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Papa Alex was Grandma Theresia's second-youngest of 10 children, whom she had with Eugen Keim.
My father was Catholic, my mother Protestant, and I atheist/pagan.
We never argued about religion. When my mother says she'll meet me in heaven, I reply that heaven doesn't exist. She bears this with stoic calm: She knows she's right and is positively self-confident.
My girlfriend in the 1970s was also Catholic. Her mother tried to forbid her from taking the birth control pill. She based this on the encyclical Humanae Vitae, in which the Pope bans the birth control pill. He bases this on the fact that, as God's vicar on earth, he is infallible.
I appreciated having a Catholic father and told him that my mother-in-law needed help with the birth control pill.
At our next Sunday coffee table get-together, my father said the following:
The Pope in Rome is so megalomaniacal that he presumes to be God's representative on earth. Therefore, you don't have to believe what he says about the birth control pill. Besides, all you achieve is that the children hope the old man will die soon, and then they'll do what they want anyway. So you're not achieving anything: it's better to leave it alone.
I don't know whether my mother-in-law continued to try to talk her daughter out of taking the birth control pill. I'm only sure that it didn't help.
As an atheist, I can't really say that he said anything wrong. But I was still astonished by his bold, brazen pedagogical methods: Even I could learn something from them. Did the (lack of) stance of the Catholic Church and the Pope during the Third Reich weaken his authority, leading my father to leave his mark?
That's what the "family Keim way" is like: To defend freedom of speech. Is it any wonder that I struggled at school and was used to speaking freely?
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