plunge himself into the sweeping river and leave everything behind him; or should he even go over to the train tracks, perhaps that is a faster death?

 

Or should he penitently knock on the nearby cloister door and, in silent peace, lead his young life to a perhaps no longer distant death? –Peter Schaedl stops on the lonely road, for his reason and his heart do not want to go on given all the confusion and desperation.

 

But then he gains clarity. Now that he stands at the lowest point in his life, his conscience tells him quite clearly that he must not become cowardly now. He would do the greatest favor for the world he has escaped, if he would now give up the fight. He must dare the path into the future, as unclear and vague as it may be. He feels that this path must somewhere and someday lead into the new time, whose traces he previously more surmised than recognized.

 

With the firm decision to fight on, his self-confidence also grows.

 

Meanwhile, Peter Schaedl has asked himself during the past weeks, whether he is not indeed that unworthy, despicable Judas as such he has been reviled and hated. But then he must again and again think about his former fellow brothers, and he reflects again on how they put up with their priesthood in reality.

 

8.

 

Peter Schaedl remembers his fellow brother Alois Pfandl, the upright chaplain. Since the time when he, as a little Latin pupil in the cloister school, became acquainted with him, he has always remained equally dry and calm, equally immobile and well-behaved. During his student period he had to work hard, but thanks to his diligence he had it to the Abitur examination. But in the theological college, his piety was valued more highly than his test scores. Whatever he found in the learned theological books, he always memorized without any deliberation and further reflection. He always told himself: More intelligent people have written that, it will be true, even if I do not understand it. So he did not have any doubts in his faith. As a priest he can present all the church’s doctrines without second thought in sermons and classes to children and adults full of conviction. Natural stirrings and feelings are not very strong in him, so priestly chastity does not cause him any difficulties, and he feels as little bound to folk and homeland as to any individual human being. Peter Schaedl knows that his former fellow brother is an honest, pious, good priest, but has little understanding for a struggle such as his own, just as he cannot envy him for his peaceful priestly happiness.

 

Peter also remembers his former classmate Bonifaz Seldbauer, who in school actually always possessed the most knowledge and who simultaneously also combined his reason with artistic tendencies. He composed flowery verses and played first violin in the school orchestra. Among the singers, he was the soloist, and he received instruction from the school’s best piano teacher. He spent at least half of his free periods in the house chapel in prayer, confessed weekly and took communion every day.

 

But even the smallest Latin pupils talked mockingly about the temptations of pious Seldbauer. One time the religion teacher said that if one has such unchaste thoughts, one should say a silent prayer and caress one’s face and eyes with the hand, and then the temptations would go away. Since then, one saw Seldbauer for weeks with a bitter expression at every occasion, in games and eating, at prayer or study, caressing his eyes with his hand, until the superiors finally became aware due to the general laughter of the boys and enlightened the thirteen year old boy.

 

The present city priest Bonifaz Seldbauer has not changed. The human being within him is in a bitter struggle with the priest. He wrestles day after day with doubts in faith arising from his reason, he tortures himself in order to be able to honestly proclaim the truth from the pulpit, and believes after every sermon again that he cannot face his conscience.

 

In many a conversation with Peter Schad’, he revealed his innermost to his friend of back then, and confessed that German blood and natural feeling also lived within him. But the young preacher cannot and will not betray the great supra- governmental idea to which he has sworn an oath, and so he consumes and torments himself in inner conflict and discord, destroys himself body and soul, and forces the souls entrusted to him into the same inner distortion and servitude.

 

The ascetic city preacher is much admired, and few days pass without a greeting or attention from young girls and women who seek to express their admiration for him.

 

Again and again, the young priest feels spellbound by the pious female souls and feels drawn to them as human beings, just to again appear to himself afterward as a base, unworthy cleric slain by the devil.

 

Peter Schaedl knows that this priest, his former friend, will now swing between understanding and hatred toward him as well. But he still only has deep regret for this poor, restless priest.

