Blessed Franz, at last: A 20th century martyr

		The Catholic  Difference  George Weigel

Several years ago, I asked my friend, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna, what he thought about the delays in the beatification process for Franz Jaegerstaetter, the Austrian peasant beheaded for refusing to serve under arms in Hitler's Wehrmacht.

Cardinal Schoenborn is a theologian of no small accomplishment; he's also a man of deep piety, which his answer to my query reflected: "I'm already praying to him."

A little relieved, I confessed that I, too, had jumped the canonical gun and had been praying to a man whom, like the cardinal, I regarded as a martyr - indeed, as one of the singular figures of 20th century Catholicism.

So it was a great satisfaction this past October 26 when the official Church caught up with us, so to speak, and Franz Jaegerstaetter was beatified in Linz, Austria.

Life of a saint

	Related article: • Local Mass: Will celebrate martyr's beatification

Very few people would have imagined the young Franz as a saint. He was a hellion, and it was only after his marriage to Franziska Schwaninger and a honeymoon pilgrimage to Rome that this largely uneducated peasant-worker was transformed by grace into a serious Catholic. A very serious Catholic.

Jaegerstaetter was a daily communicant in an era when that was far more unusual than today; he became a Third Order Franciscan; he read closely in the Scriptures and the lives of the saints; he fasted, did acts of penance, gave generously to the poor, and served as volunteer sacristan of his local parish.

When Hitler's Anschluss led to Austria's incorporation into the Third Reich, Jaegerstaetter, alone in his village, protested.

Too many Austrian Catholics welcomed the new order with enthusiasm, voting in large numbers for incorporation into Nazi Germany; Jaegerstaetter (according to that distinguished amateur historian, William Doino Jr.) wrote that "what took place in the spring of 1938 was not much different from what happened that Holy Thursday 1,900 years ago when the crowd was given a free choice between the innocent Savior and the criminal Barabbas."

Trials and suffering

Franz Jaegerstaetter's own trial came soon enough. Called to military service in 1943, he refused induction, not on pacifist grounds (he wasn't a pacifist), but on the basis of what we would now call selective conscientious objection: Hitler's war was an unjust war being waged by a fatally wicked regime; therefore, conscience would not permit serving as a soldier in the Wehrmacht.

Jaegerstatter's pastor and bishop tried to talk him out of his objections; his responsibilities to his wife and family weighed heavily on him; his offer to serve as a military paramedic was refused by the Nazi regime.

In a prison cell in Berlin, Jaegerstaetter suffered intensely at the thought that he might be acting irresponsibly toward his family. But as he wrote his wife on the day of his execution, "It was not possible for me to spare you the pain that you must now suffer on my account.

"How hard it must have been for our dear Savior when, through his sufferings and death, He had to prepare such a great sorrow for His Mother - and they bore all this out of love for us sinners. I thank our dear Jesus, too, that I am privileged to suffer and even die for Him . . . May God accept my life in atonement not only for my sins but for the sins of others as well."

Costly grace

Franz Jaegerstaetter was executed by guillotine on August 9, 1943 - one year to the day after Edith Stein, now St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz/Birkenau. The brilliant Carmelite philosopher and the simple Austrian peasant shared an unshakable faith that, as Blessed Franz put it, "Neither prison nor chains nor sentence of death can separate [us] from the love of God . . . [for] the power of God cannot be overcome."

Given the life-and-death choice between what Dietrich Bonhoeffer (the Lutheran martyr executed by the Nazis in 1945) called "cheap grace" and "costly grace," Edith Stein and Franz Jaegerstaetter embraced the costly grace of the cross - and now share the glory of the resurrection.

May their intercession at the throne of grace be a powerful aid in the new evangelization of the German-speaking world.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Thanksgiving:
Invites us to extend hands of thanks to God

	Guest commentary  Fr. Don Lange

As Thanksgiving approached, the first grade teacher instructed her class to draw a picture of someone or something for which they were thankful.

Douglas, a frail and unhappy boy who usually stood close to the teacher while others played at recess, drew a picture of a hand. He proudly gave the drawing to his teacher.

The drawing was just an empty hand. Nothing else! For once the other children were speechless. No one knew what the empty hand meant. Not even his teacher. To find out she had to ask Douglas.

"It is your hand, teacher," the boy explained. With tears in her eyes, the teacher recalled how often she said, "Douglas, take my hand." Or "let's do this together."

By drawing the hand, Douglas apparently was trying to express his thanks for the many ways that his beloved teacher extended a helping hand to him. When she did, Douglas was grateful.

Spirit of thanksgiving

Douglas's gratitude captures the spirit of thanksgiving that the pilgrims had when they celebrated the first Thanksgiving. According to tradition, during the preceding hard months, half of their number died from scurvy and exposure to the elements.

