Religion: Ready for Martyrdom

The Bishops of Denmark are militant Christians. Early this year Bishop J. J. A. Ammundsen of Lolland-Falster warned his Lutheran flock to be ready for martyrdom. Last week to the U.S. came news of increasing militancy. In Copenhagen Bishop Hans Fuglsang-Damgaard thundered: “We shall pray and kindle the spirit. There was never any use for cowardly clergymen, least of all today.”

When the Nazis rode roughshod over Denmark, they carefully bypassed the two Bishops, but they banned religious services in parts of Denmark, arrested Vilhelm Fibiger, former Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, three Lutheran Pastors.

Best known of the arrested pastors is 45-year-old Kaj Munk, rector of Vedersoe in West Jutland. He is not only famed for his preaching (“like a rain of sparks from a lightning rod”) but is also Denmark’s No. 1 playwright (Cant, An Idealist, The Word).

All during the occupation Munk’s voice has attacked the Nazis from his pulpit. He has written many a biting pamphlet distributed by the Danish underground. His last defiant gesture before his arrest came a few weeks ago when he flatly refused to obey the Nazi edict to cease prayers for the persecuted Norwegians. Wrote Munk: “. . . I intend to dis obey. . . . Danish clergymen take an oath on the Bible, but not yet to the Foreign Secretary. . . . I feel bound to my Norwegian brothers because they are . . . brothers in the faith. They fight for the ideals that I, too, have sworn to fight for. If for fear of men I should sit a passive onlooker I should be a traitor to my Christian faith, to my Danish mind and to my clergyman’s oath. It is better to damage Denmark with regard to Germany than to Jesus.”