Manfred Hörhammer

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P. Manfred Hörhammer (1982)

Manfred Hörhammer (birth name: Friedrich René Chrismant ; born November 26, 1905 in Munich , † August 12, 1985 in Planegg ) was a Capuchin priest and co-founder of Pax Christi .

As the son of a French mother and a German father, he campaigned for reconciliation with France after the Second World War , and later with Poland and Israel . "From the legacy of two core nations on this continent, he gave his heart and soul for peace and understanding from the spirit of Christ," said the former Limburg auxiliary bishop and Pax Christi president Walther Kampe about him.

Biographical

Hörhammer's mother was Ernestine Clementine Chrismant, a socialite ( governess ) from Lunéville ( France ). She gave language lessons to members of the royal family from the House of Wittelsbach and accompanied them on trips.

His biological father was Friedrich Ferdinand Heinrich Wilhelm Haupt Graf zu Pappenheim , royal court marshal and personal adjutant to Crown Prince Ruprecht .

On August 19, 1916, the mother married Franz Hörhammer, a graduate student from Haag an der Amper , who recognized Friedrich as a child on September 1, 1916. Franz Hörhammer was a teacher at the Oberrealschule Ingolstadt from 1926 to 1932 , then a teacher of new languages at the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Munich until 1937 .

Educational path

School career

Fritz Hörhammer first attended the Simmern School and later the neighboring Haimhaus School in Munich-Schwabing. After primary school he moved to the Royal Maximilians Gymnasium in Munich in 1915 . In 1920 his parents sent him to the seminary of the Benedictine monastery in Metten .

Fritz Hörhammer then decided to become a religious priest, but shied away from the “ Stabilitas loci ” of the Benedictines and therefore switched to the Capuchin boarding school in Burghausen ad Salzach in 1922 , where he attended the upper level of the Humanistic Gymnasium (today: Kurfürst-Maximilian-Gymnasium ) and passed the Abitur in 1924. The upper school students in the Capuchin boarding school were so-called Tertiary clerics and already wore habit and tonsure. Fritz Hörhammer was dressed on April 21, 1922 and was given the religious name Manfred.

Decision for the Capuchin Order

After graduating from high school in 1924, Brother Manfred moved to the Capuchin novitiate in Laufen ad Salzach. A year later, on May 16, 1925, he made simple profession in Eichstätt. He then studied philosophy and theology in Dillingen. On May 17, 1928, he took his religious vows and was ordained a priest on July 14, 1929 in Dillingen by the Augsburg Auxiliary Bishop Karl Reth . Father Manfred celebrated first time at Rothenfels Castle on the Main, the center of the Quickborn youth movement , to which he has belonged since his time in Metten. This was followed by the pastoral course and in June 1930 the degree with the synodal exam.

The Quickborn and Rothenfels Castle

During his time in Metten in 1921 Friedrich Hörhammer learned about Rothenfels Castle and the movement of the "Quickborn". Young people would come there, boys and girls, in simple hiking clothes, who didn't smoke, didn't drink alcohol, sang old songs like new, prayed mass together, a lot in German ... The Quickbornfreunde eV association existed since 1917, the In 1919, Prince Alois von Löwenstein-Wertheim (1871–1952) bought Rothenfels Castle on the Main. From 1922 on, the theologian Romano Guardini organized a work week every year. The highlight was the celebration of the Holy Days and Easter days. These work weeks gave strong impulses for liturgical renewal, youth and adult education and church building. From 1930 to 1938, Fr. Manfred used his annual leave to take part in the work weeks. The liturgical work at Rothenfels Castle was reflected in innumerable texts, songs and publications and essentially laid the groundwork for the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council. The spirituality of Rothenfels Castle and a close friendship with Romano Guardini had a lasting impact on Father Manfred Hörhammer. He remained connected to the castle for a lifetime and celebrated his golden jubilee as a priest there in 1979.

Pastoral activity

Youth pastor in Saarland

After completing his studies, the superiors of the order sent him to the Saarland near the French border as a youth pastor, from June 1930 to August 1932 to St. Ingbert and then to August 1937 to Blieskastel .

Kaplan in Munich: Health crisis

After being transferred to parish pastoral care in Munich in 1937 and a stay at a spa from August to December 1938 in Bad Dürrheim , he returned to St. Ingbert in 1939, a few weeks before the war began. From there he was called up as a medical soldier in the German Wehrmacht on May 27, 1940, after he had volunteered for military service for a chaplain from a neighboring parish.

