Category: Hagiography

Helmuth James Graf von Moltke

225px-HelmuthvonMoltkeJan1945.jpgLast night was the US premiere of “A Journey to Kreisau,” a dramatic presentation about Nazi resister Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, written by Worcester theater icon Marc P. Smith.

There are 2 more local shows, Feb 19 & 20, 8pm, at the Hibernian Center/Fiddler’s Green (19 Temple St).

I am amazed I’d not heard much about von Moltke before, given that his estate was a center of anti-Nazi activity. In my circle, if you bring up resistance to the Nazis, you are going to hear about the White Rose, Bonhoffer, and of course Jagerstatter, but not von Moltke.

I’m a bit humbled by my ignorance, but mostly eager to read more about him, and excited to realize that there are still so many great men and women of history for me to discover.

Worcester Lenten Prayer and Fast for an End to the Iraq War

As Roman Catholics who love the Church, we listened closely to Pope John Paul II who called the 2003 Iraq War “a defeat for humanity” and to Pope Benedict XVI who said, “There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq,” and went on to say, “We should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a just war.”

We remember that, despite the Vatican’s clear opposition to the Iraq War, only one American Bishop, Most Rev. John Michael Botean, condemned it. In a 2003 Lenten Pastoral Letter, Bishop Botean called the Iraq War “objectively grave evil, a matter of mortal sin.”

On March 19, the Iraq War will enter its fifth year. More than 150,000 Iraqi civilians and nearly 4,000 American soldiers have perished. Hundreds of thousands of our sisters and brothers have been injured, orphaned, or left homeless.

We cannot help but wonder if this war could have been prevented with a stronger voice of opposition from all of us in the American Catholic Church. We admit our own complicity by our failure to raise our own voices more forcefully. But, even now, we believe that the voice of our Church can help end the bloodshed.

jagerstatter.jpgTherefore, inspired by the witness of Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, we join concerned Catholics in twelve other dioceses around the United States to call for a Lenten prayer and fast for peace. Like Jagerstatter, the only known Roman Catholic to refuse service in Hitler’s military during World War II, we believe that the Church must not stay “silent in the face of what is happening.” Starting on Ash Wednesday, we invite all people of conscience to join us at Saint Paul’s Cathedral for midday Mass each weekday, followed by a peace vigil outside the church and, shortly thereafter, at the nearby United States Federal Building. We will conclude our prayer and fasting during Holy Week on March 19th with a special Catholic peace witness at the Federal Building.

We hope and pray that this witness in Worcester and other dioceses around the country will draw the Church closer to the nonviolent Christ and help our nation to end the Iraq War and Occupation.

Catonsville Nine: The 40th anniversary

On May 17, 1968, a group of Catholics now known as the “Catonsville Nine” went to the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, took 378 draft files, brought them to the parking lot in wire baskets, dumped them out, poured homemade napalm over them, and set them on fire.

To remember the anniversary of this event, which continues to bear fruit today, we talked with Catonsville Nine member (and our housemate) Tom Lewis. Also part of the conversation is long-time peace activist Emeritus Professor Michael D. True, Ph.D. and Doctor of Humane Letters (honoris causa).

The Notorious Baxters

At the dawn of the First World War, New Zealand surveyed its draft-age men and asked if they would be willing to fight. One out of six said they would not. When it came down to a choice between joining the army and going to prison, many changed their minds, but many others spent the war in detention. Of those imprisoned, fourteen were deported to Europe, three of them brothers: John, Archibald, and Sandy Baxter.
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Seeing eye to eye with Radiohead

Peter Maurin, Radiohead fanOn October 9, the British rock band Radiohead shook up the music industry by offering its new album, “In Rainbows,” online for whatever fans wanted to pay. The next morning, The Boston Globe reported not only that tens of thousands of CDs had been downloaded under the risky plan, but that the album was pretty good to boot. On the BBC news, lan Youngs admitted: “I paid precisely £0.00 – for research purposes, just to see if it could be done. And it could – the ordering process skipped the credit card section and went straight to the confirmation screen. But soon my conscience was nagging me to be a bit more equitable and give them a fair price . . . . I decided to pay £9.82 because that was the average price paid for a CD in the UK in 2006.”

