Maximilian Kaller - Career As Prelate and Bishop

Career As Prelate and Bishop

In 1926 he succeeded Robert Weimann (1870–1925) as Apostolic Administrator of Schneidemühl (today's Piła). Kaller's jurisdiction comprised Catholic parishes of the dioceses of Chełmno and of Gniezno -Poznań, which had been dissected from their episcopal sees by the new Polish border in 1918 and 1920, respectively. On Kaller's instigation the seat of the apostolic administration had been moved from Tütz (Tuczno) to Schneidemühl on 1 July 1926.

Following the Prussian Concordat (German: Preußenkonkordat) of 1929 some Catholic dioceses and jurisdictions in Northern and Eastern Germany had been reorganised. In 1930 the Apostolic Administration of Tütz was reconstituted as Territorial Prelature of Schneidemühl (German: Freie Prälatur Schneidemühl; Polish: Prałatura Pilska, existing until 1972, since 1945 under apostolic administrators) with Kaller being promoted to prelate.

On 2 September 1930 again, Kaller was invested bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Ermland (an archdiocese since 1992) by Pope Pius XI and consecrated in Schneidemühl, afterwards taking the episcopal see in Frauenburg (today's Frombork). Franz Hartz succeeded Kaller as Prelate of Schneidemühl.

Since 1925 Ermland diocese comprised all of the Prussian Province of East Prussia in its borders of 1938. In the year of Kaller's investiture his diocese, which had turned exempt in 1566 when its original metropolitan Archbishopric of Riga, had been become Lutheran and de jure dissolved, became again suffragan to an archdiocese. Ermland diocese, together with Berlin diocese and Schneidemühl prelature joined the new Eastern German Ecclesiastical Province (German: Ostdeutsche Kirchenprovinz) under the newly elevated Metropolitan Archbishop Adolf Bertram of Breslau.

In 1932 Kaller consecrated the new diocesan seminary for priests in Braunsberg in East Prussia (today's Braniewo). Under his jurisdiction Ermland diocese issued a new diocesan hymnal and a diocesan rituale (cf. Rituale Romanum) in Latin and the three native languages usual among the diocesan parishioners, to wit German, Lithuanian, and Polish. Kaller was also appointed apostolic visitator to the then 8,000 Catholic faithful in Memelland, a Lithuanian-annexed formerly East Prussian area, whose then four Catholic parishes had been seceded from Ermland diocese and subsequently formed part of the Territorial Prelature of Memel (Klaipėda); German: Freie Prälatur Memel; Lithuanian: Klaipėdos prelatūra; Latin: Praelatura Territorialis Klaipedensis) existing between 1926 and 1991.

Kaller and other members of the German Catholic and Protestant Churches formulated their opposition to the policy of Nazi mysticism early on (cf. Struggle of the churches). German clergy who opposed Adolf Hitler or supported refugees were strongly persecuted under the Nazi dictatorship. On 10 June 1939 Pope Pius XII appointed Kaller apostolic administrator of the Territorial Prelature of Memel, after Lithuania had ceded Memelland under German pressure to Nazi Germany in March the same year. In 1942 Kaller applied at Nuncio Cesare Orsenigo to resign from episcopate in order to administer services at Theresienstadt, but his wish was not granted.

On 7 February 1945, during World War II, the Nazi Schutzstaffel forced Kaller out of his episcopal office while the Soviet Red Army was overrunning Ermland diocese. Kaller had appointed Frauenburg's Cathedral Dean Aloys Marquardt (1891–1972) as vicar general to the see.