A bishop who spoke prophetic words

Below is The Irishman’s Diary from The Irish Times yesterday. The column is written by Derek Scally, the newspaper’s correspondent in Berlin.

It’s an interesting story and makes for a good read. The last three words ring loud: “...beware the beginnings."

The first meeting of Sean Lester with Edward O’Rourke reads like something from a Shaw comedy of manners. In his diary for 1934, Lester, a Protestant Irish diplomat, described the arrival into his room of a bespectacled local bishop waving an Irish magazine and coughing his way through an unfamiliar Irish cigarette.

It was 1934 and both were powerful anti-fascist voices in what is today’s Gdansk, Poland’s Baltic port city. Back then it was the Free City of Danzig, an independent city-state with a German majority population that, in the post-1918 order, was administered by the League of Nations.

As the league’s ninth – and penultimate – High Commissioner from 1934, Lester was an outspoken critic of the creeping takeover by the Nazis, determined to take back control of the territory. Lester’s warnings that Danzig was a Nazi test case for the rest of Europe – with terrible consequences likely for the continent’s Jewish population – went unheeded and the Nazis forced him from office after just two years.

That left Edward O’Rourke, in 1937, among the last voices to warn the outside world of the growing risks building in Danzig.

Perhaps his own family background left him attuned to their plight. O’Rourke was a Russian count whose noble family had fled Ireland in the 17th century to the continent and earned a reputation fighting with the French and Russian military before settling in a large landed estate near Minsk, capital of today’s Belarus.

Born there in 1876, O’Rourke was educated at a Jesuit boarding school before studying law in Switzerland and economics and theology in Innsbruck. A polyglot who spoke eight languages, he was ordained at 31, became Bishop of Riga in 1918 aged just 42, and apostolic administrator to the Free City of Danzig in 1922.

Three years later, O’Rourke became the first bishop of the newly created diocese of Danzig’s 119,000 Catholics. From his seat in the striking late-16th-century Oliva cathedral, he promised his flock: “I want nothing but to serve you with all my strength, to share joy and sorrow with you.”

His new role was as much political as pastoral, with the majority German population fearing what their separation from the rest of the Reich meant for their future. While O’Rourke reportedly sympathised initially with their fears of a creeping Polish takeover, the bishop’s thinking began to shift after the Danzig Nazi Party took control of the city-state senate in 1933.

As Gdansk-based Irish historian Paul McNamara, an expert on the period, puts it: “With the church now facing persecution by an external enemy, internal ethnic divisions in were set aside and the attitude of Bishop O’Rourke and part of the German-speaking clergy became more favourable towards the Polish community.”

It was at this point that he made contact with Sean Lester. Despite differences in faith – and only French as a common language of communication – the aristocrat cleric and the Irish diplomat shared a growing concern for what the Nazis would do to Europe when they were finished with Danzig.

As Bishop of Danzig, O’Rourke wrote 22 pastoral letters. His 1920s concerns about the “spiritual dangers” of atheist socialism yielded in the 1930s to all-out attacks on a profane “new religion born of the Germanic spirit” that seeks to reframe Jesus Christ – a Jew –as a “son illegitimate and stigmatised as a poisoner of the Germanic race”.

“The cross from Golgotha should disappear, they say, from our towers; the cross of Odin should stand as a sign of victory,” he added. True Catholics, he warned, “cannot accept as true the preached slogans ... of blood and race” because they mark a “false approach, contrary to Catholic teaching”.

In Danzig, O’Rourke faced vicious attacks for his public protest at the Nazi takeover of Catholic schools and youth groups. But his ability to intervene in political affairs – and fight back against attacks – were undermined when Rome agreed to apply to Danzig its concordat with Germany. Ratified in September 1933 it forbade clerics from adopting overtly political roles.

Though O’Rourke finally gave up on Danzig – the Holy See released him from his role in June 1938 – he didn’t give up on Poland. He moved to the western city of Poznan and, two years later, renounced his Danzig citizenship to become a Polish citizen. Fleeing the war to Rome, he died there 80 years ago today.

His remains were reinterred in Gdansk’s Oliva Cathedral in 1972. Such a gesture, at the height of the cold war, was a huge honour from a country that felt first the full cost of Nazi terror, occupation and industrialised murder.

As the far right rises again, and a war rages on its eastern flank, Edward O’Rourke’s central warning to Europe then is just as relevant today: beware the beginnings.