Hermann Fackler, March 10, 1886, Lörrach – July 19, 1978, Stuttgart

Hermann Fackler, too, was already a long-serving pastor when The Christian Community was founded. At thirty-six, he belonged to the group of the older ones at that time. Nevertheless, he was still able to serve the movement for over fifty years.

Hermann Fackler was born in Lörrach on April 10, 1886, as the son of a Protestant veterinarian and a Catholic mother from Breisach. He was baptized Catholic. His mother died shortly afterward as a result of the birth, so his father had to place his young son in the care of a loving, simple cobbler family for the first seven years. In the first ten years of his life, the boy was not spared serious childhood illnesses. Due to whooping cough, he suffered a lifelong ear ailment. For the next two and a half years, however, he was healthy and spry, apart from an accident in the icy Sudeten Mountains, which later afflicted him greatly.

When his father married again, this time to a Protestant woman, the boy was allowed to move in with his parents in Donaueschingen in 1893. He attended the humanist grammar school and Protestant religious instruction but also had deep religious experiences when visiting his mother’s relatives in Breisach and Freiburg and attending mass in the cathedrals there.

When his father was transferred to the Ministry of the Interior in Karlsruhe in 1898, his son attended confirmation classes with the city pastor Brückner, who impressed him so much that the boy wanted to become a pastor himself. Immediately after graduating from high school in 1905, he went to Heidelberg University, where he studied philosophy with Wilhelm Windelband, dogmatics with Ernst Troeltsch, and exegesis with Adolf Deißmann. He went to Berlin for two semesters to hear Adolf von Harnack lecture on church history and Reinhold Seeberg on dogmatics. All these professors have gone down in the history of science with their life’s work.

Nevertheless, for the young man, the study was unsatisfactory. It brought a lot of useless head knowledge (textual criticism, for example) and no preparation for religious practice. One learned to preach but not how to pray with people. The theoretical and practical examinations were taken in 1908/09. Then followed vicar positions in Baden, among others in Waldshut on the Rhine, where he met his wife. He received a position as “pastoral chaplain” in Immendingen (Hegau) in 1912. His wife, Getrud, née Leyendecker, had been a deaconess in Freiburg and was able to help him with the care of a large parish area and several military hospitals in the following years during the First World War.

If the discrepancy between studied theology and practiced religion was already difficult for Hermann Fackler, the problems grew even greater when he became intensively involved with the star mythology of Professor Arthur Drews from Karlsruhe during these years (1913-1919). He knew Drews personally from many visits and found access to the cosmic aspect in his book Die Christusmythe [The Christ Myth]. But how could he proclaim death and resurrection if Christ had not lived at all? Even the philosophy of ‘as if’ only helped to reach an insipid compromise.

In 1919 Hermann Fackler became parish administrator in Rheinfelden on the Upper Rhine, not far from Basel. The dean who introduced him invited him to his Freemason lodge because of his inaugural sermon (on 1 Peter 2:5), in which a word about Freemasonry had been spoken. The dean was Master of the Chair. Thus Hermann Fackler became an ‘apprentice’ in the Lodge “Friedrich zur Eintracht” in Lörrach and found cultic brotherly fellowship in which he could feel a remnant of the air of mystery.

In September 1920, a blind man asked Hermann Fackler to come with him to Dornach near Basel to see Rudolf Steiner’s ‘crazy house’ through his eyes. This is how Hermann Fackler found his way to the first Goetheanum and was immediately enthusiastic. He and his wife then went repeatedly to Dornach. They attended eurythmy performances and began to read Rudolf Steiner’s books.

In the autumn of the following year (1921), he took a short holiday with his wife in nearby Waldshut that was broken off after a week due to inner turmoil. At home, a single letter was found that had not been forwarded. It was an invitation from a completely unknown Rudolf Meyer from Stuttgart to come to Dornach for the theology course which was about to begin.

Hermann Fackler immediately arranged everything necessary and commuted daily from Rheinfelden to Dornach to attend the autumn course. There, the true science of God dawned on him when he experienced Rudolf Steiner for the first time and absorbed his lectures. And he immediately committed himself to the movement, which wanted to renew Christian religious practice with liturgical celebrations.

So he resigned from his ministry on July 1, 1922, and later even resigned from the church, for he had now found his spiritual home and his real task, which he was to serve for another half-century.

He was present in Breitbrunn for the preparatory meeting of the founders and was ordained on September 16, 1922, in Dornach at the Goetheanum, to whose forms he owed his first access to anthroposophy. When he asked Rudolf Steiner whether he should begin the congregational work of The Christian Community in Rheinfelden – also because people there had already asked – he did not find it possible. In November 1922 the church began in Constance (until August 1924). This was followed by important years of work in Berlin (1924-1929). In Naumburg/Saale, he then replaced Eberhard Kurras in the activity (1929-1931, until some difficult working years in Göppingen (Württ.) followed (1931–1936), after which Reutlingen became his place of residence for over forty years. (1936–77).

Hermann Fackler survived the ban on community work (1941) smoothly – without imprisonment and almost without theft of books. He then worked as a gardener and in the tax office, and finally as a language teacher with tutoring, before work in the community could begin again after the end of the war in 1945.

In the fifties, it was possible to buy a house and build a community room in Goethean style, which still serves the community today. Beginning with the first volume of The Christian Community magazine, a wealth of essays by Hermann Fackler has appeared, reflecting the breadth of his education and interests. He also published articles in other journals and newspapers, such as Die Kommenden, Blätter für Anthroposophie, Entscheidung, Die Drei, Die Tat, and others. He also wrote poetry and painted. As a lecturer, however, he was less prominent. He worked in silence through many visits and conversations and appeared outwardly closed.

However, he met people with constant friendliness and kindness. Perhaps his quiet manner was also due to his suffering from his ear. Fully aware of this, he continued to work spiritually until he was very old – he translated St Augustine – before ending his final years on July 19, 1978, in the Haus Morgenstern nursing home in Stuttgart.