Una Sancta. Hörhammer and the ecumenical movement

From 1938 on Fr. Manfred Hörhammer was active in the Munich Una-Sancta-Kreis, an ecumenical movement influenced by the Quickborn. Well-known theologians of the Christian denominations became involved in the movement. The Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller , whom the Gestapo put in a cell in the Dachau concentration camp with the Catholic priest and editor of the Munich church newspaper, Michael Höck , was one of them, as was the Jesuit P. Alfred Delp , who later became Abbot Hugo Lang from the Benedictine monastery. St. Bonifaz Abbey (Munich) , Heinrich Kahlefeld from Rothenfels Castle and the dogmatist Michael Schmaus .

How Father Manfred Hörhammer enriched the Una-Sancta circle, Paula Linhart writes in the anthology on his 70th birthday: “On his many backpacking routes all over the world, with bags that are much too heavy, from which he still conjures up today, whatever fits into this hour and celebration, it has become an irreplaceable messenger for the exchange of greetings, messages, signs of mutual remembrance and international chronicles. To this day he holds the ecumenical threads in his hand and spins them on from one to the other. "

Military service and field post newsletters

Father Manfred did military service as a medical soldier from June 6, 1940 until the end of the war and brought it from private to non-commissioned medical officer in January 1945. According to the military passport, he was initially with the 3rd company of the medical replacement department 1 in Tapiau in East Prussia, which Relocated to Prague in September. On December 11, 1940, he was assigned to hospital train b 502, with which he transported the wounded on 133 journeys until the end of the war and took care of medical care as assistant to the medical officer Alfred Rucker (1898–1974). The relationship with Rucker was very close. The commander of the train let Fr. Manfred in his chief physician's carriage St. Celebrate mass and ministered to him.

During his five years in the hospital train, Fr. Manfred wrote letters to the management of the Bavarian Capuchin Province, in which he mainly reported on the course of military life, and partly poetic circular letters to his circle of friends, from which the pastor spoke. "With his letters he wants to encourage the addressees to stand firm, to remain faithful to God and to give each other support." Between the lines, however, there are also references to the situation on the various front sections, and he also looks back to the post-war period and draws conclusions from the war experiences and experiences with the Nazi regime. Noal Imran published a collection of the letters in 1979. Many of his letters are in the estate of the Saarland resistance fighter Änne Meier . She was usually the addressee and copied it and passed it on to the Circle of Friends. The Gestapo was also interested in the letters that trusted soldiers had brought into the Reich. This led to the arrest of Änne Meier and her assignment to the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp.

The last journey of the hospital train led from the Eastern Front via Upper Silesia, the Sudetengau and the Hungarian Front to Mecklenburg and from there to Kiel. It was there that Hörhammer experienced the last British bombing raid, in which two thirds of the city were destroyed. He became a prisoner of war in England, where he and another priest soldier served as a hospital pastor in Travemünde until he was released in November 1945.

Catholic Young Team (KJM)

After his return from the war, Fr. Manfred joined a new group in autumn 1945 called the “Young Team”. There were many war returnees among them who were active in the Sturmschar, the Catholic young men’s association, before the war. They asked Fr Manfred to become their “Reichskaplan”. At the time, he was not used to this position as “President”, but as a member of the group, as a partner.

His life's work: Pax Christi

The beginnings

When Hörhammer was released from English captivity in Travemünde in November 1945, he visited his friends in Saarland, his former place of work as a youth pastor before the war. A friend, Josef Probst, gave him the appeal of the French bishops: “We want to pray for the brothers in Germany”. It came from Pierre-Marie Théas , Bishop of Montauban and later Bishop of Lourdes . He was arrested by the Nazis in 1943 for protesting from the pulpit against the kidnapping of Jews. After a stay in prison in Toulouse, he was taken to a camp in Compiègne, where captured resistance fighters were waiting to be transported to the Buchenwald concentration camp . With these a dialogue arose about love for one's enemies in the Bible. The resistance fighters said: “What you are saying is impossible. The gospel is terrible. We should forgive the Germans who drag out our brothers every day to the execution, who bring terror over the country? "Then Bishop Théas said:" I can tell you nothing else than what the Lord has said, love your enemies. Nothing more - nothing less. ”And he referred to the prayer of Our Father“ Forgive us our debts, just as we forgive our debtors. ”And then he added:“ If you come across the Rhine now, do not curse this people. They have widows with snow-white hair like ours, orphans like ours. Try to cross over with a thought of reconciliation. "

