Door
to the Path Taken
Woodcut: Robert R. McGovern
Franz Jägerstätter
5/30/07-8/9/43. An Exception
Catholic
Peace Fellowship rejoices with the universal church for the forthcoming
beatification of Franz Jägerstätter in Linz,
Austria on October 26, close to the village where his 98-year-old widow still
resides. The recognition of Jägerstätter as a saint
for his heroic resistance to Nazism and his refusal to participate in a war
he deemed immoral, is an event in our lifetime, at least us elderly, not a
story in a forgotten, dusty Lives of the
Saints.
There
is a special connection to Jägerstätter for CPF which makes the celebration at St. Malachy’s
so right. A number of years ago, in the 1980s, Gordon Zahn, author of In Solitary Witness, a biography of Jägerstätter, and an influential document in the church’s
recognition of the authenticity of Franz’s holiness, presided at a CPF
retreat. Prior to the retreat for many of us Jägerstätter was an anonymous victim of the Nazis, an unknown.
Zahn, a transparently good man, opened our consciousness to a saintly heroism
foreign to our experience.
In 1992 Bob and Aileen Mc Govern,
accompanied by John McNamee, made a pilgrimage to visit Franziska
Jägerstätter’s home in Austria. Bob’s woodcuts and
John’s poems commemorate the visit, and were jointly
published in a book, Clay Vessels.
Bob also carved a 4.5 foot statue of Jägerstätter as a gift for Fr. Dan Berrigan,
a great admirer of Franz. As Bob related it to me, Dan encounters Franz every
morning as he rises, at the foot of his bed.
Fr. Dan
Berrigan, in his mid-eighties, has been a
monumental force in the transformation of our understanding of war and peace.
It is a terrible irony, for those of us who listened to Dan so intently in
the Vietnam days, that he should remember a triumphant martyr for peace in
the midst of yet one more immoral, unjust U.S. war. The war beat goes on and
our bishops, as with Jägerstätter, are mute.
This
Spirit-filled man loved life intensely, especially family life. Writing to
his wife from prison on the occasion of their seventh wedding anniversary, he
said, “When I look back upon all this joy and the many graces that have been
mine for these seven years, it seems at times almost miraculous. . . .
Dearest wife, this is why, no matter how we may dread the future, He who has
upheld us and given us joy till now will not abandon us then either.”
Joe Bradley