Blessed Rupert Mayer (1876-1945)

Birth in Stuttgart and years of formation

Rupert Mayer was born on 23 January 1876 in Stuttgart, in the Kingdom of Wurttemberg, into a well-to-do Catholic family of merchants; he was one of six children.^[9] A gifted pupil, he attended the Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium in Stuttgart and then the Spohn-Gymnasium in Ravensburg, where he passed his Abitur in 1894.^[10][11] Drawn early to the priesthood, he studied philosophy and theology in Fribourg (Switzerland), Munich (at the Georgianum), and Tubingen (at the Wilhelmstift).^[12][13]

He was ordained priest on 2 May 1899 in Rottenburg, for the Diocese of Rottenburg.^[14] But the young diocesan priest already carried within him a more radical call: religious life.

From the diocesan clergy to the Society of Jesus

From June 1899 to August 1900, he was curate in Spaichingen, at the foot of the Dreifaltigkeitsberg, then asked to enter the Society of Jesus.^[15][16][17] On 1 October 1900, he crossed the threshold of the Jesuit novitiate in Feldkirch, in the Austrian Vorarlberg — the Jesuits were then forbidden to found houses in Germany after Bismarck's Kulturkampf (the Jesuit law was repealed only in 1917).^[18][19] He was twenty-four and gave up an assured diocesan career for Ignatian poverty and obedience.

The itinerant mission preacher (1906-1911)

From 1906, once his Jesuit formation was completed, Rupert Mayer became a popular mission preacher: he traveled through Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands, preaching parish missions, retreats, and spiritual exercises.^[20][21] These years gave him a remarkable command of preaching and direct contact with working-class and rural crowds — an experience that shaped the clear, popular, vehement pulpit orator he would later become in Munich.

Chaplain to migrants

In 1912, Rupert Mayer was sent to Munich, where he would exercise the greater part of his ministry until his death.^[22][23] The Bavarian capital was then receiving a massive influx of migrants from the countryside looking for work. Mayer was entrusted with their pastoral care: he visited new arrivals, identified their material and spiritual needs, organized the reception of uprooted families, and looked for housing and employment.^[24][25] There he earned the title "Apostle of Munich": a priest to be found wherever misery needed relief.

The Men's Marian Congregation

From 1921, Rupert Mayer became prefect of the Marianische Mannerkongregation (Men's Marian Congregation) of Munich, which he transformed into a powerful network of committed laymen grown to over 7,000 members.^[26][27][28] Under his direction this Marian sodality became a center of manly spiritual life and active charity: religious formation, mutual aid, and social works. Later it would also be one of the few spaces where Catholic men could stand together under the pressure of the regime.

A volunteer on three fronts

When the First World War broke out, Rupert Mayer volunteered as a military chaplain as early as 1914.^[29][30] First assigned to a field hospital, he obtained permission to be sent to the front line, among the soldiers, on the fronts of France, Poland, and Romania.^[31] His bravery under fire and his disregard of danger in reaching the wounded and dying in the trenches won admiration.

First chaplain awarded the Iron Cross

In March 1915, Rupert Mayer received the Iron Cross 2nd class for his bravery in serving soldiers at the front — a first for a chaplain; on 12 December 1915, he received the Iron Cross 1st class.^[32][33] The distinction, exceptional for a non-combatant, says enough about the physical courage of this man of God who went under fire to reach the wounded.

"The limping priest"

On 30 December 1916, in the Sulta valley, in Romania, where he served as chaplain of the 8th Bavarian Reserve Division, his left leg was torn apart by a grenade fragment and had to be amputated — the operation was performed by the physician and writer Hans Carossa, stationed on the same sector of the front.^[34][35][36] Back in Munich for convalescence, now wearing a prosthesis, he would forever be "the limping priest" (der hinkende Priester).^[37] Far from diminishing him, this mutilation added to his moral authority: when he later stood up to the Nazis, he did so with the aura of a decorated disabled veteran whom the regime found all the harder to silence.

