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Happening ... in the Local Church
 Michael
W. Hovey of the Archdiocese of Detroit shares the story of Blessed Franz
Jagerstatter as he delivers this year’s Dorothy Day Lecture at St.
Thomas Aquinas, West Lafayette. (Photo by Kevin Cullen) |
By Kevin Cullen
The
Catholic Moment
WEST LAFAYETTE — Franz Jagerstatter was like many other Austrians of his time and place: a Catholic, a farmer, a husband, a father ... and a draftee in the Nazi army.
But, following his conscience, the 36-year-old refused to take an unconditional oath of obedience to Hitler. He would not fight in what he called an “unjust war.”
Jagerstatter was beheaded in Berlin on Aug. 9, 1943. An inspiration to peace activists, he was beatified as a martyr of the faith on Oct. 26, 2007, in Austria’s Linz Cathedral. Among the 5,000 people in attendance were Jagerstatter’s 94-year-old widow and his four daughters.
Michael W. Hovey saw the aged Franziska Jagerstatter carry a container of her husband’s ashes to the bishop. Hovey recently told a crowd of approximately 100 that it was the most moving religious ceremony he had ever witnessed.
“The question is, how can we pick up where he left off?” said Hovey, director of the Office for Catholic Social Teaching and Ecumenical Interfaith Affairs of the Archdiocese of Detroit.
He delivered the Dorothy Day Lecture at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center as part of the week-long 27th annual Holocaust Remembrance Conference, titled “Lives Interrupted.”
Hovey was a friend and former assistant of Gordon Zahn, author of the 1964 book, In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jagerstatter.
Zahn was amazed that an uneducated peasant farmer in a small Austrian village would have the courage to stand up against society, “even in the face of death,” Hovey said.
In 1965, Archbishop Thomas Roberts, SJ, of Bombay, India, spoke about Jagerstatter at the Second Vatican Council, and predicted that he would be “held up as an example and model for all Catholics.”
Interest in Jagerstatter’s story grew. In the early 1980s, a film about him, titled “The Refusal,” was shown on European television. Eventually the Church in Austria began the long, involved process that leads to canonization.
Zahn could not attend the beatification ceremony in Linz, and he died a few weeks after it, at age 89. Hovey, who did attend, is a Navy veteran who received an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector in 1976.
Hovey is a former seminarian and brother candidate. Zahn and Hovey worked together when Hovey was executive director of the Pax Christi Center on Conscience and War from 1985 to 1990. He accompanied Zahn to Austria twice to visit the martyr’s widow.
Hovey has been a member of Pax Christi, the Catholic peace movement, since 1976 and he was twice elected to the National Council of Pax Christi USA.
Jagerstatter was seen as a wild youth who rode motorcycles and even fathered a child out of wedlock, Hovey said. Later, he considered entering religious life. In 1936, he married Franziska, a devout Catholic.
She was a profound influence on him. He became more spiritual, and began questioning the obligations of a Christian to the state.
“As he got older, his faith deepened,” Hovey said.
Hitler “annexed” Austria — the land of his birth — in 1938, and was greeted warmly there. There was little resistance; a later referendum showed overwhelming support for the Nazi regime among Austrians.
Jagerstatter, however, was angry about “the disaster of the Nazi regime, and the disaster that had hit his homeland,” Hovey said. Jagerstatter was the only person in his village, 30 miles north of Salzburg, to vote against the Nazi annexation.
Several priests and a bishop encouraged him to compromise his religious beliefs and serve the war effort. He was ostracized socially; some blamed his denunciation of the Nazis on his wife and others condemned him for jeopardizing his farm and family.
In his village, many saw him as an embarrassment, a shirker, Hovey said. Other local men were fighting and dying on the Russian front ... why not him?
In letters and journal entries, Jagerstatter wrote, “virtually anything the Nazis want ... the Christians will yield” and “should I be a National Socialist (Nazi) or a Catholic?”
“It is fair to say he was aware, to an extent, of what was going on (with the Holocaust) and other atrocities,” Hovey said.
Hovey said that more than 25 cardinals and bishops attended the beatification ceremony in Linz. It was intensely moving, he said, to stand in the great cathedral with 5,000 people and to think of Franz Jagerstatter “in solitary witness, with little to no support,” making a moral decision that he knew would result in his execution.
He recalled watching the widow hand to the bishop a small gold urn that contained some of her husband’s ashes.
She was later asked how she felt about the Church declaring her husband a model for all Catholics.
“She said, ‘No one will be able to call me a fool or a murderer again,’” Hovey said.
The horror stories from World War II never end, he said, but “we need to look for the good news stories — those who hid the Jews, who raised Jewish children as Catholic (to conceal their identities) ... as well as someone who went to this furthest extreme, to his death, to refuse evil.
“The primary lesson for our time is to use these stories,” he said. “The tendency is to say, ‘Well, that was a unique period in history.’
“For me, the most enlightening thing about Nazism was how incremental it was. It was bit by bit. You can’t do this or you can’t do that because you’re Jewish ... It calls on us to be vigilant.”
This month, a film crew financed by actors Martin Sheen, Susan Sarandon and others will travel to Austria to interview Mrs. Jagerstatter and her daughters. The 20-minute documentary will be available in Catholic high schools and colleges, Hovey said.
Joe Rund, of rural Romney, said he was intrigued by the Jagerstatter story.
“Learning about this Austrian farmer strikes a chord with me. I grew up on a farm while this was going on,” he said. “We didn’t know anything. We had a newspaper ... but we had no clue what was going on.”
The war, he said, “almost emptied the towns and the countryside of young people. Everyone worked 12 hour days. They didn’t have much time to think about anything else.”