Alfred Delp in Berlin’s “People’s Court”, January 8-9, 1945 One day in mid-January, 1945, the Jesuit Alfred Delp wrote to his secretary from his cell in Berlin’s Tegel Prison: “I’ve begun writing a few thoughts on the Pentecost prayer for you.” The letter was later dated “after...
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1879 In December 1918, a ninety-seven-year-old widow by the name of Catherine Hopkins, received a modest volume of poetry with a simple blue cover. The title was Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The book, prepared and edited by England’s Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges,...
In the story “The Enduring Chill” by the fiction writer of the American South, Flannery O’Connor, an atheistic character by the name of Asbury is visited by a Jesuit priest. Asbury, who fancies himself literary and intellectual, comes home to die and is met by...
In 1946, two years before Thomas Merton’s book The Seven Storey Mountain brought Trappist monasteries into popular focus, a twenty-one-year-old man set out on a ship from France to try his vocation in one of them. His destination was the Abbey of Notre-Dame du Lac...
At the beginning of his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton introduces himself thus: “On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains...
At six o’clock on a summer morning, the only sound outside the Trappist Abbaye Val Notre Dame is the croaking of two bull frogs in the nearby pond. The abbey, located deep inside the foothills of the Laurentian Mountains in southern Quebec, is so remote...
Alfred Delp was taken to the execution chamber of Plotzensee Prison and hanged about 3 o-clock in the afternoon of February 2, 1945. Hitler had ordered that the ashes of those executed for resistance be scattered over sewage. This is probably what happened to Delp's...
On January 31, 1945, Alfred Delp was driven to Plotzensee Prison where his street clothes were exchanged for the prisoner's striped clothing. He took nothing with him from his Tegel cell except his rosary. At Plotzensee he asked the chaplain for a copy of The Imitation...
On January 30 Alfred Delp wrote his last note on a prison order form to the two Mariannes: "Pray and have faith. Thank you. Dp"...
To Franz von Tattenbach SJ Dear Tatt, This week has been the hardest of all these many weeks...