When Michael von Faulhaber became Archbishop of Munich in 1917, King Ludwig III still sat on his shadow-throne in Bavaria and the old order of Europe, if crumbling, was not yet gone. Archbishop Faulhaber reached his new archdiocese from the trenches of Germany's Western Front: he had gone to war as a chaplain in 1914, although he was already 45, a bishop and a celebrated Biblical scholar. He was the first German prelate to win the Iron Cross.
As an archbishop, Faulhaber found plenty of fighting at home. Munich was one of the battlegrounds of the "Spartacist" (Communist) uprising of 1919, and Faulhaber risked his personal safety to preach against the Reds. In 1921 he became a cardinal. His friend Pope Pius XII, then Cardinal Pacelli, Papal Nuncio at Munich, called him "the speaking symbol of the Church Militant."
For the next 31 years Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber represented the Church Militant's oldest traditions. In politics his sympathies were conservative and monarchist, and he never disguised them. But if his values sometimes seemed oldfashioned, they helped him to spot evil quickly, where more modern observers saw only confusion. In 1930 he thundered from his pulpit against the dangers of Bolshevism. Three years later he began to denounce the Nazis for their persecution of the Jews.
In 1934 Hitler ordered him sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. When the cardinal appeared for his journey, dressed in full regalia, his SS guards hesitated to take him through the streets of Munich, where he was universally respected. The order was rescinded and the Nazis never again openly tested their strength against him. For the next ten years he led the Catholic Church's resistance to Hitlerism, speaking out against it where most of his fellow priests (and most Protestant clergymen) were hesitant or fearful. As early as 1933 he prophesied from his pulpit: "A state based on right, which strives from the first for a peaceful solution, must win the victory over a state based on might, which seeks to gain right with bloody weapons." In 1942 he smuggled out to the Vatican a detailed denunciation of Hitler's "war against Christianity."
After World War II he returned to the fight against Communism. Still an ultraconservative, he also sharply criticized the U.S. military government for attempting to liberalize the German school system. But his pronouncements grew rarer. Ailing since 1942, he seldom went outside his palace. It was there, last week, that death came quietly to Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber, 83.