Cardinal Clemens August von Galen, a wartime German cleric who openly criticised the Nazis and their euthanasia killings, is set to be put on the path to Roman Catholic sainthood by Pope John Paul next year.
The official inquiry establishing his case should end before Christmas, clearing the way for beatification - the step before sainthood - in 2005, said Karl Hagemann, spokesman for Galen's Muenster diocese in north-western Germany.
A tall and imposing aristocrat, Galen became bishop of Muenster just after Adolf Hitler took office in 1933 and attacked the Nazis' racist ideology in a sermon a year later.
But he was best known in Germany and abroad for sermons he gave in 1941 denouncing Nazi policies, especially the euthanasia drive that had already killed almost 100,000 disabled Germans.
"We expect it to happen in 2005," Hagemann said of the beatification. "The Pope has to announce officially that the procedure has been completed, which we expect before Christmas, and then we just have to set a date."
John Paul, 84, has beatified over 1,330 Catholics in his 25 years as pope and created more saints than any pope before him.
While the German Church did little to resist Hitler, the few clerics who did - such as Bernhard Lichtenberg, who publicly prayed for the Jews in Berlin and died in a concentration camp - have been highlighted by this pontiff as holy role models.
Galen, who was politically conservative, apparently enjoyed more freedom than other bishops because his deeply Catholic diocese was less pro-Nazi than other areas during the Third Reich and thus likely to protest if he were gagged.
He was the only bishop in Germany to distribute Pope Pius XI's 1937 encyclical "Mit brennender Sorge" (With Burning Concern), the most outspoken Vatican condemnation of Nazism.
While other bishops kept quiet for fear that protests would provoke tougher repression against the Church, Galen delivered three major sermons in 1941 in which he condemned the Nazi drive to eliminate what they called "life unworthy of living."
"There are sacred obligations of conscience from which no one has the power to release us and which we must fulfil even if it costs us our lives," he declared from his pulpit in Muenster.
Revealing that invalids from the Muenster area were being killed, he said the Nazis treated them "like an old machine that no longer works ... like a cow that no longer gives milk.
"Woe to mankind, woe to our German nation if God's Holy Commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' is not only broken but if this transgression is actually tolerated and can go unpunished."
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