A few days after being condemned to death for treason by the Nazis, a Jesuit priest began to write a work on a reflection for Pentecost permeated by a longing for inner freedom and a cry for help in surrendering himself to whatever God had planned for him

One day in mid-January 1945, Alfred Delp wrote to his secretary from his cell in Berlin’s Tegel Prison: “I’ve begun writing a few thoughts on the Pentecost prayer for you.”

The letter was later dated “after 11 January”. That date, 11 January, was significant: a demarcation line. On that afternoon, after his two-day trial for high treason, Delp had stood before the judge of the Third Reich’s “People’s Court” and received his verdict: guilty. The sentence: death by hanging. Delp had been included in the sweep of resisters arrested following the failed 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life.

Born in Mannheim to a Catholic mother and a Protestant father, Delp had been raised and confirmed a Lutheran before being received into the Catholic Church at the age of 14. He joined the Jesuits in 1926, and after his ordination in 1937 had worked as a journalist for Stimmen der Zeit. When that Jesuit magazine was suppressed in 1941, he was appointed rector of St Georg Church in Munich.
He was part of the “Kreisau Circle”, a resistance group named after the estate of its leader, Helmuth von Moltke. The group had been planning a reconstructed Germany after what they were certain would be the Third Reich’s eventual defeat.