Mass at the railway station

After returning from the front, Rupert Mayer redoubled his charitable activity. From 1925, he brought to life Sunday evening services in a hall of Munich Central Station, for travelers, workers, and migrants passing through.^[38] This legendary station ministry shows his genius for seeking souls where they actually were, outside ordinary parish frameworks.

"Rather help nine people too many"

His charity did not calculate. According to the testimony reported by the British Jesuits, Rupert Mayer preferred to be deceived by helping nine people who did not really need it rather than risk turning away the tenth, who was in real distress.^[39]

This disposition of heart — give first, verify afterward — makes him one of the great social apostles of twentieth-century German Catholicism, in the line of active charity embodied by other blesseds among the poor.

An early and unambiguous "no"

Where many hesitated, Rupert Mayer saw early and clearly. Already regarded in the 1920s as "the voice of the Catholics" of Munich, he watched the rise of National Socialism with rare lucidity and affirmed that a believer could not belong to that party.^[40] Having discerned the danger as early as the 1920s, he carried this conviction into his public preaching from the seizure of power, in January 1933, especially from the pulpit of Saint Michael's Church.^[41][42] For him, Christianity and Nazi racial and totalitarian ideology were incompatible — a position few dared state so plainly in public.

The speaking ban of April 1937

His freedom of speech soon became intolerable to the regime. After local speaking bans from 1935^[43], in April 1937 the Berlin Gestapo pronounced a speaking ban (Redeverbot) against him valid for the whole Reich^[44][45] — the order to stop speaking in public was served on him in Munich in May 1937^[46]. Rupert Mayer refused to submit: for him, silence would have meant betraying his priestly mission. On 5 June 1937, he was arrested and placed in "protective custody" at Stadelheim Prison in Munich.^[47][48]

The trial of July 1937

On 22 July 1937, Rupert Mayer appeared before the special court (Sondergericht) of Munich, accused of "abuse of the pulpit" and violation of the law against "malicious" statements (Heimtuckegesetz).^[49] Judgment was pronounced the next day, 23 July: six months in prison, minus the six weeks of preventive detention already served.^[50] Before his judges, he did not plead prudence: he announced publicly that he would continue to preach, whatever the verdict.

"Despite the ban on speaking pronounced against me, I shall continue to preach, even if the State authorities call my sermons punishable acts and abuses of the pulpit." — Blessed Rupert Mayer, before the special court of Munich, July 1937^[51][52]

But, faced with the indignation of Cardinal Faulhaber and much of the Munich population, the Jesuit was released, his six-month sentence remaining suspended.^[53][54] It was only a fragile respite.

Landsberg Prison (January – 3 May 1938)

As he continued to preach against the regime, Rupert Mayer was arrested again on 5 January 1938 and taken to Landsberg am Lech Prison.^[55][56] He was released only on 3 May 1938, freed by an amnesty — after four months of detention.^[57][58]

Sachsenhausen (1939-1940)

After the outbreak of the war, the regime struck harder. On 3 November 1939, Rupert Mayer was arrested again and deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Oranienburg, where he endured seven months of isolation.^[59][60] The health of the sixty-three-year-old priest, already weakened by his war injury, deteriorated gravely.

Fearing that he might die in custody and become a martyr capable of galvanizing Catholics, the Nazi authorities preferred to remove him from view.^[61] In August 1940, he was released from the camp — at the price of an absolute ban on preaching — and placed under house arrest.^[62][63] (The German Resistance Memorial Center notice dates this release to April 1940.^[64])

Forced exile at Ettal Abbey (1940-1945)

From 1940 to 1945, Rupert Mayer lived confined at the Benedictine Abbey of Ettal, in Upper Bavaria, under Gestapo surveillance, cut off from all public ministry.^[65][66] For this man of action, wholly turned toward souls, that imposed silence was perhaps the heaviest trial. He lived it in prayer and abandonment, as his famous prayer of trust attests, though the date of its composition is not established.^[67] He was freed only in May 1945 by American troops, as the Reich collapsed.^[68]

