When Human Love Leads to God: Blessed Franz Jägerstätter and Mother Seton
In the lives of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton and the World War II martyr Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, marital love became a school of holiness. Their devotion to each other prepared them for heroic trust in God.
Blessed Franz Jӓgerstӓtter died a martyr to the Nazis in 1943, but the movie about his life, 2019’s A Hidden Life, focuses on his marriage as much as his martyrdom.
The film’s director explained why. He said Jägerstӓtter’s wife, Franziska, “is a martyr as he was. … She supported him to the end, despite the pain.”
Their love for each other grew out of their shared faith in God, and led to a heroic love of God — as it did for Elizabeth Ann Seton and her husband William. In both cases, husband and wife entered deeply into each other’s suffering, and through that to Christ’s suffering.
God writes straight with crooked lines, and Franz is a powerful example.
He was born out of wedlock on May 20, 1907, and would himself father a child outside of wedlock before marrying his devout Catholic wife. Franz’s biological father and his stepfather, Heinrich Jägerstätter, both died in World War I.
His stepfather’s farm provided Franz his livelihood in his wooded hometown of Radegund in Upper Austria, and the homestead’s unusually extensive library supplemented Franz’s education in the town’s one-room schoolhouse. In his stepfather’s library, Franz read the history and philosophy that equipped him to see the dangers of the Anschluss movement that united Germany and Austria in 1938, and to understand the power of conscience in a more sophisticated way than his fellow parishioners.
But Franz was not an exceptionally pious young man. He was mostly known as the first in his town to own a motorcycle. His faith deepened gradually, and matured when he married his wife Franziska in 1936. The couple traveled to Rome to be blessed by Pope Pius XI.
He remembered his wedding on his seventh anniversary when, in prison, he wrote: “in the presence of God and of the priest, we promised that we would love each other and be faithful. I believe that we have faithfully kept this promise to this day, and I believe that God will continue to grant us the grace, even though we are now separated, to remain true to this promise until the end of our life.”
After the marriage he became a daily communicant, a Third Order Franciscan, and a parish sacristan. But as Franz’s faith intensified, with a special devotion to the Passion of Christ, Austria was falling under the sway of Nazism.
Franz’s opposition to the Nazis made him unpopular.
Franz was his town’s only vote against Germany’s annexation of Austria, and his position was so unpopular he had to stop going to the town tavern to avoid heated arguments.
Nonetheless, he reported for compulsory military service in 1940, avoiding active duty only through agricultural deferrals. As the war progressed, he grew increasingly appalled by Hitler’s evil and became convinced that cooperating with the Nazi war machine would be a serious sin.
When he was called to serve again in 1943 — after Germany’s catastrophic losses at Stalingrad — Jägerstätter reported for duty as required but declared himself a conscientious objector, offering to serve in non-combat roles, including as a medic. Nazi authorities refused and imprisoned him instead.
Acquaintances tried everything to convince him to fight. When they argued this was an opportunity to defeat the godless Bolsheviks, Franz answered, “When our Catholic missionaries went to a pagan country to make them Christians, did they advance with machine guns and bombs in order to convert and improve them?”
A sticking point was his refusal to swear a military oath to Hitler. Jägerstätter was reminded of the Christian duty to obey legitimate authorities. A friend urged him, “Just say yes. You don’t even have to shoot straight. But take the oath.” Franz answered that he did not consider Hitler a legitimate authority and refused to say otherwise under oath.
When Catholics insisted that, as husband and father, he was required to give in, Franz wrote, “I cannot believe that, just because he has a wife and children, a man is free to offend God.” Besides, he said, it was better for his four daughters to see their father as a martyr than as a Nazi collaborator.
“I can only act on my own conscience. I do not judge anyone. I can only judge myself,” Jägerstätter wrote. “I have considered my family. I have prayed and put myself and my family in God’s hands. I know that, if I do what I think God wants me to do, he will take care of my family.”
He was tried and condemned, and then on August 9, 1943, he was executed. As the Vatican puts it in his official biography: “Franz Jägerstätter, who would not bow his head to Hitler, bowed his head to God, and the guillotine took care of the rest. He was obviously called up to serve a higher order.”
His brave story of faith grew out of a beautiful love story.
In 2007, when Pope Benedict declared Jägerstätter a martyr, his wife Franziska was 94 years old. She not only attended her husband’s beatification but insisted on joining the procession carrying the urn containing his remains.
It was a final testament to the fierce devotion the couple had for each other. When Notre Dame University theologian Robert Krieg translated their letters for publication in the early 2000s, he said his wife would come downstairs to find him crying. He said the letters revealed the hearts of two saints — husband and wife.
In his last letter to his wife in 1943, Franz wrote:
“Dearest wife and mother, I am deeply grateful for everything that you have done for me in my life, for all the love and sacrifices which you have shown me. And I ask you once again to forgive me for everything that I have made you suffer and feel hurt. You have surely been forgiven by me for everything.”
He also left final instructions for his wife and daughters: to keep the First Fridays devotion, to take comfort in the Blessed Sacrament that would soon “strengthen me for the journey to eternity,” and to remember his promise: “If I am soon in heaven, I shall ask the loving God to prepare a place for all of you.”
Anyone who knows the story of William and Elizabeth Seton will notice the similarities.
Like Franz and Franziska, there was a six-year difference between William and Elizabeth when they married. Franz was 36 when he died; William was 35. And like Franz, William had a sincere but unremarkable faith that grew after marriage and flowered when he faced the crisis that ended his life.
Elizabeth wrote to a friend about her joy in her husband’s faith, saying, “The last twenty four hours are the happiest I have ever seen or could ever expect, as the most earnest wish of my heart was fulfilled… Willy’s heart seemed to be nearer to me for being nearer to his God.”
After their seventh wedding anniversary, Elizabeth traveled to Italy with William and one of their five children in the hope that the climate would cure his tuberculosis. After arriving, the family was immediately quarantined for thirty days as William’s condition worsened, and the couple suffered together until his death. Elizabeth recorded his last words: “My Christ Jesus have mercy! My dear wife, my dear little ones … Tell all my dear friends not to weep for me that I die happy, and satisfied with the Almighty Will.”
For her part, Elizabeth fell in love with the Catholic Church, and found comfort in the Blessed Sacrament, just as Franz later would. “Little Anna and I had only strange tears of Joy and grief: we leave but dear ashes,” she wrote, and “would gladly encounter all the sorrows before us to be partakers of that Blessed Body and Blood.”
In both cases, the intimate holiness shared between these spouses and God now inspires millions.
As director Terrence Malick put it in A Hidden Life, Franz Jägerstätter’s heroic death was regarded in his homeland as the shameful death of a cowardly traitor for decades. “Even in Austria nobody knew it,” he said. “It came out only in the 1970s, many years after his death. What the Nazis were saying in the film was about to happen: you will die, your family will suffer, but no one will notice.”
Nobody but your spouse and God — and that is enough.
TOM HOOPES, author most recently of The Rosary of Saint John Paul II, is writer in residence at Benedictine College in Kansas, where he teaches. He hosts The Extraordinary Story podcast about the life of Christ. His book What Pope Francis Really Said is now available on Audible. A former reporter in the Washington, D.C., area, he served as press secretary for the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee Chairman and spent 10 years as editor of the National Catholic Register newspaper and Faith & Family magazine. His work frequently appears in the Register, Aleteia, and Catholic Digest. He lives in Atchison, Kansas, with his wife, April, and has nine children.
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