MEMORANDUM

I, the undersigned, born in 1886 and after eight semesters of theological and philosophical studies and active since 1909 in the service of the Protestant Regional Church of Baden, see myself compelled, after conscientious self-examination, to make the following declaration: I became aware of the anthroposophical movement in 1920. After initially reading a few critical writings and systematic presentations of anthroposophy, I soon began to study Dr. Steiner’s writings myself, as far as they were available to me through the book trade. Soon seized by this study, I spent every hour that my ministry allowed me with it. I visited the Goetheanum several times to gain a personal impression of spiritual science and its building in Dornach. So it was with joy that I accepted an invitation to take part in the religious course in Dornach, which took place there from September 26 to October 10 last year under the direction of Dr. Steiner. The impressions I received from what I heard there, as well as in personal contact with the participants in the course, were so profound that even then, the decision matured in me to adjust my life to the new movement, and I signed the pledges made in Dornach. Soon after completing the Dornach course, I was accepted into the Anthroposophical Society, so that Dr. Steiner’s esoteric lecture cycles now became accessible to me, at least in part. The study of these cycles, especially the cycle on the Gospel of John, the inner processing of what I had received in Dornach, the daily practice of meditation, all advanced me inwardly to such an extent that I now feel inwardly impelled to make the following solemn and binding declaration: I am ready and determined to apply for my release from the pastoral ministry as soon as accommodations are available for my family and me in the sphere of activity I have already envisaged, in order then to place myself entirely at the service of the anthroposophical religious movement and to serve the spread of this movement with all my strength. I would gratefully welcome it if Dr. Steiner could give a preparatory course to those who are ready for this life’s work, in which all that is connected with this work would be discussed.

Badisch Rheinfelden, February 20, 1922

Hermann Fackler

June 20,1879, Schweinfurt – January 19, 1960, Wiesbaden

From Die Gründer der Christengemeinschaft: Ein Schicksalsnetz, by Rudolf Gädeke

Heinrich Rittelmeyer was born on June 20,1879, in Schweinfurt. His childhood was marked by illness and physical weakness. Only when he grew up did he become stronger and reach a ripe old age. In the weak child, there lived a strong, irascible soul, which repeatedly flared up until the boy attacked an adult with a knife. This experience frightened him so much that he decided to fight the anger with the power of Christ. For years he struggled in prayer until he had conquered his temper. At thirteen, he told his father: “I want to be a pastor.”

But the confirmand already got into difficulties because he had to profess a faith that would bind him for life. When, in the same year, his brother Friedrich, who was seven years older, traveled home from his intermediate semesters in Berlin and had conversations with the confirmand, further uncertainties arose; years of doubt followed. Yes, Heinrich Rittelmeyer felt himself to be a ‘heretic.’ But he was quite sure: “God is a reality, and the divinity of Christ is a reality because they had brought about the change in my temperament.”

At about eighteen, the student gave a lecture on “Parzival and the Grail.” At twenty-one, he passed his Abitur at the Gymnasium and began studying theology in Erlangen. The course lasted eight semesters, three of which were completed in Berlin. Like his brother, Heinrich Rittelmeyer belonged to the Uttenruchia fraternity. He passed his first examination in 1902 as the third best student and was appointed to the preacher’s seminary in Munich for two years. There he had to preach sermons and give religious instruction in the city and its surroundings.

In 1904, Heinrich Rittelmeyer became a private teacher with the dean in Kitzingen. He gave religious instruction and experienced in a drastic way the untruthfulness with which funeral addresses were given. His difficulties became so great that in 1905 he applied for a leave of absence from the Bavarian church ministry, which was dominated by dogmatism.

From spring to Christmas 1905, he taught at the Protestant Pädagogicum in Godesberg on the Rhine. In addition, he attended lectures in German studies and philosophy in Bonn. The liberal theologian Martin Rade, editor of the journal Die christliche Welt [The Christian World], then found him a position as city vicar in Gotha. There was a free working atmosphere among the very diverse pastors. He was able to pass the Second Theological Examination in 1906 and the philosophical examination at the University of Jena at the end of 1907. Both were not easy to master, as they had to be done in addition to his abundant work at the teacher’s seminary in Gotha. His work as an educator in the subjects of religion, German, and history over eleven years, from 1908 to 1919, filled him completely; it shaped many young people for life.

In Godesberg, Heinrich Rittelmeyer and Änne Kottmann (1884-1967), who had been governess in a German family in Greece for over three years from 1905, became engaged. In April 1908, they celebrated their wedding in Gotha. Two adopted sons grew up in the family. Diverse activities among the educated of the city kept him busy in addition to his teaching activities. He eventually became chairman of the German ‘Sprachverein’ [Language Society]. He now planned to acquire a doctorate in philosophy in Jena. However, he had to abandon this plan when health difficulties made the necessary journeys to the university city (in addition to his work as a teacher) impossible.

About once or twice a year, it was possible to talk personally with the elder brother Friedrich. The latter had become acquainted with anthroposophy in 1910 in Nuremberg through Michael Bauer and had met Rudolf Steiner personally in 1911 in Munich at the last lecture in the series “Wonders of the World, Ordeals of the Soul, Revelations of the Spirit.” He told Heinrich about this afterward. It was not until five years later, in 1916, that Heinrich asked what he should read. The answer was: How to Know Higher Worlds. In spring 1917, Friedrich Rittelmeyer was already working in Berlin when his brother visited him there. A public, so-called Architects’ House Lecture by Rudolf Steiner was announced: “Beyond the Senses and Beyond the Soul” (March 31, 1917, GA 66). Heinrich was the first to hear this lecture. Friedrich then offered him the printed lecture cycles to read, which were still inaccessible to non-members at that time.

Heinrich not only studied them thoroughly on an ongoing basis, but he also excerpted them stenographically, thus acquiring a solid basic knowledge of anthroposophy. Heinrich Rittelmeyer used his understanding of anthroposophy to help a former pupil who had returned from the war with a serious wound and was drawn to spiritualism by questions about the meaning of life. Heinrich intimated to him that anthroposophy was the only sensible thing to do in this situation. To his surprise, this student became a member of the Anthroposophical Society before himself.

Heinrich Rittelmeyer, who had a special relationship with Luther from childhood and had found his personal access to Christ through Lutheranism, gave a lecture in the four hundredth commemorative year of the Reformation, 1917, on Luther’s birthday, which he also had published in print, titled: “Luther, the Prophet of the New Germany.”

In April 1919, Heinrich Rittelmeyer took over the position of vice-principal in the Herford teacher training college. Because of his special interest in Germanic mythology, he applied to the Westphalian Minister of Culture to go to the area where the memory of Germanic history was alive. His professional responsibilities in Herford became even greater.