Théas himself had to stay in Compiègne as a possible hostage for the approaching Americans. They liberated him on August 15, 1944. When he returned to his diocese in late autumn, a couple asked him to take over the patronage of a prayer crusade to convert Nazi Germany. The bishop replied: “No, my friends, our first act after the war was not an act of Pharisaism. If you want to call for such a prayer crusade, do it for our own people, who God knows are mission lands. But I propose a different formula: prayer crusade for reconciliation with Germany. "

On May 8, 1945, 40 French bishops signed a manifesto for a prayer crusade for world peace. It was the hour of birth of Pax Christi.

Father Manfred promoted the idea of ​​a peace movement. In February 1947 he went to Lourdes with 16 other Germans, where Pierre-Marie Théas had invited to a meeting under the name of Pax Christi . On the return journey they were accompanied by prisoners of war who had been released on Théas' initiative. The following year, the first international Pax Christi congress took place in Kevelaer on the Lower Rhine, at which Hörhammer gave a lecture on the theology of peace. "The subject of war and peace must not be a matter for the romantics, but rather a clean theological work," he demanded.

Pilgrims for peace

Hörhammer became General Delegate and Spiritual Advisory Council of the German Section, which was founded at this meeting on April 3rd. A dialogue that lasted three decades began. As a pilgrim for peace, Fr. Manfred traveled from meeting to meeting across Europe.

Prayer, study and action

The peace work of Pax-Christi consisted of three steps: prayer, study and action. By praying , Fr. Manfred meant the inclusion of world political events and conflicts in the prayers of the congregation. By studying he understood the intellectual confrontation with war and peace on the part of theologians, sociologists, lawyers, economists and other scientists. Aktion meant to work for peace through "the establishment of contacts and fraternal exchange across the borders of nations, races and classes". He wanted to awaken a critical sense of the people in order to enable them “to react correctly to propaganda lies and to make decisions with the help of the basic education given to them, which, with all love for their homeland, demands a citizenship extended to the dimensions of the world ".

Characteristic actions

He tried to do this symbolically with the help of liturgical forms, pilgrimages or symbolic gestures, for example in Oradour sur Glâne , where on June 10, 1944, four days after the Allies landed, the Waffen-SS killed 642 residents, almost the entire population, see Oradour massacre . On February 24, 1955, Father Manfred was the first priest to travel to Oradour. He wrote an article about it in Michael magazine . A woman whose father was a colonel in Verdun was so affected by this that she offered Fr. Manfred her family jewelry. She had it made into a chalice for the Oradour community to receive. Pax Christi President Joseph Schröffer , Bishop of Eichstätt, presented the chalice to Bishop Pierre-Marie Théas in May 1955. He handed it over to the Bishop of Limoges, who passed it on to the pastor on June 10, the anniversary of the massacre, who accepted it with his community.

In 1958, Hörhammer went with a delegation to Ascq in northern France, where the SS 186 had pulled railway workers out of their beds and shot them at night because of an unproven act of sabotage.

He set a further sign with an expiation in the Mauthausen concentration camp , in which around 120,000 Jews, Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs and French were killed. Former National Socialists carried a heavy cross into the camp as a sign of their repentance, accompanied by survivors of the concentration camp.

Fr. Manfred was also the first to travel to Auschwitz and Israel with a delegation in order to open the door to a reconciliation with the Jews. In Poland he prepared the ground for the historical correspondence between the German and Polish bishops during the Second Vatican Council in 1965 with visits and many conversations.

The Peace Cross in Bühl (Baden) commemorates one of his greatest acts of mediation . In 1951, Father Manfred Hörhammer succeeded in obtaining a pardon for six Germans who had been sentenced to death in the Vichy Trial under the Collective Guilt Act (“Lex Oradour”). At his instigation, the French National Assembly dropped the law. One of the convicts, the SS man Adam Essinger from Reichenbach in the Odenwald, was demonstrably on vacation at the time of the Oradour crime and was thus innocent. For his release, the German Pax Christi friends had vowed to erect a large cross. Artists, architects and companies then assembled it free of charge from leftover concrete from the west wall. It stands at the foot of the Bühler Höhe, on a foothill in the Black Forest. For decades the cross became a pilgrimage destination for peace pilgrims from all over Europe.

