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JAGERSTATTER-WIFE Dec-10-2008 (490 words) xxxi
Wife's love gave Austrian martyr strength, cardinal says
By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
ROME (CNS) -- Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, an Austrian farmer beheaded for refusing to serve in the Nazi army, had the strength to follow his conscience because of his wife Franziska, said Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna.
With the 95-year-old widow and the couple's three daughters in the front row, Cardinal Schonborn participated in the Dec. 9 presentation of a new biography in Italian, "Christ or Hitler? The Life of Blessed Franz Jagerstatter."
The book launch was held in Rome's St. Bartholomew Church, which Pope John Paul II designated as a shrine to martyrs of the 20th century. The original handwritten copy of Blessed Jagerstatter's "spiritual testament" is on a side altar in the church, along with letters and objects owned by other victims of Nazism and communism in Europe and of dictatorships in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
The Austrian martyr's widow said she did not want to respond to reporters' questions, but she did say her happiest memory was the 1936 honeymoon pilgrimage she and Franz took to Rome.
Her daughter, Maria, said her earliest memory was "the whole family sitting around the table and Mother reading the letter that my father had been beheaded. Everyone cried."
Maria was 4 years old when her father was beheaded by guillotine on Aug. 9, 1943.
"We never felt he abandoned us," she said. Rather they believed he was in heaven and "he protected us."
Her father was beatified in 2007, but he "was always a saint to us. If you read his last letter, you would know he was," she said.
In the letter, written a few hours before he was executed, Blessed Jagerstatter apologized to his wife and family for the suffering they endured; he promised to watch over them always; and he talked about how Jesus must have suffered knowing that his mother was there watching him die.
Cardinal Schonborn told the audience that he first heard of Blessed Jagerstatter in 1968 when he read the late Gordon Zahn's book, "In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jagerstatter."
Strangely, he said, almost no one seemed to have heard of the Austrian martyr and his transformation from a superficial Catholicism to a deep faith that forced him to question how one could be "a soldier for Christ" and a soldier in Hitler's army at the same time.
The growth in faith, the cardinal said, was due to the example of his wife. "Franz had the strength to follow his conscience because he was supported by the love of his wife," he said.
Cardinal Schonborn introduced Franziska Jagerstatter and her three daughters to Pope Benedict XVI Dec. 10 at the end of the pope's general audience.
The pope stood to greet the widow and continued to hold her hands as they spoke; then, her daughters came up and gave the pope flowers and other gifts.
END
Copyright (c) 2008 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
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