 

Peter thinks back to a shocking experience that he had with auxiliary cleric Huber from the neighboring parish of his homeland.

 

It was on the day when Peter returned home from his worker-student period sunburned. The young theology student had described his peat-cutting job to the twenty years older spiritual guide. During that conversation, he had replied: “Still, it’s a nicer job than our pigsty work as priests.” At first, the young student had taken this for a bad joke, and the auxiliary cleric had explained: “I have been a priest for fifteen years now. Back then, I did not know otherwise, when I had myself consecrated as a priest. But then I quickly became acquainted with the swindle. And then one simply cannot get away. Then it is too late. One has given one’s sacred oath, and as a sacrifice of the great God, one gradually lands daily in deception and swindle and in incessant filthiness. You are still young; you can still escape this misery; if you find no other occupation, then remain a navvy, and you will be happier for your whole life than you could ever be as priest or bishop!”

 

Peter was deeply shocked back then. But his superiors managed to interpret the priest’s words to him as the talk of a sick man.

 

Since this time, Peter Schaedl has become acquainted with several similar priests, who – suffering or laughing – have accepted that their future life is a swindle, that they must in their life and work deceive both themselves as well as the faithful. He knows many a theologian who speaks of poverty and simultaneously enriches himself through usury, theft and deception, who preaches chastity and secretly gives in to the vice, who gives the appearance of humility, but is a tyrant in reality. In his memory, Peter Schaedl has all his former fellow brothers pass before him, and his thoughts remain on one of the last, Alfons Pfeil, his roommate at the university.

 

He had never concerned himself much with religious problems and dogmatic issues. And his piety was not exactly exemplary. For him, the church was the great religious power to which he had prescribed and for whose political and world- view goals he blindly and fanatically fought. Personal ambition and action for his idea – as so often for cold, rational people – flowed together in one current. So Alfons Pfeil became a skilled and well-known diplomat of his church already at an early age, so did many others become equally fanatical professors, editors, club leaders or organizers in priest robes or even bishop.

 

All of them are somehow similar to these types, without one doing them an injustice, all, with whom Peter Schaedl had once been a priest.

 

He certainly did not have to be ashamed before God and himself, before a naturally thinking world and posterity, because he has broken out of their ranks.

 

9.

 

There are still difficult months that Peter must overcome, months of worry about himself and his family members, months of inner loneliness and abandonment, of searching and wrestling. His health has been severely impaired by the past years of emotional struggles. Now that the inner decision been made and the emotional tensions have dissolved, the body does not want to hold out. He is very ill for a long time.

 

The church leaves him to his distress.

 

After months, he finally receives an admonishment from the General Vicar to repent.

 

He does not answer the letter.

 

Another admonishment follows with a reference to the punishment of hell, to which he is condemned until Judgement Day. His former superiors believe that he had meanwhile become tired enough due to distress and misery and stands at the abyss so that he is again susceptible to church influence.

 

But after his difficult struggle, Peter no longer has any fear of hell. A new, serious letter from the church officials comes, in which he is admonished to think of the tears of his mother and sisters.

 

Peter thinks more intensely than at any other time, almost hourly, about home and his mother; he suffers more from her tears than any bishop can imagine.

 

Nonetheless, the church does not give up the attempt to win back the apostate. It promises merciful forgiveness and reinstatement in his profession, it offers the prospect of the most tempting positions, it takes many other paths in order to re- conquer for itself the fallen away priest in whom it had placed the greatest hope, or at last to neutralize him for all time.

 

Among many other letters, which are more or less meaningless to the young, former priest, he receives a letter from his former religion teacher, who up until recently might have been able to still say and to mean something important to him, but which – in these, his inwardly most victorious days – only touch him as a human being.

 

The priest writes: “Dear Young Fried, I write you, trembling, from my death bed. I was operated on a few days ago and my condition is hopeless. According to the doctor’s opinion, my life will end in a few days. I hence already half stand in the beyond. Take my words as a greeting from the other world. In the forty years of my work, you were one of my very best pupils. Your knowledge, your piety and your sunny nature made be expect for you a glorious career in the service of our sacred mother, the church. My death hour, however, is now darkened, because precisely you have taken a false path. You could transfigure my death through your repentance. Standing with one foot in the grave, I ask you for that.”

