(2 of 2)
But often, Berlin hostesses would be unable to track him down. For long periods he would disappear into the tiny village of Lohr in the Frankish Spessart Mountains, the center of the Catholic Youth Movement he had helped found after the war, which now has 700,000 members. There, in romantic Rothenfels Castle, Guardini spent his time with workers, farmers and students, who eventually came from all over Germany. Some 400 young people once followed his suggestion to spend all of Holy Week in complete silence. "At Mass on Easter Sunday," remembers one of them, "we felt the Resurrection with every fiber of our body. Afterwards we ate together and drank and danced. There was no frivolity. We were all sure we knew how the disciples must have felt when they saw the empty tomb."
Another Ideology. Soon after Hitler's invasion of Poland, a Gestapo officer appeared in Father Guardini's office and told him that his chair as professor of Christian ideology was abolished forthwith. "We already have an ideology," he said. "We don't need any professors for it." Eventually, friends warned him that he was about to be sent to a concentration camp, and Guardini took refuge at a house in the Black Forest for the remainder of the war.
Since World War II, Guardini has been more active than ever, lecturing, preaching and writing. His biography of Christ, The Lord, has sold more than a million copies, has been translated into English, French, Italian. Spanish, Dutch, Greek and Japanese. Pope Pius XII appointed him a papal house prelate in 1952, and loved talking philosophy in German with him by the hour. Two years ago, when the German government awarded him its distinguished civilian decoration, the order Pour le Mérite, the Protestant Easier Nationalzeitung wrote: "Guardini's influence now reaches far beyond the realm of his own church. He has returned faith to circles which had been considered lost to it. [He is] one of the great religious figures of our time."
Christian Up a Tree. Guardini has founded no theological schools, and his power lies more in the eloquence of his preaching and writing than in any specific theories. He himself sums up his work this way: "I have tried to help people find faith. I know that nothing is more needed than this. I have simply tried to counteract the atomization of ideas which has upset our minds for the past 150 years. After all, the world doesn't consist of facts alone. Interpreting it this way either leads to a completely materialistic world or, in revulsion, to the pseudo-mystic ideology which formed the roots of Naziism.
"I believe that all there is to know in this world has been revealed to us by the words of the Lord. Faith is the automatic center, the Archimedic point from which any problem can be approached and solved . . . True Christianity pervades and forms the entire personality, the character, the thought, each gesture, each movement. One must be able to recognize the true Christian by the very way in which he climbs up a tree."