Blessed Franz Jägerstätter

Blessed Franz Jägerstätter was an Austrian farmer and sexton from St. Radegund, a husband, a father of a family, and a Franciscan tertiary. He refused to fight in Hitler’s army because as a Christian he could not wage an unjust war, and in 1943 he was executed for it. The Church commemorates him on May 21, the anniversary of his baptism.

He was born on May 20, 1907, in St. Radegund in Upper Austria, the son of an unmarried mother, Rosalia Huber. In 1917 his mother married Heinrich Jägerstätter, who adopted the boy and gave him his surname. Franz worked as a farmhand and a miner in Bavaria and Styria, and then returned home to run the farm of his sick stepfather. According to the beatification homily, he was an ordinary man with faults, who for a time lived a rather carefree and worldly life. In 1933 a daughter was born to him out of wedlock.

The turning point was his marriage in 1936 to Franziska Schwaninger, a woman of deep faith; they went to Rome on their honeymoon. The papal letter of beatification stresses that his wife’s example changed his life. Franz received Holy Communion daily, meditated on Sacred Scripture, and had a special devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Mother of God. He and Franziska had three daughters.

Faithful to the Church, he rejected the National Socialist regime. In 1938 he was the only one in his village to vote against the annexation of Austria to Germany. He would not accept the allowances the regime gave to large families. Called up for military service in 1940, he served for several months and openly professed his faith among the soldiers. On December 8, 1940, he entered the Third Order of Saint Francis. He came to the conviction that taking part in this war would be a grave sin.

Called up again in 1943, on March 1 he declared that he refused to fight with weapons. He offered to serve as a medic, but his request was rejected. Imprisoned in Linz and in Berlin, he was tormented to make him renounce his faith, but he remained faithful to it. On July 6, 1943, a military court sentenced him to death. In a letter to his wife he thanked the Savior that he had been able to suffer for Him and could die for Him. Before his execution he told a priest that he had everything, because he had Sacred Scripture. He was beheaded on August 9, 1943, in Brandenburg. He had wished to die before the solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, so as to celebrate it already in heaven.

The faithful at once regarded him as a martyr. The bishop of Linz opened the cause of beatification, and on June 1, 2007, the decree on his martyrdom was promulgated. The beatification took place on October 26, 2007, in Linz Cathedral: on behalf of Benedict XVI the apostolic letter was read by Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, and his 94-year-old widow Franziska took part in the celebration. The Pope called him a martyr and a father of a family who gave his life, keeping an upright conscience in fidelity to the Gospel and in defense of the dignity of the human person.