The faith of Saint Peter and Blessed Franz

In this Sunday’s Gospel, Matthew 14:22-33, Peter, at the call of Jesus, begins to walk on water. He was daring enough to risk this, but his faith faltered. Jesus grabbed him by the hand and then asked him, “Why did you do doubt, you of little faith?”

Sometimes I think we are a little too hard on Peter. The other apostles cowered in the boat, but he had  the audacity to ask Jesus to call him out of the boat to walk on the water. Yet, when he lost sight of Jesus, he was afraid and started to drown.

On August 9, 1943, Franz Jägerstätter, Austrian peasant, husband, father of three girls, was beheaded for his refusal to take the military oath to serve in the Nazi army.

His story has moved me since I first read it in the 1960s in Gordon Zahn’s In Solitary Witness.

What is remarkable is that, despite the opposition to his stand of his neighbors and even of religious authorities, he persevered. He saw evil and refused to cooperate. Sustained by his faith in God and the love of his wife, Franziska, he persevered, even when the waves of the evil around him threatened him with death. As he wrote to his wife from prison:

“I am convinced that it is still best that I speak the truth, even if it costs me my life.  For you will not find it written in any of the commandments of God or of the Church that a man is obliged under pain of sin to take an oath committing him to obey whatever might be commanded of him by his secular ruler.”

He persevered in his faith, despite death. The faith of the saints is not something that flounders when beset by difficulties. Though there may be doubts, these doubts strengthen the commitment to have confidence in God. As Franz wrote,

“If the road signs were stuck ever so loosely in the earth that every wind could break them off or blow them about, would anyone who did not know the road be able to find his way? And how much worse is it if those to whom one turns for information refuse to give him an answer or, at most, give him the wrong direction just to be rid of him as quickly as possible?”

The resiliency of the Reign of God

I have a small tree in a pot on my terrace. It was large at one point, but nearly withered. Then it grew back, but something happened  a few weeks ago and the whole top of the small tree broke off. I thought it was dead, but I left in out and even watered it when there was no rain.

The tree is growing back.

While preparing for preaching this weekend I ran across the last verse of the first reading, Ezekiel 17:24:

[I, the Lord,] make the withered tree bloom.

But I first read it in a Spanish version:

…reverdezco el árbol seco.

Loosely translated,

“I make the dry tree green again.”

There is so much going on to dry out our souls these days – not only the news about separating families of immigrants in the US, the deaths of so many from violence and poverty, the war on the poor that is happening in so many places in the world. How many are feeling dried and drained by worries about their children, by trying to make ends meet, by so many squelched dreams? And then there is the personal dryness – Where is God? Why do I feel so helpless about all this? Is there anything one person can do?

In the midst of this, God promises to make the dry tree green again, to refresh our thirst-plagued spirits.

And we are reminded by the parables that God works through little things, like grains of mustard.

As Pope Francis writes in Gaudete et Exsultate (16), “This holiness to which the Lord calls you will grow through small gestures.”

And we can remember the wise advice of Dorothy Day:

“Young people say, ‘What can one person do? What is the sense of our small effort?’ They cannot see that we can only lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform these actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.”

I remember especially these words from prison of Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian peasant martyred in 1943 for his refusal to serve in Hitler’s army.  cThey can both challenge and sustain us, to be resilient workers in the Reign of God:

“Today one hears it said repeatedly that there is nothing any more that an individual can do. If someone were to speak out, it would mean only imprisonment and death. True, there is not much that can be done anymore to change the course of world events. I believe that should have begun a hundred or even more years ago. But as long as we live in this world, I believe it is never too late to save ourselves and perhaps some other soul for Christ. One really has no cause to be astonished that there are those who can no longer find their way in the great confusion of our day. People we think we can trust, who ought to be leading the way and setting a good example, are running along with the crowd. No one gives enlightenment, whether in word or in writing. Or, to be more exact, it may not be given. And the thoughtless race goes on, always closer to eternity. As long as conditions are still half good, we don’t see things quite right, or that we could or should do otherwise….
“If the road signs were stuck ever so loosely in the earth that every wind could break them off or blow them about, would anyone who did not know the road be able to find his way? And how much worse is it if those to whom one turns for information refuse to give him an answer or, at most, give him the wrong direction just to be rid of him as quickly as possible?”

In the face of oppression

“You shall not stand idly by when your neighbor’s life is at stake.
Leviticus 19: 16

Martin Niemöller once wrote:

“If we had recognized that in the communists who were thrown into concentration camps, the Lord Jesus Christ himself lay imprisoned and looked for our love and help, if we had seen that at the beginning of the persecution of the Jews it was the Lord Jesus Christ in the person of the least of our human brethren who was being persecuted, and beaten and killed, if we had stood by him and identified ourselves with him, I do not know whether God would not then have stood by us and whether the whole thing would not then have had to take a different course.”

