Commemorating a Jesuit Hero: Alfred Delp, S.J.

Dr. Cubilie’s work is a model of engaged scholarship. Her 2005 book, Women Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights grew out of her own experiences in Badakhshan, Afghanistan as a United Nations field worker and investigator. Cubilie then went on to serve as a UN program officer for fifteen years.

Arts on Bergen Performance: Bach’s Ich habe genug BWV 82 and John Carter’s Cantata

That night we invite you to gather for a special Arts on Bergen performance in commemoration of Alfred Delp at 7:00 PM in Saint Aedan’s Church as part of our Arts on Bergen series.

The Saint Peter’s University Chamber Orchestra and special guests, under the direction of University Director of Music Dr. Joseph Legaspi, will perform Bach’s Ich habe genug BWV 82 and John Carter’s Cantata. The Orchestra will be joined by Joy Tamayo, soprano; Katrina Saporsantos, soprano; Patty Lazzara, flute; Alejandro Consolacion, II, organ continuo, piano, and; Frederick Golz, harpsichord.

Admission to both events is free. We encourage students, faculty and staff to attend one or both.

About Father Alfred Delp, SJ and the Kreisau Circle

The Delp Lecture was established by the Provost’s Office to commemorate Fr. Delp but also to recognize successful and engaged intellectual work intended to resist oppression, and carried out in the spirit of the Ignatian tradition.

Alfred Delp was a public intellectual, a brilliant theologian and an active member of the Kreisau Circle. The Kreisau Circle was the name given by the Gestapo to a group of men who opposed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The group met frequently at an estate in Kreisau, Silesia (now Poland) that was owned by one of its leading members– Helmuth James Graf von Moltke.

Moltke was arrested and later hanged for his alleged role in an abortive assassination attempt made against Hitler in 1944. Moltke wrote to his wife just before his execution, “We are to be hanged for thinking together.”

Included among the members of the Circle were two Jesuit priests, two Lutheran pastors, conservatives, liberals, monarchists, landowners, former trade-union leaders and diplomats. One of the two Lutheran pastors who belonged to the Circle was the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

While Bonhoeffer is well remembered, Fr. Alfred Delp and the German Jesuits are almost entirely forgotten as leading members of the German resistance.

The members of the Kreisau Circle were united in their abhorrence of Nazism and their desire to conceive of a new, humane social order for Germany after the fall of the German Reich. This was in itself treasonous because the Nazis taught that the Reich would last for one thousand years after the end of the war.

Please join us for these important and inspiring inaugural events in commemoration of the life and witness of a heroic Jesuit public intellectual.