Blessed Max Josef Metzger

Max Josef Metzger was born at Schopfheim in Germany on 3 February 1887. He began theology in 1905 and took his doctorate in 1910, and was ordained on 5 July 1911. He enlisted as a military chaplain when the First World War broke out but was discharged in 1915 after a grave pneumonia with pleurisy, and moved to Graz as general secretary of the Kreuzbündnis. In 1917 he founded the World Peace League of the White Cross and composed an international religious programme for peace, which he sent to Pope Benedict XV, and in 1919 the Missionary Society of the White Cross, whose motto was that Christ must be King. Between 1917 and 1929 he spoke at fourteen international congresses as a defender of peace, and in 1927 attended the Lausanne assembly, which gave rise to the World Council of Churches, as a Catholic observer; the same year he renamed his association the Societas Christi Regis.

In 1939 he founded the Una Sancta fraternity for Christian unity. Imprisoned that November on suspicion of involvement in the attempt on Hitler's life, he wrote from prison asking Pius XII to convoke an ecumenical council at Assisi. He was arrested again on 23 June 1943.