He was a decorated U-boat commander in the First World War. After the war he became a Lutheran pastor and later a pacifist, speaking out forcefully against war and especially the proliferation of nuclear weapons until his death on March 6, 1984.

Imprisoned by Hitler he did not stand idly by when his neighbor’s life was at stake. He recognized the call of God to respond to the forces of evil and protect the innocent.

I have since my high school days been plagued by the seeming indifference of many, including religious leaders, to the violence and racism of Hitler and Nazism. The witness of people like Martin Niemöller, the members of the White Rose, and the Austrian peasant Franz Jägerstätter who risked their lives in opposition to evil.

Will I continue to try to do this? Will I see the challenge that we followers of Christ face when we see the hungry, the refugee, the defenseless, the imprisoned? Will I, as todays Gospel notes, be among the sheep who respond to those in need or among the goats? (Matthew 25:31-46)

Where am I supposed to be?

“It’s a matter of being where you are supposed to be.”
Blessed Michal Tomaszek, OFM Conv

Where am I supposed to be? How will I know this?

Blesseds Michal Tomaszek and Zbigniew Strzalkowski were Conventual Franciscan friars who found themselves among the poor of Perú where they were killed by militants of the Sendero Luminoso terrorists on August 9, 1991.

Blessed Franz Jägerstätter found himself in a Berlin jail for refusing to serve in Hitler’s army, despite opposing advice from almost everyone he knew. He was beheaded for his solitary witness to a God of life and love in the face of Nazism on August 9, 1943.

Hundreds of Catholics were gathered of prayer in the Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki, Japan, the most Catholic city in Japan, when a United States bomber dropped an atomic bomb on the city, using the cathedral as one of its ways of identifying the city on August 6, 1945. Over 6,000 Catholics were killed that day, some of them preparing for confession in the cathedral,

On August 6, 1942, Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce – Sister Teresa blessed by the Cross – was killed at Auschwitz. A Carmelite sister, born Jewish, a convert from atheism, Edith Stein was but one of six million Jews, killed by the Nazis in their concentration and death camps.

Where am I supposed to be?

Saint Teresa offers an answer:

“Do you want to be totally united to the Crucified? If you are serious about this, you will be present, by the power of His Cross, at every front, at every place of sorrow, bringing to those who suffer, healing and salvation.”

Being a sign of hope at every place of sorrow. There we may be signs, as blessed Franz wrote from prison, that

“The power of God cannot be overcome.”

---

The photo is of a sculpture of Edith Stein, Saint Teresa Benedicta a Cruce, on a street in Köln, Germany, where she entered the Carmelites.

 

Franz Jägerstätter – touched by the saints

When I was in high school, in the early sixties, I became more aware of the Holocaust and of the evils of Nazism. I also was struck by the failure of the Church to respond.

The 1963 play The Deputy, which laid much of the blame for the silence on Pope Pius XII, probably overstated the case. But Gordon Zahn’s German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars: A Study in Social Control presented a Church that almost completely acquiesced to Nazi militarism.

Zahn’s research led him to unearth the life and death of an Austrian peasant from the obscure village of Sankt Radegund, Franz Jägerstätter, who refused to serve in Hitler’s army and was beheaded on August 9, 1943. Zahn’s book, In Solitary Witness, appeared in 1963.

Jägerstätter fascinated me. He was not at first what one might be considered an exemplary Catholic and even had the first motorcycle in his village. But after his marriage he began to take his faith seriously.

He took it so seriously that he recognized the evil of Nazism and had the courage to speak out. He was the only one in his village to vote against the Nazi annexation of Austria.

Finally when called up to serve in Hitler’s army he refused. Priests and others tried to dissuade him, calling on him to realize that seminarians and other Catholics were serving in Hitler’s army and that his family would suffer.

But Franz stood firm.

In fact in his writings to his family from prison he shows an extraordinary clarity in regard to Nazism that many church leaders lacked.

Letter of Blessed Franz Jägerstätter

In one of his writings, written before he was imprisoned, he relates a dream he had in 1938:

“I saw [in a dream] a wonderful train as it came around a mountain. With little regard for the adults, children flowed to this train and were not held back. There were present a few adults who did not go into the area. I do not want to give their names or describe them. Then a voice said to me, This train is going to hell.’ Immediately, it happened that someone took my hand, and the same voice said to me; ‘Now we are going to purgatory.’ What I glimpsed and perceived was fearful. If this voice had not told me that we were going to purgatory, I would have judged that I had found myself in hell.”

For him that train was Nazism and he would have not part in defending it.

He was tried and beheaded.

In 2007, his heroic act was recognized by the Church that had almost abandoned him. He was beatified in Linz, Austria.

