Today is the memorial of Blessed Franz Jägerstätter.
There is much you could read about him, but I think this is particularly powerful – and a little painful as it was written in the context of the revelations about Jean Vanier. But as the writer explores the notion of “hiddenness,” he brings out the good that is possible for all of us:
By focusing so minutely and carefully on their ordinary holiness of life, rather than solely on his martyrdom, the film points out a further irony. We look to the martyrs as heroic precisely because of the martyrdom. But what led the martyrs to their martyrdom? We can be blinded by our need for heroes, blinded by the particular heroism of martyrdom; fascinated by it, the rest of the martyrs’ lives remain hidden to us by our own lack of interest, our narrowness of vision, like the way our desire for stunning miracles can obscure from us the ubiquitous and ordinary but just as holy ways of God’s providence.
If the Church canonizes and so proclaims a saint to us in order to provide objects of admiration and thus models of holiness for us to emulate, then it is really a kind of cheap grace for someone like me to admire Jägerstätter’s martyrdom; I cannot connect with him at all in his martyrdom, except hypothetically—well, if I am ever in that situation, I pray I will do what he did. Right, if I am ever in that situation . . . But what the film shows is that his martyrdom was the fruit of the holiness of his ordinary hidden life. And that is a portrait of the life of a man I can connect with, a life I can seek to emulate—a man at home with his wife, children, friends, a job, living a life that is hidden, “unhistorical,” but holy.
That hidden life was not a conscience hidden from the world around him. It was the life of a conscience as clear and bright as a cloudless day, alive in its impact upon the lives of those around him. For me to emulate that hidden life would not be cheap grace. And maybe, just maybe, it would not then be cheap grace for me to pray, if I am ever confronted with a situation as bad as he was, however unlikely that is, that I could emulate his martyrdom, because I have already emulated the holiness of his hidden life. “If you found out you were going to die in fifteen minutes, what would you do?” “Same thing I have been doing.” The Little Way, day by day.
We all live hidden, “unhistoric” lives, lives hidden from the world, yet lives that change the world around us for good or ill in untold unknown ways. We have a choice—to live a hidden life of deceit or of integral holiness. Nothing is hidden from God, nor even man entirely.
The “hidden life” is of course a reference to Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life.
The host of the podcast of which I’m a part, Chris Barnett, has edited a book on Malick. A Hidden Life was not on his list of “Top 20 Most Spiritually Significant Films,” but if you are interested in his book, click here.
![](https://amywelborn.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/franz-jagerstatter.png?w=472)
Anyway, I was interested to see that Franziska lived to the age of 100 and only passed away in 2013. She and her daughters, and Franz’s daughter from a previous relationship, attended his beatification in 2007.
Early in 2020, I was instructed in the art of radical hospitality by a woman whose parents had demonstrated to her how to love one’s enemies. During my COVID-shortened semester abroad, five friends and I hopped a plane, trains, and an automobile to visit Sankt Radegund, Austria, home of Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, a brave soul who dissented amid social pressure and refused to swear allegiance to Adolf Hitler, paying for it with his life. Maria, nearly eighty years old and the second daughter of Franz and his wife Franziska, offered to fetch six American college kids, whose German skills ended at “guten Tag,” at the train station half an hour away. She and her friend Elisabeth, who had driven an additional three hours from Linz to assist, welcomed us as we stepped off the train.
….Even after Franz’s death and the end of the war, his family remained ostracized and his life was regarded by their community as a waste. Franziska was refused government pensions for decades due to the nature of Franz’s death, and thus bore the responsibility of her family’s livelihood, including the labor of farming. However, as Elisabeth attested in person, Franziska was never bitter. Even in the midst of her loss, she extended kindness to those who hated her. Multiple neighbors recall how Franz and Franziska generously fed and clothed them, even during their own tough times.
The warmth of the Jägerstätters’ joy and generosity was palpable. After our stop at their farmhouse, Maria invited us to her own home for coffee. Maria made four rounds with different Austrian pastries, insisting we take more. We sat with the two women for hours, asking questions about their family. Although Maria lamented having few memories of her father, she spoke of him proudly and laughed about asking for his intercession in the minutiae of finding her keys. Elisabeth reflected on the times she had sat at the same table with Franziska. “We like to joke around that Franziska was the real saint here,” she told us. Humor aside, Maria quietly hopes to see her parents canonized together. In Maria’s dining room hung a photo of Franziska’s face at her husband’s beatification, radiant.