Carlo Bayer: Ein Römer aus Schlesien und Pionier der Caritas Internationalis by Christian Heidrich (review)

BOOK REVIEWS93 Carlo Bayer: Ein Römer aus Schlesien und Pionier der Caritas Internationalis . By Christian Heidrich. [Arbeiten zur schlesischen Kirchengeschichte, Volume 6.] (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag. 1992. Pp. 380. DM 48,-.) Carlo Bayer (1915—1977), a German priest, was the first secretary-general of Caritas Internationalis after its foundation in Rome in 1950—51. Under his dynamic leadership it early became an important factor in international relief work in stricken areas. In 1968 his agency, other church-related organizations , and the Red Cross were confronted with a near-catastrophic food crisis in Biafra, which in the course of its war with stronger Nigeria had been completely surrounded by its foe's army and denied access by land to foreign food sources. Before Western aid groups had gotten on top of the problem through the creation of a large air-lift operation, deaths from malnutrition had mounted to the high hundreds of thousands. Carlo Bayer was probably the most energetic and resourceful and certainly the most daring ofthe aid officials who were involved in the whole effort to feed the Biafran people. It was his willingness to take certain risks which would either provide the occasion or be the actual cause of his sudden and humiliating dismissal from his highly profiled position in February, 1970. Christian Heidrich believes that Bayer, whom he much admires, lost his office because of the joint desire of Monsignor Jean Rodhain, the French president of the Catholic relief agency, and of Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, the Deputy-Secretary of State at the Vatican, to take over control of Caritas Internationalis. He stresses the fact that the German episcopate showed its confidence in its countryman by making him the head of its own well-funded program of aid to the Eastern European Catholic churches, a post he would hold till his death in January, 1977. The author may be unfair to the two high churchmen who forced Bayer out of his longtime post as chief operating officer of CaritasInternationalis. Bayer had earlier said that he did not observe diplomatic considerations when he was confronted with starving people. From time to time he found that his agency in trying to feed the people of Biafra needed to buy foodstuffs on its domestic markets, an undertaking which required the exchange ofhard Western currency for the inflated paper money of Biafra. On one occasion, when the Biafran government was out of its own currency, he arranged for the printing of a large amount of it in European presses, paid the bills for that work, and then concluded an exchange arrangement with the Biafran government in which his agency secured Biafran paper money for Western currency. The agreement provided that Caritas Internationalis could send its payments to Biafra's European diplomatic missions and not to the home government itself so that it would not be used to purchase weapons. The Nigerian government soon angrily protested, however, that the Catholic relief agency and the Catholic Church itself had become allies ofBiafra, and President Richard Nixon of the United States made a formal protest over the above currency pact to Pope Paul Vl in an audience at the Vatican. 94BOOK REVIEWS For all his admiration of his subject, Heidrich does present a broad and detailed account of Bayer's Biafran operations so that his readers can come to their own conclusions as to whether his critics or supporters had the more right on their side. It is puzzling then that in his writing on the young Bayer as a seminarian, new priest, and non-combatant soldier in the Nazi years (1933—1945) his approach seems to be unusually narrow in focus and anodyne in approach when he deals with the young man's responses to dramatic public events, some of them horrendous in nature. By the later 1930's Adolf Hitler had achieved a charismatic leadership in Germany with special effects on youth. Nevertheless, there is no evidence in the Heidrich study that the seminarian Bayer's determination in 1938 to enter the army if war came was due in any way to the dictator's inspiration. He did postpone taking that step until after his ordination in December, 1940, and his priestly...