Franz is for me a person who saw through the glitter of political evil, who held firm to his love of God and to his conscience, who was not held back by fear.

Would that we had more people like Franz, more people willing to stand firm in the face of injustice, evil, and war.

Would that I might learn from him how to be courageous and truthful in the face of evil.

Blessed Franz, pray for us.

——–

The letter pictured above is on a side altar in the church of Saint Bartholomew in Rome, in the church of the new martyrs and witnesses of the twentieth century. A blog on the church can be found here.

At the foot of the Cross

Shall he, then, keep on brandishing his sword
to slay peoples without mercy?
Habakkuk 1, 17

 Habakkuk is complaining about human beings whom God has made, who make gods for themselves out of the works of their hands, even out of the fishermen’s net. Worse, they “slay peoples without mercy.”

Today that complaint seems to ring true.

On August 9, 1945, the US dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Nagasaki was a center of Catholicism in Japan, with its shrine of the Japanese martyrs. The bomb killed tens of thousands of innocent people, including those who had gathered in the Nagasaki cathedral to pray.

Two years before, on August 9, 1943, Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian peasant was beheaded for refusing to serve in the Nazi army. He was one of only a few Catholics who saw the reality of Hitler and decided that he could have no part of it.

In one of his letters to his wife from prison he recalled a dream he had in 1938 of a training speeding down a hill, with people running to get on board. He identified the train as Nazism and saw it as a train going to hell.

A year before Franz’s martyrdom, Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce, born Edith Stein, died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz onAugust 9, 1942. A philosopher, a convert from Judaism, a Carmelite nun, she did not see herself as separated from the pain of her day, especially the suffering of the Jewish people. In fact, she has written to Pope Pius XI seeking an audience to talk with him about the persecution of Jews. Her letter was unanswered.

But St. Teresa Benedicta saw her role as being with Christ crucified.

Do you want to be totally united to the Crucified? If you are serious about this, you will be present, by the power of His Cross, at every front, at every place of sorrow, bringing to those who suffer healing and salvation.

On August 9, 1991, two Conventual Franciscan priests, Miguel Tomaszek and Zbigniew Strzalkowski, missionaries in Perú, were killed by the Sendero Luminoso. They had stood with the poor.

How can I be present at the Cross, at the suffering of peoples? If I truly want to follow the Crucified God, how can I be silent in the face of suffering, death, bombing, persecution?

A peasant prophet

For what doth it profit a man,
if he gain the whole world,
and suffer the loss of his own soul?
Matthew 16: 26
(Douay-Rheims translation)

Seventy years ago today, August 9, 1943, a 36 year old Austrian peasant, husband and father of two girls, was beheaded in a Berlin prison.

Portrait von Franz Jägerstätter- St. Radegund/ Schärding 2. Weltkrieg – 1939 – 1945 *** Local Caption *** St. Radegund

Franz Jägerstätter has refused to serve in Hitler’s army. Unlike many in Germany and Austria, he had realized the horror and the sinfulness of Nazis. Even though religious leaders told him to recall his duty to his family and to his “fatherland,” he insisted that he could not do something that endangered his immortal soul.

This man from the small village of Sant-Radegund, Austria, had an understanding of the horror and evil of Nazism that others lacked. In one of his writings from prison he described a 1938 dream in which he saw people eager to board a train. He heard a voice, “This train is bound for hell.” He identified the train as Nazism and considered it is duty to jump off.

He also had the courage to act. He was the only person in his village to vote against the German annexation of Austria. He also took the brave act of refusing induction into the German army in 1943.

He is a real example of someone who was willing to deny himself and take up the cross, as Jesus calls us to do in today’s Gospel (Matthew 16:24).

He did it even though he was virtually alone.

In an extraordinary letter from prison he wrote his wife about his solitary witness:

Today one can hear it said repeatedly that there is nothing any more that an individual can do. If someone were to speak out, it would mean only imprisonment and death. True, there is not much that can be done any more to change the course of world events. I believe that should have begun a hundred or even more years ago. But as long as we live in this world, I believe it is never too late to save ourselves and perhaps some other soul for Christ.

One really has no cause to be astonished that there are those who can no longer find their way in the great confusion of the day. People we think we can trust, who ought to be leading the way and setting a good example, are running with the crowd.

No one gives enlightenment, whether in word or in writing….

Do we no longer want to see Christians who are able to take a stand in the darkness around us in deliberate clarity, calmness, and confidence — who, in the midst of tension gloom, selfishness, and hate, stand fast in perfect peace and cheerfulness — who are not like the floating reed which is driven here and there by every breeze — who do not merely watch to see what their friends will  do but, instead, ask themselves, “What does our faith teach is about this,” or “can conscience bear this so easily that I will never have to repent?”