In the heart of the night — camp, illness, silence, war — Rupert Mayer found peace in total abandonment to the will of God. He left a brief prayer of self-surrender (Ergebungsgebet), which became one of the best-loved prayers in German-speaking Catholicism.^[69]

"Lord, as You will, let it be done to me, / and as You will, so I will go. / Help me only to understand Your will. // Lord, when You will, then it is time, / and when You will, I am ready, / today and for all eternity. // Lord, what You will, I accept, / and what You will is my gain. / It is enough that I am Yours. // Lord, because You will it, it is good, / and because You will it, I have courage, / my heart rests in Your hands." — Blessed Rupert Mayer, prayer of abandonment (English translation of the German text)^[70]

His whole spirituality is contained in these lines: not passive resignation, but a filial trust that makes obedience to God the source of courage. This abandonment — doing God's will in trust — remains distinct from what the tradition of Luisa Piccarreta calls living in the Divine Will, the singular gift by which God unites the soul to His own and unique will.

Freed, Rupert Mayer refused all rest. He immediately resumed preaching in Munich, returning to his crowds and to the pulpit of Saint Michael's. But his body, worn down by war, camp, and illness, was exhausted.

On the morning of All Saints' Day, 1 November 1945, while celebrating the 8 a.m. Mass in the Chapel of the Cross (Kreuzkapelle) of Saint Michael's Church and preaching on the saints in Heaven, he was suddenly struck by a stroke.^[71][72] According to English-language Jesuit accounts, his reported last words, before he collapsed, were a threefold invocation of the Lord^[73][74]; German accounts specify that he lost consciousness and died shortly afterwards without regaining it^[75].

He died shortly afterwards. He was sixty-nine, and he fell in the full exercise of his ministry, on the day when the Church celebrates all the saints.

The tomb that became a shrine

First buried in the Jesuit cemetery at Pullach, Rupert Mayer's body was, on 23 May 1948, transferred to the crypt of the Burgersaalkirche (Unterkirche), in the heart of Munich, his first tomb already drawing crowds of pilgrims.^[76][77][78] His tomb immediately became a much-frequented place of pilgrimage, where Munich's faithful still come to pray and leave their intentions.

The cause and beatification (1951-1987)

The informative process for beatification was opened as early as 26 September 1951.^[79] In 1956, Pope Pius XII declared him Servant of God; in 1983, John Paul II recognized the heroicity of his virtues, giving him the title of Venerable.^[80] Finally, on 3 May 1987, during his journey to Germany, Pope John Paul II beatified Rupert Mayer at Munich's Olympic Stadium.^[81][82][83] His liturgical feast is fixed on 3 November in the Jesuit order and several German dioceses.^[84]

The table below summarizes the major stages of his life.

Rupert Mayer's life is that of a whole priest, in whom charity and courage are one. Three lessons remain.

• Faith engages public speech. Rupert Mayer did not separate private piety from public responsibility: when Nazi ideology threatened truth and human dignity, he spoke, knowing what he risked. "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29) was not a formula for him, but a program.
• Charity precedes calculation. To prefer helping nine false needy persons rather than turning away one truly poor person: this rule of the heart sums up a Christianity of concrete mercy that does not pay itself in words.
• Abandonment is the source of courage. His prayer of abandonment reveals the secret of his strength: not a clenched will, but the trustful surrender of everything into God's hands that makes one able to stand in prison, in the camp, in silence — and to die in the very act of announcing the Gospel.

"Lord, because You will it, it is good, and because You will it, I have courage: my heart rests in Your hands." — Blessed Rupert Mayer^[85]

• Blessed Miguel Pro (1891-1927) — Mexican Jesuit priest, martyr of another contemporary anticlerical persecution, another face of priestly fidelity at the risk of life.
• Blessed Clemens August von Galen (1878-1946) — Bishop of Munster, the "Lion of Munster", another great German Catholic voice against National Socialism.
• Blessed Frederic Ozanam (1813-1853) — lay founder of the Conferences of Charity, in the same line of concrete service to the poor.
• Blessed Antoine Chevrier (1826-1879) — priest of the poor and of the Cross, a spiritual brother of the Apostle of Munich.