For Our Time
With all due respect to the playwright Robert Bolt, his hero, Sir Thomas More, was not A Man for All Seasons. He was a man of his time, caught-up in his own and other’s political and religious fervors, willing to send - and actually sending – those whom he believed were heretics to the Tower of London and to be burned to death at the stake.
Intellectual. Proficient in Latin and Greek. Man of letters and the law. Determinedly committed to his faith. Enemy of Lutheranism and every form of the emerging Protestantism. As Henry VIII’s Chancellor, he approved the execution by fire of England’s first Protestant martyrs.
Having risen to the highest office in the land, a man of immense political power and greater conviction of his own theological correctness, More considered heresy – Protestantism - treason against God and king and, defending his own faith, was quick to cast all blame on the Protestants: “The Catholic church did never persecute heretics by any temporal pain or any secular power until the heretics began such violence themselves.”
Neither saint nor villain, More was a flesh-and-blood individual, confirmed in his dedication to community and king and unyielding in his principles. By refusing to recognize Henry as the supreme head of the Church in England, More sealed his fate on the scaffold of London’s Tower Hill.
More was a man of his time and its politics and prejudices.
Not a man for all seasons.
Franz Jägerstätter was a man for the generations.
Born in 1907, the illegitimate child of a chambermaid and a farmer, adopted by his stepfather, he had a reputation as something of a wild young man, even fathering an out-of-wedlock daughter. [“Unruly… the first in his village to own a motor cycle… an ordinary and humble Catholic who did not draw attention to himself,” noted the official Vatican news report of his beatification.] Marrying a deeply religious woman and beginning his own journey in Faith in Holy Week 1936. “We helped one another go forward in faith,” Franziska once said of their time together and the Bible that became their reference book for everyday life. His love for his wife and four children was a story for the ages - “I could never have imagined that being married could be so wonderful.”
Yet, despite the wonderland magic of their love, he could not reconcile his Christianity and Nazism. When German forces invaded Austria in 1938 – two years after his marriage to Franziska, he refused “the military oath of unconditional obedience to Hitler” – the Hitler Oath, ultimately declaring himself a conscientious objector in 1943.
When Germany invaded Poland, he decided he could not participate in an unjust war. He received a number of deferments because he was a farmer and continued to reject the Hitler Oath, despite the imprecations of his village priest and chiding by the local bishop, who lectured him about other young men who were fighting and dying in Russia in defense of the fatherland. When Jägerstätter heard the fate of the Austrian priest Fanz Reinisch, who was executed for rejecting the same oath, he followed his example.
As war claimed more and more young lives, he was called to active duty on February 2, 1943 and, when he reported to the Wehmarcht garrison on March 1, declared his conscientious objections to the war – offering to serve as a paramedic, an offer that was immediately rejected. “I cannot serve both Hitler and Jesus.”
“I can only act on my own conscience. I do not judge anyone. I can only judge myself,” he wrote. “I have considered my family. I have prayed and put myself and my family in God’s hands. I know that, if I do what I think God wants me to do, he will take care of my family.”
Accused of Wehrkraftzersetzung – undermining military morale – he was sentenced to death in a military trial.
The 2007 Vatican news report of his beatification noted: “The prison chaplain was struck by the man’s tranquil character. On being offered the New Testament, he replied: I am completely bound in inner union with the Lord, and any reading would only interrupt my communication with my God.”
“My loved ones,” he wrote to his family from prison, “let us be ready to die.”
On August 8, 1943, Franz wrote to Fransizka: “Dear wife and mother, I thank you once more from my heart for everything that you have done for me in my lifetime, for all the sacrifices that you have borne for me. I beg you to forgive me if I have hurt or offended you, just as I have forgiven everything…My heartfelt greetings for my dear children. I will surely beg the dear God, if I am permitted to enter heaven soon, that he will set aside a little place in heaven for all of you.”
On August 9, Jägerstätter wrote: “These few words are being set down here as they come from my mind and heart. And, if I must write them with my hands in chains, I find that much better than if my will were in chains. Neither prison not chains nor sentence of death can rob a man of the Faith and his free will. God gives so much strength that it is possible to bear any suffering… People worry about the obligations of conscience as they concern my wife and children. But I cannot believe that, just because one has a wife and children, a man is free to offend God.”
He was executed by guillotine that day.
After his death, Franziska wrote a priest-friend, ““I have lost a dear husband and a good father to my children, but I can also assure you that our marriage was one of the happiest in our parish -- many people envied us. But the good Lord intended otherwise, and has loosed that loving bond. I already look forward to meeting again in heaven, where no war can ever divide us again.”
After the war, a group of nuns returned his ashes to his home village, where the local bishop forbad any public recognition – fearing to do so would shame those who had fought for Germany.
"We comply with the request [...] that Franz Jägerstätter,
martyr and family father,
from now on can be invoked as Blessed Franz Jägerstätter."
Pope Benedict XVI, October 26, 2007
On the occasion of his beatification, Diocesan Bishop of Lizn Dr. Ludwig Schwartz observed that Franz Jägerstätter kept – and we must keep – one question in mind: “Is it agreeable to God what I am doing?”
Franz Jägerstätter.
Raufer (“brawler’) and Lustiger Mensch (“lively fellow”).
Unruly in his younger days… the first in his village to own a motor cycle.
Avid reader.
Miner.
Farmer.
Guardian of his widowed mother.
Breadwinner.
Wondrously loving husband and father.
Countersign to the silence of the priests and bishops of the Church he loved.
Man of conscience.
Franz Jägerstätter.
Did not need federal forces – Secret Service, Park Police and DC National Guard - firing pepper balls, chemical agents, smoke cannisters, stun grenades and rubber bullets into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators in Lafayette Park in order to hold up a Bible – taken from his daughter’s white $1,500 Max Mara tote - for a photo op.
Franz Jägerstätter did not need a Bible that “might interrupt my communication with God.”
Franz Jägerstätter. A person for our time. A man for the generations.