If road signs were ever stuck so loosely in the earth that every wind cold break them off or blow them about, would anyone who did not know the road be able to find his way? And how much worse is it if those to whom one turns for information refuse to give him an answer or, at most, give him the wrong direction just to be rid of him as quickly as possible!

Franz stood alone and is for us a signpost of God in the midst of violence, war, and injustice.

Would that we also be signposts of God’s will – even if it brings the cross.

—

The quotation from Jägerstätter’s prison letter is taken from Gordon Zahn’s In Solitary Witness. In 2009, Orbis Books published an anthology of his writings: Franz Jägertätter: Letters and Writings from Prison.

A peasant witness against Nazism

Today the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of Blessed Franz  Jägerstätter, who was killed by the Nazis on August 9, 1943, for refusing to serve in Hitler’s army.

Franz, an Austrian peasant, was a husband and father who saw through the deception of the Nazis and refused to cooperate with what he saw as an immoral regime and an immoral war. He not only refused to serve in Hitler’s army, but he had been the only person in his village to vote against the Nazi annexation of Austria.

He was urged by many, including a priest and a bishop, to cooperate but his conscience prevented him from collaboration in what he saw as immoral.

His story might have been forgotten had it not been unearthed by Gordon Zahn, a US Catholic sociologist and conscientious objector. Zahn published his research in the book In Solitary Witness, which included many of the letters he wrote from prison.

Since I read this book I have been moved by the witness of a peasant who held firm, despite all the pressure not only from the Nazis, but even from church authorities.

One of his most moving letters tells of a dream in 1938 of “a shining silver train circling around a mountain. ““This train is going to hell,” he hears. But people refuse to jump off. He identified this train as Nazism. A few years later he showed the world that he would not jump on the train.

In another of his letters he asked, “Is there anything the individual can do?” Though I think it is a limited response to the question his answer is worth praying over:

Today one can hear it said repeatedly that there is nothing any more than an individual can do. If someone were to speak out, it would mean only imprisonment and death. True, there is not much that can be done anymore to change the course of world events. I believe that should have begun a hundred or even more years ago. But as long as we live in the world, I believe that it is never too late to save ourselves and perhaps some other soul for Christ.

But the example of people like Franz Jägerstätter has changed the world, moving many people to be willing to speak up for justice and truth, without counting the cost.

Would that there may be more people like Franz.

What can one person do?

On August 9, 1943, Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, Austrian Catholic peasant, husband and father of three girls, conscientious objector to the Nazi army, was executed in Berlin, Germany. His witness would probably have gone unnoticed if Gordon Zahn, US pacifist and sociologist, had not come upon his story and written In Solitary Witness.

His writings are simple and straightforward, reflecting his peasant background and his deep faith. What is extraordinary is his recognition of the evil of Nazism and his willingness to give his life rather than cooperate with evil. Would that more Christians were like him.

His witness might seem to some to have been useless, but, from prison, Franz wrote:

“Today one hears it said repeatedly that there is nothing any more that an individual can do. If someone were to speak out, it would mean only imprisonment and death.
True, there is not much that can be done anymore to change the course of world events. I believe that should have begun a hundred or even more years ago. But as long as we live in this world, I believe it is never too late to save ourselves and perhaps some other soul for Christ.
One really has no cause to be astonished that there are those who can no longer find their way in the great confusion  of our day. People we think we can trust, who ought to be leading the way and setting a good example, are running along with the crowd. No one gives enlightenment, whether in word or in writing. Or, to be more exact, it may not be given. And the thoughtless race goes on, always closer to eternity. As long as conditions are still half good, we don’t see things quite right, or that we could or should do otherwise….
“If the road signs were stuck ever so loosely in the earth that every wind could break them off or blow them about, would anyone who did not know the road be able to find his way? And how much worse is it if those to whom one turns for information refuse to give him an answer or, at most, give him the wrong direction just to be rid of him as quickly as possible?”

In 2009 Orbis Books published a translation of  Franz Jägerstätter: Letters and Writings from Prison, edited by Erna Putz.

Today is also the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. Nagasaki had a very large Catholic population, some of whom could trace their faith back to the arrival of the first missionaries and who preserved their faith  underground for centuries. Many Catholics died while at prayer in the cathedral. One Catholic who survived and became a voice for peace was Dr. Takashi Nagai. He wrote:

“Men and women of the world, never again plan war! With this atomic bomb, war can only mean suicide for the human race. From this atomic waste the people of Nagasaki confront the world and cry out: No more war! Let us follow the commandment of love and work together. The people of Nagasaki prostrate themselves before God and pray: Grant that Nagasaki may be the last atomic wilderness in the history of the world.”

May we realize our calling and raise our voices for peace and justice, knowing that there is much that one can do – and that the Lord uses our little efforts.