Aloisius Joseph Muench


Aloisius Joseph Muench was an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as bishop of Fargo in North Dakota from 1935 to 1959, and as apostolic nuncio to Germany from 1951 to 1959. He was elevated to the cardinalate in 1959.
Muench was the most powerful American Catholic and Vatican representative in Allied-occupied Germany and subsequently in West Germany from 1946 to 1959. He served as the liaison between the U.S. Office of Military Government and the German Catholic Church in the American occupation zone, Pope Pius XII's apostolic visitor to Germany, the Vatican relief officer in Kronberg im Taunus, Germany, regent in Kronberg, as well as nuncio to Germany.

Early life and education

Muench was born on February 18, 1889, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Joseph Muench and Theresa Kraus on February 18, 1889, the first of seven surviving children. His father's ancestors were from Sankt Katharina in the Bohemian Forest near the Bavarian border, what is now Svatá Kateřina in the Czech Republic. His father, a baker, emigrated to Milwaukee at age 18 in 1882. His mother was born in Kemnath in the Upper Palatinate region of Bavaria and emigrated to Milwaukee in 1882 at age 14; Muench's parents married in 1888.
The Muench family lived on the north side of Milwaukee among other German Catholic immigrants, his parents speaking only German in the home. Muench began his training for the priesthood at age 14, entering Saint Francis Seminary in St. Francis, Wisconsin, in 1904.

Priesthood

Muench was ordained to the priesthood by Archbishop Sebastian Gebhard Messmer on June 8, 1916, for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. After his ordination, the archdiocese assigned him as an assistant pastor to Saint Michael's Parish in Milwaukee.
He left Milwaukee in 1917 to become the assistant chaplain of Saint Paul's University Chapel at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, where he obtained a master's degree in economics in 1918.
In 1919, Muench entered the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, earning a doctorate magna cum laude in July 1921 in the social sciences, focusing on theological disciplines of economics, social morality, and social ethics. He was a member of KDStV Catholic German Student Association Teutonia Freiburg, a Catholic student fraternity that was part of the Union of Catholic German Student Fraternities.
The archbishop of Milwaukee granted Muench permission to remain in Europe to study at University of Leuven, Cambridge, Oxford, the London School of Economics, the Collège de France, and the Sorbonne. Muench returned to St. Francis Seminary in 1922 as a professor. In 1929, he ceased his teaching duties to become a rector. The Vatican elevated Muench to the rank of monsignor in September 1934.

Bishop of Fargo (1935–1959)

On August 10, 1935, Pope Pius XI appointed Muench as the third bishop of Fargo; he was consecrated by Cardinal Amleto Giovanni Cicognani at Gesu Church in Milwaukee on October 15, 1935. Muench was installed in Fargo on November 6, 1935.
Muench in 1946 accompanied Archbishop Samuel Stritch to Rome when the latter was created cardinal by Pope Pius XII; Muench purchased the red hat that Stritch received duringthe ceremony. In a meeting with the pope, Stritch recommended Muench for the role of apostolic visitor in post-war Germany, because of his "sympathy" for the "suffering of the German people".
When Muench returned to the United States, he was offered the additional position of liaison between the U.S. post-war occupation authorities in Germany and the German Catholic Church. This was also on the recommendation of Stritch, after Anthony Strauss, the first choice of the Truman Administration, turned the appointment down.

Post-war Germany (1946–1951)

After the end of World War II in 1945, Pope Pius XII appointed Muench in 1946 as apostolic visitor to the allied-occupied sections of defeated Germany. In Fargo, Auxiliary Bishop Leo Ferdinand Dworschak was elected in 1947 to serve as the apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Fargo in Muench's absence.
From 1946 to 1949, Muench served as military vicar delegate of the United States Armed Forces, and in 1949 was named regent of the nunciature in Germany. Muench also served as "liaison consultant for religious affairs to the military governor", appointed by Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson. The German nunciature had been vacant since the death of Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo in 1946. Muench assumed the de facto role of nuncio before he received the title on March 6, 1951.
According to Barry's biography, Muench focused on three goals in Germany:
  • Running the Vatican mission to assist Catholic displaced persons and prisoners of war. This mission was funded by American donations brokered by Muench.
  • Maintaining the validity of the Reichskonkordat, a 1933 treaty between the Vatican and Nazi Germany)
  • Ensuring the autonomy of German Catholic schools from state control
Historian Michael Phayer views Muench's dual appointment as significant:
"Muench's position was extraordinary. At one and the same time, he was President Truman's Catholic liaison to OMGUS and Pius XII's personal envoy to zonal Germany. Serving two masters, he listened to Rome, not Washington from the moment of his arrival in Germany".

