![]() ![]() Thomas Merton reviewed In Solitary Witness for the PAX Bulletin in a piece entitled “An Enemy of the State,” and the piece reached a wider audience when Merton included it in his 1968 book Faith and Violence. Archbishop Thomas Roberts brought the Jägerstätter story to the Council during the drafting of Gaudium et spes, influencing the composition of GS §79. Zahn wrote, traveled, and lectured, even sharing the story with bishops during Vatican II. He too was called to perform a task, and we can be deeply grateful to him for also being a witness, and in a way a solitary witness.” Zahn’s incandescent work and serious commitment to the Christian vocation to peacemaking, helped make Jägerstätter’s witness more widely known. Radegund does become a place of pilgrimage it will be thanks to this book of Gordon Zahn, who has not allowed the story of Franz to be forgotten. ![]() When God wants a saint, He makes one.” Dorothy acknowledged, “Of course the person in question has to give assent,” and mused “I wonder how many there are who have been ‘called to be saints’ and have refused because the price was too great?” Dorothy was so moved by Jägerstätter’s witness that she even gestured in the direction that the costs associated with the canonization process would be justified in this case of Jägerstätter, concluding, “We need such saints today, to be held up for public veneration, raised to the altars so that we ask their intercession with God in these times of terror, with the threat of nuclear war hanging over us.”ĭorothy continued, “If St. Dorothy began her reflection on the Jägerstätter text by calling to mind the words of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: “It is all God’s doing. Over June and July of that summer, Zahn conducted interviews, researched and assembled a remarkable story which he published in 1964 as In Solitary Witness: The Life & Death of Franz Jägerstätter.Ī year later, the Servant of God Dorothy Day reviewed Zahn’s seminal book in the June and July editions of The Catholic Worker. Zahn then dutifully set out to reconstruct this entire chapter of history. In 1961, Zahn traveled to the remote village of Saint Radegund, Austria and discovered that virtually no resources of a documentary nature about this man existed. Zahn uncovered some initial details about a Catholic farmer from Austria named “Franz.” The farmer conscientiously objected to Nazi conscription and was executed by guillotine on 9 August 1943. While researching in Germany in 1956 for what would become his book German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars, the Catholic scholar and WWII conscientious objector Gordon C. ![]()
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