Carl Lampert

Carl Lampert was born on 9 January 1894 in Göfis, a rural parish in Vorarlberg in the far west of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He grew up in a Catholic milieu typical of that Alpine region and discerned a vocation to the priesthood. He received his theological formation in the seminary of the Diocese of Brixen (Bressanone), which at that time had pastoral responsibility for Vorarlberg and the Tyrol. He was ordained a priest in 1918, in the closing months of the First World War, and began his ministry as a curate in parishes of Vorarlberg, among them Dornbirn, where he was known as a diligent pastor.

In the later 1920s and early 1930s Lampert was sent to Rome. There he studied canon law at the Pontifical Gregorian University and lived and worked in connection with Santa Maria dell'Anima, the historic church and hospice for German-speaking Catholics in Rome. He completed a doctorate in canon law. Returning to Austria, he was assigned to the diocesan curia and to tribunal work, which prepared him for higher administrative responsibility. After the German annexation of Austria in 1938, the Church in the Tyrol and Vorarlberg faced increasing pressure from the National Socialist state. In 1939 Apostolic Administrator Paulus Rusch appointed Lampert Pro-vicar of the Apostolic Administration of Innsbruck-Feldkirch, making him the administrator’s chief deputy and a central figure in the diocese’s dealings with the civil authorities.

As Pro-vicar, Lampert resisted Nazi attempts to restrict Catholic education, youth work, and the Church’s public role. He did not conceal his opposition to the regime’s ideology or to its interference in church life. The Gestapo arrested him in 1940 on more than one occasion; after detention he was forbidden to remain in Tyrol. He was sent north to the region of Stettin (today Szczecin) in Pomerania, then part of Germany, where he exercised priestly ministry, including among the sick and in circumstances of wartime pastoral need. Even at a distance from his home diocese he remained under suspicion.

In February 1943 the Gestapo carried out a sweep against Catholic clergy in Stettin. Lampert was arrested with others and charged with listening to foreign radio, passing on news, and making remarks considered hostile to the war effort. He was moved through prisons and concentration camps, including Sachsenhausen and Dachau. In 1944 he was tried in Halle an der Saale together with the priests Friedrich Lorenz, an Oblate of Mary Immaculate, and Herbert Simoleit. All three were sentenced to death. On 13 November 1944 Carl Lampert was executed by beheading in Halle. He was fifty years of age.

After the collapse of the National Socialist regime, Lampert was remembered in Vorarlberg and in the Church of Innsbruck as a priest who had given his life rather than abandon his duty and his faith. The cause for his beatification proceeded in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. On 13 November 2011, the anniversary of his death, he was beatified at a Mass in Dornbirn, Vorarlberg. Pope Benedict XVI approved the beatification; Cardinal Angelo Amato, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, celebrated the rite in the Pope’s name. The Catholic Church keeps the memorial of Blessed Carl Lampert on 13 November.