 

Peter Schaedl wants to forget the church. He has, admittedly, not yet completely overcome it, but everything drives him away from it. He wants to build a new world for himself and begin a new life.

 

 

Part Five

 

The laws of nature are the laws of God. To live according to them, is service to God and highest obligation at the same time.

 

To celebrate the marriages of nature is the holiest celebration.

 

1.

 

Everything that the hatred of an intolerant priest caste can think up has been tasted by Peter Schaedl, the former priest. Distress, misery, defamation, outlawing, mockery, scorn, contempt – all that he has had to experience and endure daily in new form again and again.

 

If he had not rescued his faith in God from the ruins of his collapsed world, he would have probably perished body and soul.

 

Peter now feels much closer to this God than at the most solemn times of his former life. Now he does not need to take a detour via church and sacraments and no mediation via bishops and Pope, if he wants to know that his relationship with the Almighty is in order; he is no longer separated from him by cannon and rubric regulations.

 

For him, God is the essence of everything great, mighty, beautiful, sublime and good. Whether this God is portrayed personally or impersonally, whether one defines him so or differently, any dogmatic formulation or theological determination of the highest power no longer touches him today, him, who a decade ago debated the most subtle dogmatic debates with such zeal.

 

Peter understands that a folk that is strong and mighty due to its great historical past, and that lives in closest bond with mighty nature and possesses the deepest, personal values, can also only have the very greatest concept of God.

 

Many representatives of other churches woe Peter Schaedl in this period and ask him to build a great movement of the fallen away within the Catholic clergy. But he is just as little interested in another church as he knows a hatred against the Catholic church.

 

In the beginning, since he was still under the influence of his impending annihilation, he often believed that he would have to hate and curse the church and all its represents for his whole life, because he had been robbed of his youth and his ideals.

 

But now the church is so distant for him; he feels so free of it that he no longer needs to hate it. He views it as a historical event.

 

For about a thousand years, the church had served broad circles of the German folk as a substitute for the natural belief in God and played a mediator role between people and their Lord God. Great Germans have expressed their wisdom and their artistic energies in the church’s language of forms. Full of reverence, he observes the works created on church commission; but at the same time, he feels the painful wounds that the church has inflicted on the German folk during the long centuries.

 

But Peter now sees a time dawning in which the priests must step back behind the true God himself, in which the church must step into the background from its previous position, because Germans again hear, understand and speak God’s voice, the voice of their blood, within themselves.

 

Peter now sees in the church only a transitory tool of the creator that has fulfilled its task and now, relieved by a new era, is silently set aside.

 

During this time Peter receives a letter from his mother that is filled with a question that is constantly tormenting her: “Is it true, what they say, that you want to erect a new faith and a new religion?”

 

He can clearly give his mother the liberating answer: “No, my heart belongs to the one, old, indestructible belief in God, which every German carries in his heart in one form or another. This God has set down his laws in the laws of life. They are sacred to me and will obligate me for my whole life.”

 

Peter Schaedl immerses himself ever deeper into these laws of life; into those that were valid millennia ago and will be valid in millennia. He meets those fighters for whom during his priesthood he could summon up only a silent, deep admiration. But now he joins the ranks of these men, who victoriously carry the difficult struggle into the foremost ranks of the German folk, in order to then make it proud, free, happy and mighty again before the whole world.

 

Peter finds the completion of his thoughts in the words of these people; in their deeds he sees the most glorious fulfillment of his life.

 

Peter experiences that fathers and mothers are the most natural mediums to God for their children, he notices that those men who are the leaders of their folk simultaneously feel responsible for this folk before God. Peter himself feels that the celebrations of the annual cycle and the great historical days of remembrance are simultaneously hours of celebration close to God, and that the sunny festive places of people are simultaneously their sacred sites.

