Alban Ernst Bunse

Alban Ernst Bunse (born November 3, 1919 in Laar ; † November 18, 2003 in Heiligenkreuz ) was a German Roman Catholic clergyman and Cistercian .

Life

Origin and school education

Ernst Bunse was the third child of a Duisburg ironworker and a saleswoman. From 1934 to 1938 he attended the Franciscan School Schloss Exaten in Baexem (today: Leudal ) in the province of Limburg in the Netherlands . He returned to Duisburg and passed the Abitur at Landfermann-Gymnasium in 1940 .

The letter to Hitler and the consequences

Bunse became a soldier in 1940, wounded outside Leningrad , fought in the Battle of the Volkhov , was wounded again in the winter of 1942/1943 and was taken to a hospital camp in East Prussia. From there he wrote a letter directly to Adolf Hitler , in which he asked him to forbid the atrocities against the Russian people and especially against the Orthodox Church . He was admitted to the psychiatric department of the Königsberg hospital, picked up there by his mother and taken out of service in Dortmund in April 1943. In pursuit of the intention to enter a Swiss monastery, he was arrested at the border and, after passing through a prison, was admitted to the psychiatric clinic in Freiburg im Breisgau . Since he finally refused to eat food there because of the inhumane conditions (and was force-fed), his mother was informed again, who arrived and was transferred to the Alexians in Münster.

Miner in the Ruhr area

At the end of the war he was released and turned to Therese Neumann (who encouraged him to become a priest) and Reinhold Schneider (who advised him to build up a "serious and honest existence") for advice . He became a miner, and after studying engineering in Essen and Bochum (graduation in 1951), he was a driver , later safety officer at the Erin colliery (1973 retired at 54 years of age due to pneumonia ).

Encounter with Alban Brauckhoff and church engagement

After his mother's death, he lived in Castrop-Rauxel from 1949 with the mother of the Dominican Father Alban M. Brauckhoff (* April 24, 1915 - August 11, 1960), who was a missionary in China from 1940 until his expulsion in 1954 and then lived in Schwichteler Monastery in Cappeln (Oldenburg) until his death . Bunse supported the Dominican mission organizations (he traveled to Taiwan himself ), was involved in the Catholic workers' movement and in the Kolping Society and was chairman of the parish council .

The Cistercian

In 1988 he came into contact with the Cistercians from Heiligenkreuz Abbey in Stiepel Monastery and accepted the invitation of the Austrian monastery to join. On August 15, 1990, at the age of 70, he was dressed and took the religious name Alban. He studied theology and was ordained a priest on June 14, 1996 at the age of 76 (together with Wolfgang Gottfried Buchmüller ) by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn . He died of a heart attack seven years later in the monastery garden and was buried in Stiepel. In Eheliyagoda ( Ratnapura District ) in Sri Lanka , the Father Alban House bears his name.

literature

• Wolfgang Buchmüller : Father Alban Bunse. A witness to freedom of conscience . Be & Be, Heiligenkreuz 2014, ISBN 3902694696 .

Web links

• Gerd Gessinger: Bunse, Alban. In: Biographia Cisterciensis . 20th December 2017 .