Newman, the Nazis and friend Alfred

Cardinal John Henry Newman. Läpple relates: «Newman was not a topic like any other. He was our passion»

«When in the January 1946 I was able to begin my theology studies at the seminary of the diocese of Freising, finally reopened after the upheavals of the war, it was arranged that our group should have as prefect an older student, who already before the outbreak of war had begun to work on a dissertation on Newman’s theology of conscience. During all the years of his engagement in war he had never taken his eyes off the theme, that now he took up with new enthusiasm and new energy. From the beginning we were tied by a personal friendship that had its whole focus in the great problems of philosophy and theology. It can be taken for granted that Newman was always present in this exchange. Alfred Läpple, he in fact was the aforementioned prefect, then in 1952 published his dissertation, under the title ‘The individual in the Church’. Newman’s teaching on conscience became then for us the basis of that theological personalism, that attracted us all with its fascination. Our image of the man, as our conception of the Church, were marked by that starting point. We had experienced the pretensions of a totalitarian party that conceived itself as the fulfillment of history and that denied the conscience of the individual. Hermann Göring had told of his leader: “I have no conscience! My conscience is Adolf Hitler”. The immense ruin of mankind that came of it, was there before our eyes».

From the speech of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on the hundredth anniversary of the death of Cardinal John Henry Newman, Rome, 28 April 1990