Priest in Münster
After working in Berlin for ten years, Clemens August von Galen was recalled to his home diocese of Münster. There, he served the local city parish of St. Lambert from 1926 until his election as bishop in 1933and additionally administered the parish of St. Servatius as of 1931.
Johannes Poggenburg, Bishop of Münster, (1862–1933), gave von Galen this office less because he desired to position von Galen as a bishop candidate and more to oppose the Westphalian nobility’s changing political views.
The Rhenish-Westphalian Association of Catholic Nobles, to which Galen himself belonged, had been becoming an increasingly right-wing Catholic movement, its sympathy for National Socialism had been becoming increasingly clearer and clearer. Poggenburg considered the aristocratic priest von Galen to be the person capable of counteracting these currents.
His hope went un fulfilled, however, for von Galen’s attempts to steer the Rhenish-Westphalian Association of Catholic Nobles away from its sympathies with National Socialism and back to the church’s position in sociopolitical issues and thus to win it back for the Catholic Center Party came to naught.
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