My son Patrick and I went online that night and paid £3.45 (about $6). We were listening to the album less than nine minutes later.

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Fr Bernie Gilgun’s homily, October 19, 2007

This is a recording of a homily by Father Bernie Gilgun, from his weekly Mass at the Mustard Seed in Worcester, Massachusetts. He begins with an anecdote about Dorothy Day, then discusses the North American Martyrs.

You can download the mp3 (6MB) or see other formats. You can also subscribe (RSS) to the podcast.

Reading for October 19, 2007.

Honoring Franz Jägerstätter

Franz Jägerstätter, who was killed for refusing to fight for the Nazis, will be beatified on Friday, October 26. There are at least 2 Worcester-area events honoring him on that day. At 1pm at Anna Maria College in Paxton, Massachusetts, at the Zecco Audiorium, there will be a screening of the Jagerstatter documentary “The Refusal,” followed by a discussion. Then at 7:15pm there will be a mass celebrated by Fr Bernard Gilgun at the Mustard Seed, 93 Pleasant St, Worcester, Massachusetts. After mass (8pm) we’ll be watching “The Refusal” there. All are invited to these events.

If you are planning a Jagerstatter event or teaching about him, here are some useful resources.

Holy cards: These can be ordered from the Catholic Peace Fellowship. They’re asking a 25-cent donation per card. There’s a funkier card available from Pax Christi for $1.25.

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I’m distributing the CPF version of the holy card around Worcester.

DVD: You can order a DVD of the Jägerstätter documentary “The Refusal” from the Center for Christian Nonviolence for $5. I haven’t seen it yet.

Handouts: The Catholic Peace Fellowship has two handouts, in PDF format. In Sign of Peace vol 2.3 (pdf) is the article “In Light of Eternity: Franz Jägerstätter, Martyr.” They also have a lesson plan: Following Christ in a Radical Way: Conscientious Objection and the Story of Franz Jägerstätter (pdf).

Articles: The Wikipedia page on FJ could be much better. I believe that the standard book on FJ is Gordon Zahn’s In Solitary Witness.

I took many of these links from the Catholic Peace Fellowship. I hope the other Pie and Coffee editors will revise this article as they see fit.

Dorothy Holds Forth

This interview, by Jeff Dietrich and Susan Pollack, was originally published in the December 1971 Catholic Agitator. You may want to compare this with the portrait drawn of her in Cardinal O’Connor’s application for her sainthood.

CATHOLIC AGITATOR: I’d like first to ask you, are you an anarchist? And what does that mean to you in terms of your daily action?

DOROTHY DAY: Do you want me to go back into history? When I came from college, I was a socialist. I had joined the socialist party in Urbana Illinois and I wasn’t much thrilled by it. I joined because I had read Jack London—his essays, The Iron Heel, and his description of the London slums. I also read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. All of these made a deep impression on me. So when I was sixteen years old and in my first year of college, I joined the Socialist Party. But I found most of them “petty bourgeois.” You know the kind. They were good people, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers—mostly of German descent—very settled family people. And it was very theoretical. It had no religious connotations, none of the religious enthusiasm for the poor that you’ve got shining through a great deal of radical literature.

Then there was the IWW moving in, which was the typically American movement. Eugene Debs was a man of Alsace-Lorraine background. A religious man, he received his inspiration from reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. That started him off because he could have been a well-to-do bourgeois, comfortable man. But, here you have this whole American movement. The IWW has this motto: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” That appealed to me tremendously because I felt that we were all one body. I had read scripture, but I don’t think I’d ever really recognized that teaching of the “Mystical Body”—that were are all one body, we are all one.
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