In the field of anthroposophy, he had now gained so much confidence that he was able to become a member of the Society and the branch in Bielefeld in 1920. From 1921 onward, he publicly advocated for Rudolf Steiner in lectures. From such a lecture on June 28, 1921, came the writing: Was will Dr. Rudolf Steiner? [What does Dr. Rudolf Steiner Want?], which appeared in at least six editions.

The years 1920 and 1921 also enabled him to have two conversations with Rudolf Steiner, which mainly dealt with meditation. In the meantime, Heinrich Rittelmeyer had changed from a person who prayed intensively from his youth, and indeed prayed for many other people throughout his life, to a person who now also meditated energetically. He received many impressions, but he did not like to talk about them. Out of Heinrich Rittelmeyer’s conversations with Rudolf Steiner it is important to note that Steiner’s indication that Luther and Raphael were in Rome at the same time but did not meet in person remained with him for the rest of his life.

He was a particularly quiet and, in a way, sober person in addition to being a teacher.

Now the time was approaching when he learned of the preparations for the founding of The Christian Community. In the spring of 1922, he had decided to place his life in their service, and so he was ordained priest by his brother on September 16, 1922, in Dornach. At the age of forty-three, he was already one of the older ones.

Without his family, who remained in Herford, he founded the three congregations in Karlsruhe, Mannheim, and Heidelberg in the twenty-five months from October 1922 to November 1924.

After working in the twin congregations of Mannheim-Heidelberg and Herford-Bielefeld, he continued his work in Wiesbaden Mainz starting in 1935.

After the banning of The Christian Community on June 9, 1941, Heinrich Rittelmeyer was arrested together with Fritz Blattmann by the Gestapo in Darmstadt on June 12. SS men indiscriminately dragged laundry baskets full of books and manuscripts (even the bride’s letters) from the flat; under threat of punishment, the parents were forbidden to inform their son in the field of this action. After his release from prison on  August 16, 1941, friends found him a job at the Erdal-Werke in Mainz with the task of writing about the historical development of the shoe and its care. After the total bombing in October 1944, Heinrich Rittelmeyer lived with friends in the Taunus until June 1945. Then, after the re-establishment of the Wiesbaden congregation (1945), he worked there until his death on January 19, 1960. After twenty-two years, he followed his brother, under whose importance he had suffered throughout his life, into the spiritual world.

An important teacher of his students, a praying pastor who accompanied all the people of his congregation daily in his consciousness, he also included the deceased in his prayers daily with the help of a little book in which he had entered hundreds of names. He was a humble, faithful minister in the performance of the sacraments, a courageous advocate of anthroposophy, and a quiet meditator: that was Heinrich Rittelmeyer. He rightly wore the ring of the archpriest (see also August Pauli and Rudolf von Koschützki).

Die Gruender der Christengemeinschaft: Ein Schicksalsnetz
By Rudolf F. Gaedeke
Translated by Cindy Hindes

Hermann Beckh
May 4, 1875, Nuremberg – March 1, 1937, Stuttgart

When Hermann Beckh received a visitor in the last days of February 1937 at his death bed in his parlor in Stuttgart’s Lichtensteinstraße No. 10, he said as a greeting: “…. please be quiet! Dying is happening here.” This saying is characteristic of his life, not only superficially because his utterances were often original, but because a main motif of his being was the search for life beyond death.

This does not seem to be self-evident. At first, his biography predominantly showed the fullness of the original forces of being human. Throughout his life, he was often like a child. Opposing forces fought at the bottom of his soul.

Born on May 4, 1875, into a well-to-do family in Nuremberg, Hermann Beckh grew up together with his younger sister ‘Mariele’ in a carefree childhood. The formative experiences of his first years were shaped by the flowers, the animals and stones, the weather, and the stars. His parents’ travels to the Tegernsee and Berchtesgaden regions and to the Allgäu enabled him to breathe deeply in his childhood soul. In the fourth year of life (1879), this led so far that a rapture state occurred. The impression of the high mountain world near Einödsbach (Allgäu) overwhelmed his consciousness: “I am sure that many people never experience anything of what I experienced there ‘on the other shore of being.’ It was the world of my prenatal existence, … which I had forgotten. ” This is how Hermann Beckh described this experience in his memories of childhood.

When he had to go to school, he felt that this was a ‘violation and deprivation of freedom.’ He didn’t understand why such methods were used when he was able to recite a page-long prose text by heart after reading it once. For years he studied as if in a dream. Languages especially were not difficult for him, so he eventually learned fourteen languages through his later studies. Only in the further school years did the painful necessity arise for him to work more systematically and with diligence. The ‘Gymnasiumabsolutorium,’ the Abitur, was then passed with flying colors. The written examinations had gone so well that oral ones were ordered. This qualified him for a place at the Maximilianeum in Munich.

If the Nuremberg Abitur fell in the year 1893, the study of law, for which Hermann Beckh strangely decided, lasted until 1896 and his time as an assistant judge until 1899. During this time (1899), it happened that he had to sentence a poor married couple with a child for wood theft. Because with a prison sentence, the child would have remained alone, Hermann Beckh sentenced the couple to a fine. But because the couple had no money, Hermann Beckh gave them the sum out of his own pocket after the sentence was passed – and resigned from his post.

Then he began to study anew. To access the sources of human culture, he learned Sanskrit, Tibetan, Indian, Persian, Egyptian, and Hebrew. He studied in Kiel and Berlin, where he received his doctorate from the Humboldt University in 1907 and qualified as a professor in 1908. He became the authority on ancient languages of the Himalayan region and was the first to translate many texts of that region from ancient manuscripts in the Prussian State Library. If he was thus close to the sources and origins of human culture, the second great area of death experience also emerged. He had loved the mountains since his childhood. Once, while hiking in the high mountains, he got caught in a dense fog. He spent a whole night on the edge of a glacier, his feet stuck in his backpack, fighting frostbite. When he was twenty-nine years old, his grandfather died (1904) – the first death in his immediate environment. During the First World War, he only had typing duties in Romania and Bulgaria, also in Kiel and Berlin. Death only really struck him closer when, fifteen years after his grandfather, in 1929, his beloved sister Marie, who had always faithfully accompanied him, died. The mother survived both children and died on May 25, 1943. (No date of the father’s death has been handed down.)

