What Should Catholics Think of Bonhoeffer?

Angel Studios released the film Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. on November 22, 2024. It celebrated the German Lutheran pastor as a Christian hero of Nazi resistance. Undoubtedly he was a man who lived out his convictions and who died in accord with his conscience. In that sense, he is a “martyr” in the broadest possible sense—the sense that would include both St. Thomas More, killed by Henry VIII, and Thomas Cranmer, killed by Queen Mary in the short-lived Catholic restoration after Edward’s death.

Obviously, this is not the meaning of the word “martyr” as used by Catholics in their liturgical worship and veneration of the saints. But I need not stress the obvious.

The question remains: Should Catholics celebrate Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a great Christian witness?

The answer is unequivocally no.

In his book The Triumph of Romanticism, Fr. Gerard Steckler helps us to understand why:

At length, after having started to influence Catholic theology, religious existentialism in turn succumbed to the radical Christianity of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who managed the remarkable feat of extracting the religion out of Christianity and thus paved the way for the increasing identification of humanism and former Christian principles. (243)

Let’s listen to Bonhoeffer himself, sounding quite like Pope Francis:

Again and again I am driven to think about my activities, which are now concerned so much with the secular field. I am surprised that I live and can live without the Bible for days. . . . I feel the resistance growing in me against all religiosity (das Religiöse), sometimes reaching the level of an instinctive horror—surely this is not good either. Yet I am not a religious nature (eine religiöse Natur) at all. But all the time I am forced to think of God or Christ, of genuineness (Echtheit), life, freedom, charity—that matters for me. What causes me uneasiness was just the religious clothing. (253)

I am constantly moved by the question what Christianity really is, or who Christ really is, for us today. The time in which everything could be said to men by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over. So too is the time of inwardness or conscience, which means the time of religion in general. We are moving toward a completely religionless time. Men as they are simply cannot be religious any more. (254)