Despite their severe losses, the pilgrims prayerfully thanked God that enough of them survived to enjoy freedom for themselves and for their children yet to be born. They also shared their blessings with Indian friends by inviting them to a three-day feast of thanksgiving. The pilgrims had a sense of Christian gratitude rather than entitlement.

The true spirit of thanksgiving is captured in the Eucharistic Preface number four of daily Mass, "You have no need of our praise. Yet our desire to thank you is itself your gift."

The "Prayer after Communion" of the Thanksgiving Day Mass expresses our need for grace in order to be thankful in the words, "Help us to reach out in love to all people so that we may share with them the goods of time and Eternity."

Sharing our blessings

Thanksgiving invites us to be grateful by sharing our blessings with others, especially those in need. St John Chrysostom wrote, "Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life." The pilgrims modeled this by sharing their blessings with their Indian friends.

We can share our blessings with others by contributing to the Campaign for Human Development, to a food pantry, to some other worthy cause, or by quietly helping someone in need. We can call, write, or visit a shut-in or a lonely person.

Or we can invite someone who lives alone with no family or friends to share our Thanksgiving dinner. If we ask, God will show us other ways to be thankful.

Eucharistic thanks

We celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. And we celebrate Christ's gift of the Eucharist to us on another Thursday - Holy Thursday.

For Catholics, participating in Thanksgiving Day Eucharist is especially appropriate because the Mass is the center of Catholic Christian life. And the word Eucharist comes from a Greek word which means thanksgiving.

At Mass we can ask the Holy Spirit to empower us to be thankful on a daily basis for our blessings, especially those that we may take for granted. Grateful participation in the Eucharist graces us to bring a more thankful heart to our Thanksgiving meal. May we all enjoy a thankful Thanksgiving.

Fr. Don Lange is pastor emeritus of the Diocese of Madison.

Questioning the Church:
Seek and you will find

		A Culture  of Life  Christopher West

As a Catholic, am I not allowed to question the Church's teachings? Do I have to believe everything the Church teaches?

There's nothing wrong when a person growing in his faith poses questions in an earnest quest for truth. That's how we discover what the truth is.

No one, then, should be afraid of entertaining "perhaps." Perhaps God doesn't exist. But perhaps he does. Perhaps the Catholic Church is woefully misguided in her teachings. But perhaps her teachings come from God himself. These kinds of questions must be entertained.

Those who are afraid to put their beliefs to the test in this way are clinging to an ideology that they fear will not stand up to reality. On the other hand, those who seek the truth have no fear of surrendering their beliefs to reality. Entertaining "perhaps" is the only path to the truth. It's the only path to the surety and freedom of faith.

Faith, however, is a gift that doesn't necessarily come all at once. The Church herself recognizes that "an educational growth process is necessary in order that individual believers . . . may patiently be led forward arriving at a richer understanding and fuller integration of [Christ's] mystery in their lives."

Still, if the Church is who she claims to be, then the gift of faith will ultimately lead the seeker of truth to embrace all that she teaches. If in the end a person still protests what the Church teaches, then that person doesn't really believe the Catholic Church. At that point it would seem hypocritical to remain Catholic.

"Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you" (Mt 7:7). Pose every question you've ever had about the Church, entertain every "perhaps" you can think of, but don't be satisfied until you find the answers. The truth is not afraid of your questions. The question is, are you afraid of the truth?

Isn't morality a matter of my own conscience?

The Church has always taught that Catholics, like all people, are obligated to follow their own consciences - on issues of sexual morality and every other matter.

But there is an even more fundamental obligation to form the conscience according to the truth. Conscience is not free to invent right and wrong. Conscience is called to discover the truth of what is right and wrong and to submit its judgments to the truth once the truth is found.

While all of us have the basic moral law written in our hearts by God, original sin tends to cloud our judgment. Sometimes our own fallen desires can take us completely off track. This is why the conscientious person sees the Church's moral teachings as a tremendous gift. They're a sure norm for forming one's conscience according to the truth.

Too often we use "conscience" to give a morally acceptable veneer to what we wanted to do all along without discerning our behavior in light of objective standards.

Think about it: if personal conscience is the autonomous determinant of good and evil, morality becomes whatever I want it to be. There must be objective standards that we're all responsible to follow. The objective standards of God are revealed to us through the teachings of his Church.

Yet, if we don't like what his Church teaches, we hide behind our claims of "conscience" and imagine a God who accepts what we want. But that's a god who is other than God. That's an idol.

We'll never find peace and true happiness until we embrace God's will for our lives.

Christopher West is a research fellow and faculty member of the Theology of the Body Institute in West Chester, Pa. His column is syndicated by www.OneMoreSoul.com and reprinted from his book Good News About Sex and Marriage: Honest Questions and Answers About Catholic Teaching (St. Anthony Messenger Press).