Hermann Beckh

In 1911, when Hermann Beckh was 36 years old, he met Friedrich Rittelmeyer as well as Rudolf Steiner. Since he had already become acquainted with Indian theosophy, he now found in anthroposophy the spiritual bond of all the cultural-historical studies he had pursued up to that time. Now the connection of the history of consciousness of humankind, as it also shows itself in the history of languages, became clear to him. With the two volumes of the Göschen Collection on Buddhism, published in 1916, he began his real life’s work (see the list of writings), which he developed as a speaker, university teacher, and writer.

In addition to his work on the early cultures of humankind, which gave rise to From the World of Mysteries, Hermann Beckh had been deeply involved in music since childhood. At the age of sixteen, he experienced Richard Wagner’s Parsifal in Bayreuth in 1891. The last of Beckh’s works, completed on his deathbed, was Die Sprache der Tonarten (The Essence of Tonality). He had also felt connected to the starry world from an early age. A rich work, “Beiträge zur geistigen Sternenkunde,” (Contributions to Spiritual Astronomy) was dedicated to his fellow pastors in their Rundbrief (newsletter).

The fruit of Beckh’s studies on Buddhism

His two books about the cosmic rhythms in Mark’s Gospel and John’s Gospel should be mentioned especially. They would demonstrate from the spiritual science that the cosmos order and earthly working of Christ belong together.

In Karlsruhe, a philosophy professor, Arthur Drews, had written the book Die Christusmythe (The Christ Myth), in order to show that the Gospels contained nothing but mystical-fairy-tale illustrations of star processes (astral myths). This Arthur Drews belonged to the ‘Combat League against Anthroposophy’ and had expressed: “My I shall be taken by the devil after my death,” and his gravestone read: “Redemption is a detachment from the I.” Against the pantheistic religious philosophy of Arthur Drews, Beckh’s aforementioned works were meant as positive aids to understanding the Gospels.

Hermann Beckh

The always childlike admirer of all that is high and noble, who nevertheless possessed intellectual abilities in abundance, the shrewd jurist, the profound explorer of the word, and the harmonies of the starry and tonal world reaped the fruits of his labor in abundance. Nevertheless, in his opinion, he lacked the real thing. When the preparations for the foundation of the Christian Community had already led to the first two teaching courses with Rudolf Steiner, Professor Beckh had not been asked to collaborate. He had been the anthroposophical speaker at the opening of the first Goetheanum building in 1920. Rudolf Steiner had said of him: “He has done a lot of research that I have not yet come to, although some of it is somewhat speculative.” Hermann Beckh was regarded as an outstanding expert who was not asked for new activity after he had given up his university work to serve Anthroposophy.

He heard about the preparatory group that met in March 1922 in Friedrich Rittelmeyer’s confirmation hall and appeared there with the vehement words: “Now I am here and belong to you; and even if you don’t like it, you won’t get rid of me! ” Thus he became a priest of his own will, a servant of the word in an even more comprehensive sense than before.

As a co-founder of the Christian Community in Stuttgart, he was also its teacher from the beginning. He had become acquainted with anthroposophy in 1911 through an Elijah lecture, but now he himself worked with the firepower of his will for the Word like Elijah. In December 1923, he attended the Christmas Conference for the founding of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum in Dornach.

Hermann Beckh

He was also the lovable-scattered, shy, yet child-loving professor who, somehow not quite present, often seemed clumsy and tempted ridicule. He was lonely in the founding community. He remained misunderstood and knew that he had to “persevere in resistant circumstances.” His severe kidney cancer forced his soaring spirit through pain to the body: “dying is happening here.” But looking to the future, he had written in a poem about the New Jerusalem:

“And even if my path still leads over graves,

Even if I must still be a bearer of death,

There  shines on the path from the world’s farthest reaches

the resting star’s holy serious light.”

As a seminary teacher, Hermann Beckh had imparted to a whole generation of priests the enthusiasm for the spiritual work with the word, the language. The Christian Community preserves his work in the cultural sphere, where his renderings of Genesis 1 – “In the Spiritual Thought of the Original Beginning” and of the 23rd Psalm –  “He who speaks the I in me is my shepherd…” – are read again and again on the occasion of larger sermons.

Caption for Picture:

The fruits of Beckh’s studies on Buddhism

Die Gruender der Christengemeinschaft: Ein Schicksalsnetz
By Rudolf F. Gaedeke
Translated by Cindy Hindes

July 31, 1869, Hernsheim/Franconia – January 6, 1959, Munich

August Pauli, the second oldest of the founding circle, lived through a very similar destiny as did Friedrich Rittelmeyer and brother Heinrich Rittelmeyer, as well as Hermann Heisler and Christian Geyer. Pauli shared his French homeland with Friedrich Rittelmeyer and Christian Geyer and almost the same theological training and ministerial experience with all of them. Hermann Heisler, Heinrich Rittelmeyer, and August Pauli remained individual campaigners, while Christian Geyer and Friedrich Rittelmeyer were united by their unique friendship over many years.

August Pauli was born on July 31, 1869, the second of five children, in the vicarage at Hernsheim in Lower Franconia. The boy spent his first seven years in the natural, purely rural environment of the small village where his father worked as a priest.

His second seven years were marked by a move to Nördlingen and small-town life when his father became dean there. The boy went through elementary and Latin school (1876-1883) until, at the age of fourteen, he entered high school, the Anna-Kolleg in Augsburg, where he passed his Abitur in 1887. His preparation for confirmation and the celebration itself became a particularly profound experience for him in which he learned not only outwardly that the human being partakes in Christ’s grace. The experience opened up inwardly for him: This also means me; I am included in it.

From his entire school years, August Pauli only reported on his history teacher, Professor Metzger, in Augsburg, whose enthusiastic teaching captivated the schoolchildren.

Four semesters of theological studies in Erlangen passed as if without a trace on his soul, and nothing was reported about life in the student fraternity Uttenruthia. It was not until his third year of study in Tubingen that he was forced to follow the students’ example into a more intensive engagement with the study contents. The main occupation involved learning by rote, as it once was at school. The fourth year of study, again in Erlangen, was similar. One of his fellow students was the later famous Ernst Troeltsch; he was followed in the Uttenruthia by ‘the fox’ Friedrich Rittelmeyer, who immediately attracted attention because, as a newcomer, he wanted to give a speech.

Despite his lack of participation, August Pauli passed his first examination in 1891 so well that he was recommended to the Munich seminary. He immediately began his service as a vicar. At twenty-two, he suddenly found himself in the pulpit of his hometown of Nördlingen, substituting for his father, who was seriously ill and soon died. After the third sermon, Pauli thought he had said everything he knew. How was it to continue? The young pastor Dr. Christian Geyer, with whom he had become acquainted as a colleague, provided him with a certain amount of help that his father could no longer give him. From Nördlingen, he then passed the Second Theological Examination in Ansbach.

