Bless also my enemies: the witness of Blessed Leisner

Inscription reads: 'Bless also, O Most High, my enemies'

Karl Leisner (1915-1945) was a German priest who died shortly after being held as a prisoner in Dachau concentration camp outside Munich. Dachau was the proto-type concentration camp conceived by the Nazis at the very beginning of their tyrannical reign in 1933.  During his formative years as a young man he was active in the Schoenstatt movement.

I recall visiting Dachau and seeing the cells and barracks where priests were imprisoned. The camp contained a special section, the so-called 'Priests' Block', in which many Catholic clergy were confined.

Leisner was possibly only known to the Nazis as a catholic activist arrested for articulating anti-Nazi views.

Leisner was showed extraordinary leadership and courage in the period leading up to his arrest in 1939.  He encouraged young people to remain faithful to Christ and not to submit to Nazi ideology.

Already under Gestapo surveillance because of his Catholic youth leadership, Leisner was arrested in 1939 after making a critical remark about Hitler while recovering in a sanatorium.

Although ordained a deacon in 1939, he was not ordained until a few months before his death. The ordination took place in secret involving a fellow prisoner – bishop Piguet. A Sister Imma Mack (known as the 'Angel of Dachau) managed to smuggle in a ritual book, vestments and sacred chrism for what is believed to have been the only ordination that occurred in a Nazi concentration camp. He managed to celebrate only one mass (in secret). Leisner was united with Our Lord in his ultimate sacrifice and death from TB shortly after Dachau was liberated.

One of his favourite prayers was:

"Bless also, O Most High, my enemies."

In 1996, he was declared Blessed by the Church along with Bernhard Lichtenberg.  These martyrs witnessed to truth and love in the midst of terrible evil and injustice.