Walter Dirks (8 January 1901 in Hörde, North Rhine-Westphalia – 30 May 1991 in Wittnau, Baden-Württemberg), was a German political commentator, theologian, and journalist.
He also served as secretary to Romano Guardini (1885–1968), an Italian-born German priest and influential theologian of the twentieth century.
[3] Writing in the August 1931 issue of the journal Die Arbeit (Deutschland) [de], he "described the Catholic reaction to Nazism as 'open warfare'.
Dirks also participated in forming a new political party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), joining Protestants and Catholics.
[8] In a 1946 article, Eugen Kogon, Clemens Münster, and Walter Dirks advanced the vision of a Christian socialist future for a democratic Germany.
During 1953–1956 he worked with Theodor Adorno at the Institut fur Sozialforschung (IfS), then home of the Frankfurt School of social criticism.
Addressed were positive similarities between the prophetic passages of the young Marx and the Christian gospel of love and community.
Dirks wrote of this "radical thinking out of the existence of the helpless and exploited" and of Marx's "essentially Christian act... of solidarity with the other, with the neighbor, a sacrifice".
[17][18] In terms moral and spiritual Marx had described the "human relations in producing" and "the real world of power conflicts and selfish drives, without idealizing it."
[19] Dirks here[20] describes himself as a lay Catholic Christian, mentioning other like authors: Chesterton, Belloc, Bloy, Hello, and the novelist Bernanos (p. 2).
He tells it "from a personal way of thinking that seeks" a pathway through secular realities to "develop a consciousness" of the unity, so that one may share in "the true entirety of the history of God" (p. 31).
In the main, Dirks offers brief narratives of the major founders of monastic institutions: St. Benedict, St. Francis, St. Dominic, and St. Ignatius.
152–181), Dirks historically situates the start of the Franciscan order when medieval societies began to transform into urban business cultures (pp. 164–167).
The merchant was put "in the slow process of learning how to separate workaday atheistic behavior from devout observance" and "under these conditions he was imperiled" (p. 166).