After three years of this first period of learning, the church leadership transferred him in 1894 as a traveling preacher to the diaspora parishes of Upper Bavaria in Tolz, Miesbach, Holzkirchen, and Tegernsee. In the Catholic area, his activity was quite varied, with constant travelling. The mine workers in Hausham near Miesbach, the immigrant Swabian farmers in Holzkirchen, the bathers in Bad Tolz, and the aristocrats in Tegernsee each formed their own kind of community. And the most diverse acquaintanceships and connections developed – also with “crowned heads.”

In 1897, August Pauli was now twenty-eight and not yet married, when something deeply shocking happened to him; while he himself was in love with a girl, he received a letter from a young man who told him that his sister was devoted to Pauli, and that she was sure he loved her too. This episode, which does not seem to be very significant, awakened a profound problem in August Pauli: Is it permissible for a Christian to experience happiness at the expense of others or alongside the suffering of others? Questions now arose that awakened his own judgements. This struggle gave rise to his first writing:On the Trail of Life – Diary of a Young Theologian. (Auf der Spur des Lebens. Tagebuch eines jungen Theologen.)

The reflections in Schultze Naumburg’s magazine Kunstwart gave rise to interest in and questions about art. Friedrich Naumann, the theologian who became a politician, awakened Pauli’s interest in politics. In theology, which had hitherto been the content of his studies, historical interest in Jesus awoke, and Christ as the Son of God disappeared from consciousness. “At that time, the path had to be taken from the dogmatic Christ, who no longer had any life in him for us, to the historical Jesus.” It was as if, at a later point in the unfolding of his life, something came to light that others had experienced earlier. August Pauli was a loner. He also took his inner steps basically in melancholy solitude and without a friend.

He was strengthened in this by his intensive reading of the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, who had particularly emphasized the importance of the striving single individual and had ultimately given a harsh critique of official church Christianity. August Pauli found in Kierkegaard a precise description of his own stage of development.

Tolzer’s term of office also saw Pauli’s first meeting with Dr. Johannes Müller, who had just moved to Schliersee. August Pauli met him in person. The emphasis on the individual, the single personality, was also the basic motif of Müller’s work, and August Pauli, who was increasingly questioning the fixed forms of the church and church service, found confirmation in the spontaneous, humane nature of Johannes Müller’s work.

At the turn of the century, in 1899, August Pauli became pastor of the small Lower Franconian parish of Westheim. A mere farming village, it was prosperous and knew how to maintain this prosperity with firm social forms, right up to marriage. The parish priest was an integral part, indeed the guarantor and often the enforcer of the customs and laws of old. The new pastor had questions everywhere, challenged the customs: Should this be Christianity? Is it not rather Old Testament, pre-Christian? Is a people’s church at all capable of being Christian? Doesn’t the uniformity of a community contradict spontaneous enthusiasm, the filling of the individual with the spirit? “O could I, like Paul, be a carpet weaver and then, when I wanted to, not if it drove me, if it were an inner necessity for me, help my fellow men come to the truth, to God – would that not be the better, I might say purer in style and therefore a more effective way to serve the cause of Jesus?” Thus wrote August Pauli in his book Im Kampf mit dem Amt. Erlebtes und Geschautes zum Problem Kirche [Struggling with the Office. Experiences and Observations with the Problem of the Church] (1911, p. 47), which was probably significantly influenced by his experiences in Westheim. He could “do nothing but faithfully guard their [the church’s] sleep.”

To vent his soul, he wrote polemical articles in the Pastors’ Correspondence Journal, which soon made him known throughout the country as a ‘highly questionable heretic.’ “By openly and courageously confronting the terrorism of an outdated orthodoxy for the first time, the movement was prepared, which my friends Dr. Geyer and Dr. Rittelmeyer later took into their own hands,” he later wrote.

In 1908, his decision had matured; August Pauli resigned from the service of the Bavarian Regional Church after seventeen years of work. He worked as a freelance speaker in southern Germany and in the summer months at Mainberg Castle, near Schweinfurt, as a private secretary to Johannes Müller. The latter gathered a congregation there near Elmau (1908-1911). During this time, Pauli met his wife, Elsbeth Seydler (October 13, 1881), who came from Königsberg in East Prussia. He also had an important, longer meeting with Christoph Blumhardt in Bad Boll/Württemberg, where he experienced the special, healing presence of the spirit in prayer, with which father and son Blumhardt had been able to work so convincingly.

What is special about August Pauli’s biography compared to that of Hermann Heisler is that he saw himself as able to re-enter the church ministry after a four-year break. In Bavaria, the church did not accept this’ heretic.’ Still in office in Munich was president Bezzel, with whom Friedrich Rittelmeyer had had harrowing experiences.

August Pauli became pastor on the ridge of the Thuringian Forest in Schmiedefeld near Wallendorf. He had also married there at the beginning of August 1914. Despite 4000 members, there was no ‘proper’ congregation among the poor farmers and workers in that harsh climate. People were more or less socialist; there was no religion. On Christmas Day, there was finally time to slaughter a pig; the church was empty – so empty that sometimes no sermon had to be preached. This changed abruptly with the outbreak of the First World War. The church was overflowing, and field services had to be held. Every man wanted to take communion once more – or for the first time – before enlisting: a field of work “calling for a heathen mission.”

From 1916 to 1918, August Pauli worked as a pastor in Weißenfels an der Saale, the place where Novalis died. There, too, his experiences with the Thuringian-Saxon population were not much different from those in Schmiedefeld. He had to administer a “pastoral parish with about 12,000 souls”. There were too many outer obligations, for example, funerals. “I was curious myself when I stepped up to a new grave, what I would say again.” “I had to tell myself that a church that makes its servants accept such things is itself contributing to the complete devaluation of its sacred acts.”

