The Heroism of von Hildebrand

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a reception in honor of the unjustly neglected Dietrich von Hildebrand. Not only was he one of the leading Catholic philosophers of the twentieth century, I learned, he was also a great moral figure. The German thinker was among the first to warn publicly of the dangers of Nazism and the wickedness of its anti-Semitism, and as early as the 1920’s was calling Hitler “evil.” Such morally courageous outspokenness led to his financial ruin and threats upon his life. Upon Hitler’s becoming dictator in 1933, van Hildebrand fled to Vienna, where he founded and edited the anti-Nazi weekly paper Der Christliche Ständestaat. (Meaning “The Christian Corporate State,” the title was not his choice.) Ultimately, he would have to flee from Austria, eventually making it to New York, where he spent the rest of his life as a professor at Fordham University.

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The Heroism of von Hildebrand

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