The sacrifice of Franz Jägerstätter
R. Casadei - Eighty-one years ago, on August 9, Franz Jägerstätter died, beheaded in a prison near Berlin for refusing to fight in the Third Reich army. The Austrian farmer and sacristan who knowingly went to the death penalty because he found his Christian faith incompatible with Nazism and participation in the war Hitler wanted was beatified by the Catholic Church in October 2007.
Yet for many years, his legacy was considered an embarrassment not only by his fellow villagers in the village of Sankt Radegund, on the border of Bavaria, but by the Austrian Catholic Church itself, which began to unreservedly value his testimony only in the late 1970s. What was the problem? The problem was that extolling farmer Franz's martyrial choice seemed to imply a negative judgment on all other Christians who had instead served under arms in Hitler's time and on the church authority itself, which had not encouraged objectors at all, quite the contrary: church authorities either kept silent or tried to dissuade objectors like Jägerstätter.
Even the pastor of St. Radegund and the then Bishop of Linz, certainly in their hearts anti-Nazis and not without admiration for his choice, tried to change his mind by resorting to two arguments.
The first was that the Christian is called to obey civil and military authorities like other citizens, and that of any morally evil decisions of those authorities, the citizens who obey higher orders are not responsible in God's eyes, but only those who gave them. Soiling their hands with innocent blood that cries out for vengeance in the sight of God would not be those who carry out massacres but only those who ordered them. The second argument consists of the family responsibilities that Jägerstätter, as a spouse and father of three daughters (as well as a fourth born before and out of his marriage to Franziska Schwaninger), had. These kinds of responsibilities would always precede other calls to Christian witness that one claims to have received from God, including the call to shed one's blood because of following Christ.
Jägerstätter's martyrdom and our Christian consciousness
As can be seen, despite the years that have passed and the major ecclesial turn involved in the beatification of one who, until a few decades earlier, was considered a borderline case not to be emphasized, the questions that Franz Jägerstätter's life and death pose to the Christian conscience are very much current.
Even today, there are anti-Christian political powers that demand submission and cooperation from Christians; these are not only dictatorial, ultranationalist, or totalitarian powers of the kind prevailing in Russia or China, but also the powers that are the expression of radical secularism and an atheistic progressive ideology that increasingly pervade societies characterized by the liberal-democratic political system in Western Europe and North America.
Today, too, church authorities appear tossed between the responsibility to bear full witness to the truth of Christ and the desirability of coming to terms with or minimizing open criticism of policies contrary to natural law and Christian morality to not be sidelined or swept aside altogether. Even today, Christian laymen have family members entrusted to their care and protection, which can be invoked as impediments to forms of Christian witness that would produce reactions from the authorities, making it impossible to fulfill parental and spousal duties.
Undoubtedly, Jägerstätter is and remains a sign of contradiction for the lukewarm in faith, for those who, as Sergio Tanzarella, for example, writes, are lulled into the "illusions of a pseudo-Christianity without a cross." But he is also the one who can help everyone - those who appear willing to respond to a call that carries a high price and those who believe they can and must witness in a way that does not involve the outpouring of blood or civil death - to understand what it is all about, to understand the terms of the question, before decisions about "what to do."
Farmer Franz was by no means a fanatic thirsting for martyrdom and intransigent with those who had no intention of imitating him: at the first call to military service, when there is hope that he will not be sent to the front, he takes the oath to Hitler as the ultimate leader of the armed forces; when he is put on trial, he offers his willingness to serve without arms in health care; he maintains until the end a rich exchange of correspondence with his friend Rudolf, like him a Franciscan tertiary, who had chosen to serve in the army although he shared Jägerstätter's judgment of Nazism and war.
He alternates between judgments of disappointment and sympathy toward the church authorities and their attitude toward the war. In the end, he does not accept the compromise solutions that are proposed to him because they all involve his submission to Nazism and the reasons for the Nazi war: Jägerstätter does not object to military service as such, but to serving the Third Reich; he does not condemn the war at all, but the war on Hitler's side.
