Status Updates From Alexander Schmorell: Saint ...

“The narrative of St Alexander’s life reminds us to be judicious in our choice of friends and in the heroes we hold up as models for our children and ourselves.”

“It was their Christian faith that gave them the fortitude to willingly risk their lives, to sacrifice themselves for others and for the sake of serving their deepest convictions and truth.”

Himmler: “we shall not rest until we have rooted out Christianity.”

“God arranges everything according to His will and for our good.”

“Even in the last weeks of his life, Schmorell never lost his self possession or the confidence that what he had done was right. It was distressed to see this young man, so obviously gifted and full of promise, standing before me with so terrible a doom upon him; but where I was shaken, he was serene and even lighthearted.”

Alexander struggled with feelings of disquiet and despair.

“Suffering tempers the character and forms real people.”

“Christianity… teaches not racial superiority but the brotherhood of men.”

“It is not given to any human being, in any circumstance, to make judgments that are reserved to God alone. No one can know what goes on in the soul of a mentally afflicted person. No one can know what secret inner ripening can come from suffering and sorrow. Every individual’s life is priceless. We are all dear to God.”

“Man without God is no longer man.”

The members of the White Rose found much value in the works of Georges Bernanos, among others.

Alexander looked up to Alyosha Karamazov

“Gallantry and modesty seem to have been characteristic of Alexander.”

“Art, music, and literature were interests that Alexander and Hans (Scholl) shared, in which they sought sanctuary, and that provided their lives with uplifting sustenance.”

Alexander Schmorrell joined the Munich medical school out of a compulsion to both avoid killing lives and to save lives.

“It was Alexander’s pious nanny who truly nurtured Orthodoxy in him, as well as a love for Russia, the homeland they both had lost.”

There were juvenile concentration camps. Wow.

“Meetings of the Hitler Youth were conducted on Sunday morning and included the singing of blasphemous songs. Initiation ceremonies into the organization were scheduled at Whitsun to conflict with Catholic confirmation services.”

Hitler was quoted to have said “One is either a Christian or a German. You can’t be both.”

“In both passive and active resistance to Nazism, Christian ideals and idealism played a significant role.”

“Resistance (to Nazi Germany) was based on political, moral, and religious principles.”

St. Alexander of Munich was remarked by a friend at his 2012 canonization as “just a normal person. How is it that this normal, life loving young man chose to embark on a course of action that he knew would put his life in jeopardy, and then ultimately come to sacrifice his life?”