Prayer & miracles

I've been reading The Shadow of His Wings: The True Story of Fr. Gereon Goldmann, OFM(San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000), about a German Catholic who was drafted with his fellow-Franciscan seminarians into the German army during the Second World War. The dramatic first-hand account highlights not only the life-and-death situations they constantly faced, but the struggle of maintaining their fidelity to Christ and the Church in the face of unrelenting persecution from the Nazis, who hated devout Catholics and tried to root out their Christian commitment. Goldmann was made an SS officer, complicating problems for him as well as multiplying ironies. He also sought ways to minister to his fellow Catholic soldiers who were often wounded and dying. He secured permission to carry the Blessed Sacrament with him and to distribute Communion to his fellow soldiers. Eventually he also managed to get himself ordination as a priest, by direct permission from the Holy Father in Rome, further facilitating his ministry but also pulling down the ire of Nazis upon him.

Eventually his group was taken prisoner and shipped to various prisons across Algeria and Morocco in North Africa. There, he did his best to continue his ministry among the prisoners, setting up make-shift chapels for Mass, sometimes in hiding from the prison guards, and always in the face of persecution and sometimes life-threatening beatings from the Nazi prisoners.

While in Morocco, he got permission to visit a nearby convent where he secured material gifts of food and clothing for his fellow-prisoners from the Sisters. He writes:

More important than these material gifts was the fact that these Sisters prayed for the conversion of the prisoners. Day and night, they prayed before the Blessed Sacrament for the conversion of the Nazis, not only the Sisters in Midelt, but also in another convent. Soon we had a dozen convents in North Africa praying and making sacrifices for our camp. In the face of such storming of heaven, many men lost all resistance, expelled the unbelief and paganism of the Nazi credo from their hearts, and accepted belief in God; after some months of prodding they came to confession and received their second First Holy Communion.

There was one man in particular, a rabid Nazi, who was notorious even in Germany. His conversion was so exceptional that it is worthwhile to follow it in more detail.

It happened some months before this trip to Midelt that resulted in my meeting the Missionary Sisters. On one of my trips to another work group, I learned that in the valley of these mountains, known as the "Valley of Hell" because of its intense heat, a Sister was living all alone. I could not believe it at first, it was so unprecedented. When I had a chance to go there later on, I found sister Jeanne living isolated from all Europeans in the beautiful mountain district of Khenifra, in solitude and penance. Having obtained special permission from the Pope, she had sought out this lonely spot, where she fasted with almost inhuman rigor. The three days I was there I suffered continuously from hunger -- I, who thought I knew a great deal about privation! She cared for the native sick in the villages, going from early morning until late at night into the dirty huts to nurse their frightful wounds and festering sores. Then every night she knelt as motionless as a statue of stone before the Blessed Sacrament for three hours -- I saw this with my own unbelieving eyes. By special papal permission, she was allowed to keep the Blessed Sacrament in her small chapel; every three or four months a priest-hermit came from still higher up the mountain to renew the species. Then for months again she would be all alone with her work and with her Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. What I heard and saw there was unbelievable. Her bed was a board; her meal, thin soup; but she was happy as a child and physically much stronger and enduring than I.

The first time I came into her solitude -- it was soon after I became chaplain in the Nazi camp -- was at a time when I had lost all courage to go on because of the extreme opposition and persecution I suffered, while making no progress that I could see. When I told her that I was thinking of going to another camp where the work would be easier and more satisfying, she told me almost fiercely that I was to return to the Nazi camp.

"sister Jeanne, I cannot. It is just too much for me. I have done everything I can, and still I have failed to bring the camp to Christ."

She amazed me by seizing my habit and looking me in the eyes, saying in a voice that pierced bone and marrow, "Father, in God's Name, you are going back to your camp at once!"

I recovered from my surprise at being so "commanded," since her order was given in such a way that I knew I dare not oppose her. At the same time, she made me write down the name of the worst enemy of the Church on a piece of paper. "Leave all the rest to me, Father," she said.

I did as she asked, giving her the name of Kroch, a fanatical Nazi, a terrible persecutor of the Church and her French people, and returned to camp. I really did not have too much time to think about Sister Jeanne after that, and when Kroch came to speak to me three months later, I was preoccupied. I was so angry at his continuous vituperation against me and his ugly remarks against God and the Church that I would not see him.

"If Kroch wants to speak to me, tell him to come in the morning when everybody can see him and not in the darkness of night!" It was an angry message, and I was sorry at once; but I let it stand as it was said.

The next morning as I stood in line for the small bread ration, he actually came up to me and asked, without trying to conceal his request from the others standing by us, if he could go to confession.

"I was a Catholic, Father. Once I was even a Mass server; my mother was a pious woman, who would be so happy if she could know that I had come back to the Church." I could hardly believe my ears, but it was really so. I knew something of his history; for many years, even before the war, he had been a leader of the youth against God and had played a leading role in Nazi Germany.

However touched, however moved I was by his request, his admittance back into the Church could not be a simple matter. He must do public penance for his many public wrongs. Every Sunday for months he had to stand before the altar, a poor penitent, and admitted sinner. Finally came the Sunday when he acknowledged publicly before many hundreds of men, who listened breathlessly to what he had to say, his guilt and his whole shameful history -- from pious lad to one of the most vicious haters of the church. He recounted the story of his return to the Church and asked for pardon. Then at last he received sacramental absolution and Holy Communion. The men stood around the altar with tears in their eyes, and later many of them stood waiting patiently before the confessional to end their lives of sin.

Good Sister Jeanne, in her solitude at Khenifra, had put the paper with the man's name before the tabernacle, and every night she spent six hours in prayer for his conversion. (pp. 229-232)