But the political orientation of the church was also intolerable to August Pauli. On the birthday of the emperor (January 27, 1918), the superintendent held the sermon with the theme: “The Hohenzollerns are given to us by God for wisdom and for justice and for sanctification and for salvation.” So his friend Christian Geyer’s offer to take up a pastorate in Nürnberg fell on good ground. But the church leadership did not want to see him in Nürnberg. So he went to Regensburg (December 1918). Even though the people in this southern German city were more accessible and open, church life again shaped itself in the old traditional forms. “I was obviously not yet in the right stream.” In 1921/22, the ‘Leimbach case’ occurred in the Bavarian Regional Church. Pastor Leimbach in Öttingen was a militant advocate of a radical-modern theology. Bavaria’s pastors were divided over him when he was to be suspended. Dr. Christian Geyer, at the head of about fifty modern-minded colleagues, took a six-month leave of absence. In view of the founding of The Christian Community, which Geyer helped to prepare, he hoped to be expelled from the church. This did not happen, and Geyer travelled back to Ansbach to the General Synod instead of Breitbrunn and Dornach.

August Pauli had known about anthroposophy for over a decade through his wife but had not found a special relationship with it. He, too, took a six-month leave of absence because of the Leimbach case. Initially, he had not heard about the preparations for the founding of The Christian Community. Now that he had time, the news came just in time. It became clear to him what had to happen, and he intensively studied the transcripts of the first two so-called ‘theology cycles,’ which Rudolf Steiner had held in the summer and autumn of 1921.

It is pointless to speculate about how many of the fifty progressive pastors around Christian Geyer would have found their way to The Christian Community if he had gone before them. Certainly not very many. It took a deeply personal decision. But August Pauli made this decision. He resigned from the church service for the second time and worked among the founders from the Breitbrunn meeting onward. “Even in my most recent and highest relationships, I bind myself to those who, like me, want to be bearers of the mission of Christ, which we do not receive as individuals, but as a community.”

Rudolf Steiner had explained to him that, actually, only two realizations were necessary for cooperation: That in Jesus, there lived more than a human being and that there must be a new liturgy. Vom Pfarrer der Landeskirche zum Priester der Christengemeinschaft [From Pastor of the National Church to Priest of The Christian Community] is the title of the book August Pauli published in 1928, in which he described the path traced here.

He had walked it in his own way, thoughtfully and thoroughly. The insight that the preaching ministry, as well as the people’s church, urgently needed renewal had already come in 1908, but then fourteen years had passed before he wanted to help build a new church of the future.

As full of pressing questions and deeply moved as the first part of his life had been, he then served the new mission steadily and straightforwardly in the congregation of The Christian Community in Munich, which he founded. In Munich, he began the new work with Gerhard Klein immediately after the ordinations in 1922. In November 1923, Gerhard Klein left Munich, and Hermann Heisler joined Pauli. Seven years younger, he had often taken his steps in life very similarly. But in temperament and style, there had hardly been a greater contrast among the founders of The Christian Community.

Hermann Heisler was a fiery speaker, but August Pauli was always thoughtful and calm, even taciturn, or even aloof, as a friend called it, but always balancing and forming the calming pole in the spiritual discussions of a community that was repeatedly subjected to severe tests.

Probably the most severe of these – besides the ban – was the conflict that broke out in 1933 through Gertrud Spoerri. Hermann Heisler came out sharply against her. August Pauli tried intensively to bring about a mediation. Finally, Friedrich Rittelmeyer travelled from Stuttgart and announced her leave of absence.

The exhilarating time of the beginning of all congregational work for The Christian Community had thus come to an end. The rising power of the National Socialists overshadowed all free spiritual life. Hermann Heisler had to give way to this. He had violated a ban imposed by those in power, and it was necessary for August Pauli to agree to his departure, even though the two men, so different from each other, had become close friends.

Of August Pauli’s two children, his son Reinhold, born in 1915, died in 1938 during a mountain hike at the ‘Totenkirchl’ in the Wilden Kaiser, east of Kufstein. This experience had deeply shaken August Pauli, and Hermann Heisler had been a strong support for him during this most difficult time.

The death of his son unleashed new abilities and possibilities in August Pauli. At almost seventy years of age, he opened his soul to his fellow human beings in radiant mildness, and the refined humor of old-age wisdom met his friends. From that time on, August Pauli was able to perceive clear experiences from beyond the threshold, from the so-called dead, with an alert daytime consciousness. With this ability, he was able to help many people in the following difficult years of prohibition and war.

After the Second World War, August Pauli was the patriarch of the reconstruction phase of the congregation in Munich. He had to cope with the death of his wife Elsbeth in 1955 and another crisis among his colleagues. But then, the almost ninety-year-old was able to experience the consecration of the new church in Munich’s Leopoldstraße, revered and celebrated by the whole congregation. He was rightly one of the few wearers of the golden ring and the title of ‘Archpriest,’ a distinction that has only been awarded to a few priests to this day.

On Christmas Eve 1958, weakness forced him into bed. He died on January 6, 1959. Thus his dying was at the same time a journey through the twelve holy nights and a full awakening to the spiritual reality on Epiphany, the day of the appearance of the light from above.

December 2,1897, Radolfzell – September 2, 1973, Freiburg

From Die Gründer der Christengemeinschaft: Ein Schicksalsnetz, by Rudolf Gädeke
Translated by Rev. Cindy Hindes

From his ordination on September 16, 1922, Friedrich Doldinger worked as one of the most prominent personalities of the original circle. For more than fifty years, he was pastor in the congregation he founded in Freiburg im Breisgau and was Lenker of the congregations in Baden. None of the first four Lenkers and three Oberlenkers held office for so long. None of the other often-so-called original priests worked exclusively in one parish for more than half a century, from the very first day.

The sacraments of the Catholic Church instilled a special piety in Friedrich Doldinger as a child. Already as the first pupil in the class of the Realgymnasium, he proved his scientific abilities and his exact thinking; from childhood onwards, he lived actively in the arts, writing poetry, painting, and making music.

Religion, science, and art lived in unique harmony in him. He was, however, not without powerful obstacles due to his descent from a Catholic-Alemannic family, his extremely fine sensitivity, and a persistently very weak constitution. He was a man both revered and controversial as hardly any of his colleagues. He still lives clearly in the memory of many people: a medium-sized figure, fine limbs, a splendid head, usually tilted slightly to one side and a little forward, as if listening, a pained smile, a gaze at once penetrating and yet as if dreaming. In earlier years, he was always mistaken for a girl, or a woman.

He was hardly ever seen without a scarf around his neck, at any time of the year, and rarely without a cap on his head, like the ones motorcyclists used to wear. Once he had pulled it off with an energetic gesture, his hair stood out like flames in all directions. The first five decades of The Christian Community’s life were shaped by him in a special way.