''One World in Charity''

Muench's pastoral letter One World In Charity was published in installments. The 10,200 word letter was read from the diocese of Fargo's pulpits weekly on the five Sundays between Shrove Tuesday and Passion Sunday. It was then translated into German and printed first in German language newspapers in the United States. Truncated versions of One World, focusing on Muench's comments about the collective guilt of German Catholics and the equation of the Nazis and the allied occupation authorities began to circulate in Germany in early 1947. It and spread rapidly, due to grassroots distribution and quotation in German newspapers.
One World appeared in both religious and secular publications alongside statements denying Germans' complicity in the Holocaust, especially the concept of collective guilt. Muench received several letters from German Catholics commenting on One World; they regarded him as one who understood German "suffering" and believed him to be of German descent.One World referred to the Allied authorities as "other Hitlers in disguise, who would make of nation a crawling Bergen-Belsen concentration camp|Belsen. One World argued that responsibility for the Holocaust lay only with a very few war criminals who had "revived the Mosaic idea of an eye for an eye".
According to Brown-Fleming, Muench's sympathies in his writing matched his actions as one of the most active participants in the Vatican's "postwar clemency campaign on behalf of convicted war criminals". In particular, he spoke against what he perceived to be the mistreatment of high-ranking prisoners such as the diplomate Konstantin von Neurath, Admiral Erich Raeder, Admiral Karl Dönitz, politician Walther Funk, politician Baldur von Schirach, architect and Hitler confident Albert Speer, and Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess. Muench wrote that their treatment was "another terrible blotch on our record for decent, humane treatment of war criminals". One World was cited by prison guard Josef Hering and other war criminals in their own writings.

Relationship with Jews

In at least four instances, Muench became involved in restitution disputes in Germany between Catholic Germans and Jews regarding property seized during the war. In each instance, Muench sided with the German Catholics, contacting highly placed German and American officials on their behalf. Muench wrote in a September 1946 letter that "some of these gents exploit the fact that they were in concentration camps for their own benefit, although some were there because of an unsavory past". In one restitution case, where a distant relative of Muench had been sentenced by a military court to a fine of 2,000 marks and the return of his business to a Polish Jew, Muench wrote "a lot of hardship and injustice comes about because of denazification".
Muench was also an opponent of interreligious dialogue efforts that included Jews, opposing the organization of chapters of the National Conference of Christians and Jews and the International Conference of Christians and Jews, among others, in occupied Germany. In a 1948 letter to Carl Zietlow, a Minnesotan Protestant pastor of the NCCJ, Muench described the organization as unneeded because: "regarding anti-Semitism" he had "found very little of it". Historian Paul Weindling has described Muench as having "made efforts to downplay war crimes by distrusting Holocaust survivors as exaggerating Nazi crimes", part of a broader worldview that stated that "Germans were victims: Jews, Slavs and communists were exaggerating crimes against them to extricate resources".
According to Phayer, for Muench as well as Pius XII, the "priority was not the survivors of the Holocaust, but the situation of the German Catholic refugees in Eastern Europe who had been expelled from their home nations at the end of the war. Muench felt that their suffering was comparable to that of the Jews during the Holocaust".

Clemency for war crimes

Along with other German and American clerics, such as Johann Neuhausler, auxiliary bishop of Munich, Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne, Muench was "in close contact with occupation authorities, other religious leaders, and the convicted war criminals themselves" regarding the campaign for clemency for Nazi war criminals.
In February 1950, Pius XII instructed Muench to write a letter in support of clemency for some convicted German war criminals to General Thomas Hardy, the head of the U.S. Army European Command, who had the final word on all clemency decisions; with his new appointment as papal regent, Muench was to speak as a direct representative of the pope. In his diary, Muench made it clear that he viewed as "questionable" the sentences of war criminals who had not been directly involved in medical experimentation or other extreme acts at concentration camps or the deportation of people for slave labor. Prior to this, Muench had frequently become involved in individual clemency cases, but took care not to attract undue attention or publicity to the Vatican. As the Vatican urged Muench to press harder against the U.S. authorities, Muench wrote to Undersecretary Montini warning him that Rome was on "dangerously thin ice". According to Phayer, it was Muench's discretion that "saved the Vatican from becoming publicly associated with former Nazis". Muench wrote: "I have not dared to advise the Holy See to intervene, especially if such intervention would eventually become public".
Muench often preferred to work behind the scenes; for example, a letter from one of Muench's secretaries provided Reverend Franz Lovenstein the contact information he had requested "with the understanding, of course, that you are not to use his name in connection with any letters or briefs that will be sent to those gentlemen". For example, in the case of Hans Eisele, the former SS doctor convicted of experimentation on prisoners, there is some evidence that Muench's intervention with General Clay in the summer of 1948 resulted in the commutation of Eisele's execution and his eventual release in 1952.