Diverse initiatives

Fr. Manfred initiated much more as a spiritual adviser to Pax Christi Germany. He took care of the conscientious objectors long before the official church took care of this group. The International Building Order was u. a. also his initiative.

Together with Walter Dirks , Father Manfred was also the founder of the Bensberger Circle (originally “Friends of Pax Christi”), an association of German “Catholics with critical and reformist engagement in church and society”, a kind of “think tank” of left-wing Catholicism in Germany. One of his priorities was the reconciliation with Poland by renouncing the former German eastern territories administered by Poland. The Bensberger Kreis thus paved the way for Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr's New Ostpolitik . Further topics were the war in Vietnam, conscientious objection, church taxes, reforms in the church after the Second Vatican Council and the relationship between Christianity and sexuality. The circle existed until 2004.

Awards

  • 1966 Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class
  • 1975 Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
  • 1977 “Ordre pour le merite” of the French Republic
  • On the church side he was appointed Episcopal Spiritual Council .

death

P. Manfred's strength weakened when he had to undergo colon cancer surgery in 1984. At the beginning of 1985 he came to the forest sanatorium of the Sisters of Mercy in Planegg for care, where his friend, the then Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker , visited him at Whitsun . Father Manfred Hörhammer died on August 12, 1985 and was buried on August 16 in the Capuchin Cemetery at St. Anton Monastery in Munich.

literature

  • Heinrich Fries / Ulrich Valeske (ed.): Reconciliation: Gestalten, Zeiten, Modelle. P. Manfred Hörhammer on his 70th birthday. Frankfurt 1975
  • P. Manfred Hörhammer: St. Franz, the Peace and Pax Christi . Manuscript c. 1977. Archives of the Province of the Bavarian Capuchins, Altötting
  • Franz Josef Schäfer: The Capuchin Manfred Hörhammer - youth pastor in the Saar area and medical soldier during the Second World War. In: Yearbook for West German State History, 41st year 2015, pp. 509-590.
  • Jakob Brummet: The Pax Christi Movement. A sketch of their story. Manz Verlag Munich undated (permission to print 1955)
  • Sound fragment 1967 or 1968: P. Manfred Hörhammer tells the story of Pax Christi

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted in Münchner Katholische Kirchenzeitung No. 6/1986: "He was a genius of friendship". Report on the commemoration for Fr. Manfred Hörhammer ofm.cap. in the Catholic Academy in Munich on January 31, 1986, see also: www.kg-mediendienste.de/Texte/Manfred2.htm
  2. ↑ ibid
  3. ^ Godehard Ruppert: Quickborn. In: Historical Lexicon of Bavaria
  4. ^ Paula Linhart: The Una-Sancta-Kreis Munich. In: Reconciliation: Gestalten, Zeiten, Modelle, Frankfurt 1975, p. 198.
  5. ^ In the archives of the Province of the Bavarian Capuchins X 151 221 1174
  6. ^ Franz Josef Schäfer, Der Kapuziner Manfred Hörhammer - youth chaplain in the Saar area and medical soldier during the Second World War, in Yearbook for West German State History, 41st year, 2015, pp. 509-590, here p. 564.
  7. ^ Noal Imran: clearings on distant horizons. Letters to friends from 1940-1945 from Father Manfred Hörhammer .
  8. ^ Franz Josef Schäfer, p. 583
  9. ↑ Jakob Brummet: The Pax Christi movement. A sketch of their story. Manz Verlag München undated (permission to print 1955), p. 4.
  10. ↑ P. Manfred Hörhammer: The hl. Franz, the Peace and Pax Christi. Manuscript in the archives of the Province of the Bavarian Capuchins X 151 221 1174, p. 11
  11. ↑ P. Manfred Hörhammer: The hl. Franz, the Peace and Pax Christi. Manuscript in the archives of the Province of the Bavarian Capuchins X 151 221 1174, p. 12
  12. ↑ Sound fragment: P. Manfred Hörhammer on the Pax-Christi story, 1967 (or 1968), Archives of the Province of the Bavarian Capuchins X 151 221 1174
  13. ↑ Jakob Brummet: The Pax Christi Movement, p. 36 f.
personal data
SURNAME Hörhammer, Manfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Capuchin priest and co-founder of Pax Christi
DATE OF BIRTH November 26, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH August 12, 1985
Place of death Planegg