Their third son, Friedrich Leopold was born to the Catholic postal clerk couple Willibald and Walburga Doldinger. He grew up with his two older brothers, Alfred and Walter. As a child, he regularly went to church and then to the lake with a view over to the island of Reichenau. Later he wrote about the end of his 14th year: “… that everything traditionally ceremonial without the content of the good spirit is repugnant to me. I realized this at the age of fourteen when I turned away from the Catholic Church”.

He ruptured his lung while swimming. As a result, he had to miss school for half a year. Later, he had a gymnastics accident.

His father was transferred to Freiburg in Breisgau. There, Friedrich attended the Realgymnasium and found, to his own surprise, that he was usually first in his class and also ‘very good’ in painting. He read a lot and was an avid user of the town library. He was particularly impressed by the sagas of the gods, the Germanic heroic sagas, and the Edda. He did much of this reading in seclusion on the grounds of the “Old Cemetery.” Through a woman friend who gave him a picture of the Sistine Madonna and one of Michael fighting the dragon, the sixteen-year-old had his first contact with anthroposophy in 1913. Mrs. Woebken took him to Stuttgart for a lecture by Rudolf Steiner, where Friedrich Doldinger was also introduced to him. However, he did not like the lecturer’s energetic manner of speaking.

A heart defect saved him from military service in the First World War. Ever since his confirmation, he had fainting spells and attacks of weakness, such that he fell down as if lifeless. Breathing exercises increased such conditions even more. He had to stay away from school for three-quarters of a year. How he loved the holiday visits to relatives in Radolfzell and Überlingen am See and the visits to Uncle Alfred, who was a district court judge in Karlsruhe and once showed him Rudolf Steiner’s Occult Science with the remark: “Nonsense personified.”

At eighteen, he passed an external Abitur in Ettenheim with an excellent essay, the subject of which we, unfortunately, do not know. Now he felt more free. His parents and brothers did not look too favorably on his ambitions. He read anthroposophical books! How To Know Higher Worlds? and the Mystery Dramas! Why hadn’t this been given to him earlier? That was something for his artistic soul. He met Mrs. Anna Wolffhügel with her three children, whose husband, later a Waldorf teacher, was in the field.

In the winter semester of 1916/17, he began his studies, which he completed exclusively in Freiburg for health reasons, as he was always ill to the point of endangering his life and dependent upon his mother’s care. He absorbed knowledge from experimental physics to literature and philosophy to musicology.

In 1921, he wrote his doctoral thesis in literature: Die Jugendentwicklung Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis bis zum Allwil-Fragment in ihrer Beziehung zur Gesamt-Entwicklung [The Development of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Youth up to the Allwil-Fragment in its Relationship to the Overall Development]. It was highly acclaimed by Edmund Husserl. His second subject was musicology.

It is still to be reported from the years of study that Friedrich Doldinger had to stay in Munich for several months in 1918 in order to undergo treatment by Marie Ritter, the inventor of the ‘Ritter Mittel.’ During this time he met Albert Steffen, Ernst Uehli, Otto Graf Lerchenfeld, Frau Harriet von Vacano and, in Breitbrunn am Ammersee, Margareta Morgenstern and Michael Bauer. All were well-known members of the Anthroposophical Society at that time.

In the following year, he was already actively involved in Freiburg through lectures and discussions to spread the idea of the threefold social order. He published works in the Waldorf Nachrichten (e.g. “Hubertus,” Volume II, p. 416, or “Der Sänger,” Volume III, p. 160).

Then his study and reading evenings formed the center of a circle that later became a local group of the Anthroposophical First Class work. He himself did not speak much, was mostly silent, and always seemed somewhat embarrassed; he liked to play something on the piano or recite poetry. But he could also forcefully express his views — he called himself an uncomfortable “truth-teller” — which won him many admirers and some opponents.

In May 1920, Johanna Otto, his future wife, met him for the first time in this circle. We have a detailed chronicle of his life from her (privately duplicated). According to her own judgment, she was an “absolutely emotional person.” “He was spirit – I was pure soul.” She was his ardent admirer, fifteen years his senior, energetic and caring. Her husband gave Doldinger money, a bicycle, and a typewriter. She was, as she herself writes, always ill, irreligious, and melancholic to depressive. They went on a short trip to Lake Constance together, both as if dreaming.

In the autumn of 1920, the first anthroposophical First Class course took place in Dornach to mark the opening of the Goetheanum building. Of course Friedrich Doldinger was there. Johanna also traveled with him. It was the colored windows in the building and the eurythmy that most captivated Friedrich Doldinger.

In 1921 his doctoral thesis was finished, typed by Johanna. Friedrich Doldinger published his first essay in the newly founded journal Die Drei on the “Weg zur Wirklichkeit bei Goethe und Steiner” (The Path to Reality in Goethe and Steiner) and edited the verse epic by Julius Mosen “Ritter Wahn” with his own introduction at the publishing house Der Kommende Tag.

At that time, Tom Kändler, a theology student from Tübingen, visited him in Freiburg in the summer and told him about the preparations for work on religious renewal and the first course (June course) that Rudolf Steiner had just held. This would be continued in the autumn. Rudolf Steiner himself had drawn attention to Friedrich Doldinger and thought he should be invited.

From the ‘Autumn Course’ in 1921 on, Friedrich Doldinger was a member of the founder’s circle. It was difficult for him to explain his professional will to his parents: But he was always able to go his own way. He was not a fighter but an absolute individualist.

From Dr. Hermann Heisler’s financial collections, each founder was to be paid three thousand marks to start work. The value of the money dwindled daily due to inflation.

In Breitbrunn am Ammersee the circle stayed as guests of Michael Bauer and Margareta Morgenstern. They met daily in an empty cowshed to prepare for the foundation in Dornach. Friedrich Doldinger sat in the sun at the open door under an umbrella and took notes. Even then, he seemed to some like a figure from Spitzweg’s pictures. Was he actually listening to the discussions? His paper on the Templars, however, quickly dispelled the impression of a dreaming poet.

Then they sailed together across the Ammersee, then across Lake Constance into Switzerland to Dornach. Rudolf Steiner received the circle and helped it to form itself as a priesthood of the consciousness soul age. This included the new kind of hierarchy of the community, and through his advice, Doldinger was acknowledged as one of the first four Lenkers.

In Freiburg, after the founding days in Dornach, all the preparations were made; a room was rented, a circle of people was officially confirmed as the first members before the Act of Consecration could be celebrated on December 3, 1922.