 

It required a truly difficult and long path before Peter gained this view. Whoever has walked for twenty years through the school of the church, as priest or monk, carries the seal of that world burned deep into body and soul, even if he has long since set aide cowl and tonsure.

 

At first, Peter had to fight against a wall of distrust. Often he thought he would never be able to find his way back into the life of the folk; then he believed that nature had totally expelled and cursed him, because he had acted against its laws for so long.

 

When he frequently encountered, joyful, happy, laughing youth, he was totally demoralized in view of the bitter feeling that in twenty years so much had been destroyed for him. Because he took his profession so sincerely and seriously, he had to fight against all naturalness. His original tendencies had been stomped into the ground. He had to renounce his fresh youthful nature in order to become an eternally serious, reserved, young oldster always pouring over problems.

 

Only gradually did Peter find the path to his folk. This is harder for him that he had experienced, and a lot of time passes before he has found it fully and with all its consequences. Previously, the church was the closest and highest thing for him, and feeling for another energy, a bond with anything else, was not allowed to exist.

 

That was the first great thing that Peter had to learn, that God first put him into his folk, that he shares the same blood with each member, that the same talents and burdens bind him to this folk, and that he must stand by it always.

 

He had to comprehend that the highest law is the obligation toward the German folk, with which the chain of his ancestors binds him, and that all moral responsibility results from it.

 

Within his priest activity, Peter had become acquainted with many people who know nothing about an obligation, people who – totally imprisoned in an oriental world – ignore all order, all laws, all human honor, right and life.

 

The great time and its people however, now make it easy for him to absorb the new basic laws into his affirmation of faith and of life. They show him noble, straight, honest and kind people, who give him firm support and a mighty certainly, so that he no longer needs to search for evidence for the correctness of his path.

 

So the former Catholic priest Peter gradually builds a new world for himself. He works and produces. It is a silent, little work, which he is allowed to perform somewhere in the life of his folk, hidden and yet within the framework of the totality as a great work.

 

It is this work that step by step leads him back into real life and lets him stride ever more straight and genuine upon the tracks of naturalness and life joy.

 

Through this tenacious, silent work at his modest place, Peter again becomes a living member of his folk.

 

He feels joyful, free and happy, happier than ever before in his life. Unambiguous and clear, he again sees everything that is great, beautiful and good in the world, and, above all, he feels so close to the working of the great God.

 

2.

 

Like at the shore of the infinite sea, a rustling and surging goes through the hundreds of thousands of people who stand under the night sky on the great meadow, assembled in columns four abreast.

 

German forest surrounds the broad square, and on one side the glistening of the great dike is visible between the trees, in which the moon and the stars are reflected. In the distance one sees the lights of the city. The front of the broad meadow is formed by a mighty pillared building. Almost like a mighty altar, it juts gigantic into the dark sky.

 

Then the monumental building suddenly radiates blinding white in shining light, and - above the great meadow and the people - a cathedral is created by countless beams of light. After many hundreds of meters, this canopy of cathedral light is united with the stars of the sky.

 

Devout silence lies over the broad field; hundreds of thousands hold their breath. The symbols of the folk, symbols of faith and life, are carried ahead. The blood red flags sweep like wandering blazes along the infinite rows of people.

 

The hundreds of thousands sing a song. This song is simultaneously jubilation, gratitude and prayer.

 

What the man of the folk says, that is what each one of the vast crowd of people also wants to feel and say at this moment.

 

They stand there close together, peasants, workers, soldiers, officials, scholars, men, women and children from all classes and of every age. Every eye glistens with emotion, and each feels that since a folk has come together again, no one stands alone anymore, rather each belongs to the next, even if he does not know him. Each feels within himself the blood current of his folk, for this short hour leads each of these people millennia back and millennia forward.

 

Hundreds of thousands experience this hour like Peter Schaedl. All feel the same that an old era has collapsed, that a folk has burst its chains and assembles free, happy and devout for the march into new millennia, obeying God’s law!