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I was a news-boy in the 1930's growing-up season of grammar-grades at St. Callistus. The Evening Bulletin and The Ledger headlined Hitler's star rising in Germany, his Anschluss of his native Austria, and his fanatical hatred of Jews. Real stuff but so remote. My family was friendly with our druggist's family, the Pastors, across Lebanon Ave. at 67th.
My mother shared a mutual respect with Mrs.
Pastor. My brother Jack and Nathaniel Pastor's friendship, fostered on the playing fields in Morris Park, flourishes still. 'Doc' Pastor drove us to my first big-league game- the A's vs. the Yankees, Lefty Grove vs. Babe Ruth.
Shadows clouded the sunshine of our ties with our Jewish neighbors. During those desperate Depression days my parents were one of the million subscribers to Father Charles Coughlin's Social Justice Weekly because he preached Leo XIII and Pius XI's labor encyclicals that called for a family living wage and old age insurance, and because Coughlin along with Charles Lindbergh opposed our entry into another European war. On Sunday afternoons like millions of others we huddled around our Philco to ponder the radio-priest's oratory. For a time the Pastors tuned in too. Coughlin decried Communism as more menacing than Nazism,
named some Jews among the first Communist
revolutionaries, and turned toward right-wing demagoguery. In 1938 he published the fraudulent Protocols of the t=lders of Zion, a document purporting to be a Jewish plot for seizing world power.
John Cogley, editor of the Chicago Catholic Worker, wrote to him in May 1939: "In a sense you are the most powerful Catholic voice in the U.S. today ... A 'fringe' group-- faithful friends, violent supporters of your program, that have come popularly to be called "Coughlinites'-- has become notorious for its burning anti-Semitism, and they have persisted in
canonizing you as the patron of prejudice ... and
justifying a senseless unchristian attitude toward Mrs. Cohen, the delicatessen lady around the corner, and Meyer the insurance collector. Some body should talk to them. They would listen if you did. What you say would help to make up for the pain and insult many innocent, godly Jews have received from your confused followers". Pearl Harbor effectively silenced Coughlin when his Christian Front supporters deserted to join the war effort.
In Europe ominous clouds changed to deadly
storms culminating in Hitler's lightning strikes of war, blitzkriegs. Harry Fiss, a young student in Vienna, was among 97 Jews expelled from his public school after the Anschluss of March 12, 1938. His family escaped to America just two weeks before the start of WW 2. Fiss was eventually drafted into a U.S. Army Air Force Intelligence unit where he became a friend of Mario De Pillis, a classmate of mine both at St. Callistus and at St. Thomas More High. In an ironic turnabout Fiss translated at the Nurenberg trials.
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Currently Harry Fiss's old school intends to publish memoirs of its Jewish student-survivors. This excerpt from Fiss's testimony is quoted with permission: "Anti-Semitism in Vienna did not begin at the time of the Anschluss. I remember being forced to sit in the last row of the classroom, and being ostracized and abused by the majority of my fellow students. I have even been accused of 'crucifying Christ'....1 would like to recall the events that occurred on November 10, Kristallnacht. Perhaps one of the worst events I remember of that day was watching my stepfather along with several other Jews scrubbing the sidewalk in front of our building on their knees. While they were doing that our former so-called neighbors were jeering and hurling insults at these poor people. To scrub the sidewalk my father was given a brush and lye. When he came home I saw holes in his hands.
Last, but not least, I can still see in my mind's eye
the smoldering ruins of my burnt out synagogue on Schmalzhofgasse, and the many Juden Unerwuenscht signs on the storefronts."
Nearby in the Austrian farming village of St. Radegund, Franz Jagerstatter, a town tough, married a good woman in 1936 and turned himself around to become the sexton-saint. Because of his growing Catholic faith he rejected the Nazi
philosophy, refused to cooperate in any way with the Nazis, and avoided
taverns because he had gotten into heated arguments
with Nazi blowhards. Contrary to the pleading of friends, pastor and bishop that
Franz consider the
consequences for his young family, continued
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The Terrible Beauty and... continued
he refused induction into the army, was
arrested, and on August 9, 1943 was beheaded in a Berlin prison. The prison chaplain said: "I can say with certainty that this simple man is the only saint I have ever met in my life". His living and dying were known to only a few. Franziska, his
widow, and three daughters, loyal to the memory of
a good man, suffered many years of economic punishment, discrimination and social exclusion before Austrian attitudes began to change.
Gordon Zahn, a rare Catholic conscientious objector to WW2, a friend of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, visited Franziska and was allowed to read and copy Franz's prison letters hidden for many years under a mattress. Zahn, author of Gennan Catholics and Hitler's War, and a founding member of Catholic Peace Fellowship-Pax Christi USA, authored In Solitary Witness in 1965. Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers to help end the Vietnam War, was deeply moved by Franz's courage and wrote: "His persistence in doing what he felt was right really gave me a lot of
strength." Our local CPF-Pax Christi has many links
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with the Jagerstatters, including artist Robert McGovern's carved statue of Franz on loan at St. Malachy.
Austrian youths began to recognize Jagerstatter's heroism as the canonization process started last October when Franz was named 'blessed'. But here in America our young people face troubling pressures. Recruiters, flag wavers and other super-patriots encourage them to serve in an
American empire that has over 1000 military bases
world-wide and proposes a permanent state of war. Others of them turn their backs on engagement in civic affairs and, with the zeal of the evangelical right, pursue a personal sanctity apart from the burning concerns of everyone else.
How can CPF peace-people engage young people in a nonviolent third way? The Jesuit John Dear
says in NCR: "An astonishing turn of events. In his
9.
time church officials had heaped ridicule upon Franz Jagersttater's insistence that Jesus forbids us to kill. And now this turnabout, a kind of
judgment against the 'devout' German and Austrian Catholics who cheered the war and fought for Hitler. But more than that, the turnabout is a sign.
It's a sign that points to the nature of sanctity, a
sign of the future of sanctity. In a world of total war, a world on the brink of destruction, only one kind of sanctity bears fruit- the one Jesus embodied and Franz embraced."
Here are elements of a 'truth and reconciliation' healing-process: John Cogley says that Fr. Coughlin, the populist shepherd, is pointing the flock toward the pitfall of religious prejudice; Harry Fiss's truth-telling rebuts the lie that Austrians were innocent of the Nazi-inspired contempt that led to condoning the killing of Jews; Gordon Zahn and Bob McGovern uncover the hidden beauty in the life of the peasant, Franz Jagerstatter, the prison chaplain salutes the 'shirker'-saint; and John Dear reveals the significance of Franz and Franziska's fidelity to faith.
Consider Yeats in a different context: "A terrible beauty is born". The terrible beauty and goodness of the truth in the Jagerstatters' witness to nonviolence is what young people, longing for life's meaning, need to experience. That kind of truth can free all of us from prejudice, jingoism and phony patriotism.
Frank McGinty
Frank is a member of CPF
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1429 North 11th Street Philadelphia, PA 19122
June 2008