The Freiburg Community Chronicle and the records of Johanna Doldinger describe in detail the development of community life year by year. Friedrich Doldinger immediately began to travel in his area of influence, which included Baden and Switzerland. He held lectures and musical-poetic celebrations throughout the area. From a distance, he witnessed the Goetheanum fire on New Year’s Eve 1922/23. During the 1923/24 Christmas Conference, he was present in Dornach as far as his priestly duties allowed. Friedrich Doldinger had done much for the Anthroposophical Society. Rudolf Steiner is said to have asked him if a house for the Anthroposophical Society together with The Christian Community could be built in Freiburg.

On May 8, 1924, Hermann Beckh officiated at the wedding of the Doldinger couple.

Rudolf Steiner asked him by telegraph to hold the funeral of his collaborator Edith Maryon in Basel on  May 6, 1924. When Friedrich Doldinger enquired by telephone about the course of events, he received the clarifying reply: “You perform the rite for the deceased; the rite must precede; and then I come and speak of the special circumstances of her life, which in this case were anthroposophical.”

The autumn weeks of 1924 brought the culmination of Rudolf Steiner’s lecturing activities. Friedrich Doldinger took part in everything: Drama Course, Karma Lectures, Classes at the School, Apocalypse Lectures for the Priesthood, Pastoral Medicine Course. Johanna Doldinger was accepted by Rudolf Steiner into the School: “You are the lady who creates The Christian Community together with Doctor Doldinger in Freiburg; continue to be a worthy member of the Society!”

Rudolf Steiner died on March 30, 1925. The Doldinger couple attended the funeral service in the hall of the carpenter’s workshop, which included a composition by Friedrich Doldinger.

Christ of All Earth, vol. 13, 1925

He earned great merit for the movement as a whole from 1923 onwards, when he published a series of small volumes under the title Christ of All Earth, with his own single volume design, which announced the spiritual-pious attitude that The Christian Community wanted to generate. With thirty-nine titles by 1940, these writings went out into the world by the tens of thousands and found their receptive readers. In the journal Tatchristentum, which after a year was called The Christian Community, he was involved with contributions from the beginning. Many other writings were created by him, well over thirty works. But it was as a speaker and festival organizer that he was most effective until his old age.

The large conferences were an important element in the early days of The Christian Community. Friedrich Doldinger was involved in almost all of them. In 1926 he himself organized a conference in Freiburg with the theme “Christ – Gospel – Church.” Doldinger always performed dramatic scenes he had written and rehearsed himself, played his own compositions, and showed paintings; artistic activity was the element that inspired many people around him to join in. He loved improvisation, not only on the piano but also in drawing, making small things out of any material but also in speaking, and performing. Most of what he created and did was done on the spur of the moment. Only conferences and journeys were planned in the long term.

“Gloria” one of hundreds of Freidrich Doldinger drawings

His wife was a strict judge. After a lecture, she could audibly call from the back row: “Friedrich, that was cultural salad.” But she was also his constant companion.

Gottfried Husemann was somewhat involved in Doldinger’s Freiburg congregation during a convalescence period in 1927/28. The two were very similar in many ways: outwardly often sickly, spiritually open and stimulating, very musical, but with an easily offended sensibility. One was a choleric Westphalian, the other a melancholic, gruff Alemanni. One can guess how difficult it was for the two of them to live with each other throughout their lives. For both, the spontaneous personal will for freedom took precedence over all the necessary order of a community.

Doldinger had a hard time with ‘Stuttgart,’ with the movement leadership, to which he himself belonged. It was not in him to hold meetings or attend conferences, although he took his leadership responsibility very seriously. He had to be effective himself and did so intensively for fifty years. For him, the source was the lived unity of knowledge, art, and religion. When he once thought it necessary, he wrote to all his colleagues: “If a strong and heartfelt devotion to anthroposophy were cultivated among us, exhortations to conscientiousness would be superfluous, as would the need for slogan-like declarations of will.”

He was allowed to travel extensively: In 1937, three months in Finland, earlier stays in Italy, then France with Paris and Chartres, and later, after the war, several times in Sweden and England. He loved to travel, despite all his settledness in Freiburg. As early as 1931, he was given a tiny car for his business trips. He always had friends and patrons but suffered greatly from those who were not well-disposed towards him.

From 1936 onwards, the ‘Midwinter Week’ in Freiburg and the days around the Day of Repentance and Prayer in Bremen were part of his fixed annual schedule. After the war, the meetings at the Hardthof on Lake Bonn were added. He cultivated all these activities over the decades.

Facsimile of Doldinger’s Memorandum 1922

When The Christian Community was banned in 1941, he registered with Professor Weismann to study composition and piano playing. He gave piano lessons and had more than twenty students. During the war, he wrote his Mozart book, which ran into six editions and has been reprinted by a renowned publisher. “I worked through a solid meter of literature for it!” he had commented on it.

Of his compositions, the Good Friday music, the ‘Kassel music,’ the choirs, especially the baptismal choir, the string quartets, and the songs and movements for the Act of Consecration must be remembered.

After the war, 1948-1950, the small construction of a church was possible on Goethestraße 67a, where the congregation regrouped after the time of the war and had its center for decades. It is unforgettable how Friedrich Doldinger improvised on the harmonium before the service!

Still to be mentioned are the two North German Conferences in the summer of 1949 at Sternberg Castle/Lippe and in 1950 at Schloss Vahrenholz on the Weser, which made it possible for a larger circle to experience his works and the intensive life of the Bremen community and its youth circle with Friedrich Doldinger.

More than two decades of intensive work followed. This is a miracle in view of his persistently weak health, and only possible because of the glowing fire in his spirit and will that he forged. In his old age, many smiled at him as an oddball. It was not easy for colleagues who nevertheless, needed to work with him.

It will certainly take some time before we rediscover much of Friedrich Doldinger’s work. However, there was one quality he had that everyone experienced: humor! At the beginning of a lecture during a conference in Hamburg—the hall was merely partitioned off in an exhibition hall— it was loud. People shouted for him to speak louder; he replied: “I don’t speak louder; you have to be quieter.” He is said to have once preached to his confirmands:  “One gets by in life with relatively few sins. Yes, so be it.”

He died on September 2, 1973, after a life full of physical and mental suffering, from which he always extracted a transfiguration that shines in the words: “Christ of All Earth.”