The depth of Martyr Franz's Christian conscience and the lucidity of his reason enlightened by faith emerge in the letters he is allowed to write from prison in Berlin. In the most famous, we find all we need to understand his position and teaching that applies to all to this day: "I write with my hands tied, but it is better that way than if my will were chained (those sentenced to death remained handcuffed until the sentence was carried out - ed.). Sometimes, God openly shows us His strength, which He gives to men who love Him and do not prefer earth to heaven. Neither prison nor chains nor death can separate a man from God's love and rob him of his faith and free will. God's power is invincible (...) There are always those who try to oppress your conscience by reminding you of your bride and children.
The actions one takes become right because one is married and has children. Or perhaps the action is better or worse just because thousands of other Catholics also perform it? (...) Did not Christ himself say, "He who loves his wife, mother, and children more than me is not worthy of me?" For what purpose do we pray to God and ask for the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit if we are to give blind obedience anyway? What good has God provided men with an intellect and free will if we are not even allowed, as some say, to judge whether this war Germany is waging is just or unjust? What is the use then of being able to distinguish between good and evil? I believe that one can also lend blind obedience, but only if doing so harms no one. If nowadays men were a little more sincere, there should be, I think, even some Catholics who say, "Yes, I realize that what we are doing is not good, yet I do not feel ready to die yet. If God had not given me the grace and strength to die, if necessary, to defend my faith, perhaps I would simply do what most people do. God can, in fact, grant His grace to each person as He wills. If others had the many graces I have received, perhaps He would have done much better things than I did."
Franz sweeps away the argument that instrumentalizes Jesus' words about "giving to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's," and implicitly also the one that appeals to the "bona fide conscience" of those who went to fight in the army of the Third Reich.
The human being is given the reason of a moral subject whose conscience is capable of distinguishing good from evil, and insofar as it is integrated into his person, it cannot but "function" at all times: there is just no such thing as not having to be exercised before the demands and decisions of civil authority. The voice of conscience, as Gaudium et Spes will later explain (nos. 16-18), always speaks, and if the individual person does not correctly hear what it says to him, it depends on a neglect of his own being that has made him deaf.
Anyone who would claim that conscience legitimizes him to fight for Hitler would simply show that he has not taken care of his own moral formation. This was explained by the then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger, in a text on the relationship between conscience and truth, which was first published in 1992, says: "It is never a fault to follow the convictions one has formed, indeed one must follow them. But no less can it be a fault that one has come to form such mistaken convictions and has trampled on the revulsion toward them that he feels the memory of his being. The guilt then lies elsewhere, deeper: not in the act of the moment, not in the present judgment of conscience, but in that neglect toward my own being, which has made me deaf to the voice of truth and its inner promptings. For this reason, even criminals who act with conviction remain guilty."
If, however, one can never compromise on the sharpness of the judgment that distinguishes between good and evil, the matter changes when it comes to the existential decision: not everyone is given the moral strength indispensable to sacrifice one's life. Franz Jägerstätter openly declares that the determination that drives him to the scaffold for Christ does not come from himself but from God, from a gift of grace. Indeed, he speaks of graces in the plural. Here, the knot concerning family responsibilities must also be untied. Here, we need to read beyond the impeccable quotation from the Gospel according to Matthew about the need to love Christ more than one's own family members. In the documented reality of the life of the Sankt Radegund farmer, marriage and family are not an obstacle to sacrificing one's life for Christ but a decisive driving force to this end.
It is on the strength of the good experienced in the spousal communion and fatherhood lived out in the relationship with his three infant daughters that Franz matures a gratitude for God's gifts that is also grace that makes possible the consistency of faith up to the outpouring of blood. Terrence Malick illustrated this aesthetically perfectly in the well-known film The Hidden Life - Hidden Life, the exhibition entitled "Franz and Franziska, there is no greater love" at the Rimini Meeting that opens Aug. 20 and will tell the story.
Translation urevised by the author. The article was published on Tempi.This copy is not for commercial use, but for education purpose only. Download.
