Sr Katrina Alton: Where Your Treasure Is: Gospel Nonviolence from Jagerstatter to Gaza

Image: PCrispin

Sr Katrina Alton CSJP gave this reflection at the Pax Christi peace service on Saturday held in the Crypt of Westminster Cathedral, to commemorate the life and witness of Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, who was executed on 9 August 1943 for refusing to join Hitler's army.

"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Luke 12:34

In every generation, the Gospel confronts the powers of this world and demands a choice: What do you treasure? Conformity or conscience? The way of violence or nonviolence? Empire or the Kingdom of God?

Few lives illustrate this choice more clearly than that of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian Catholic farmer who refused to fight for Hitler. His story, told powerfully in Gordon Zahn's In Solitary Witness, remains a model of Gospel fidelity. Today, his witness challenges us amid modern atrocities-especially the genocide in Gaza-and calls us to action, to nonviolent resistance to the systems of war and death.

Franz Jägerstätter lived a quiet and hidden life in rural Austria. He was a devout Catholic, a husband, and a father to three daughters. In 1943, when called to serve in Hitler's army, he refused. Despite pressure from his neighbours, government officials, even his own Bishop, Franz insisted that he could not reconcile military service under the Nazi regime with his commitment to Jesus. "I cannot and may not take an oath in favour of a government that is fighting an unjust war," he wrote. Zahn recounts how even those around him could not understand this: "He was considered a fool or a traitor-even a heretic-for refusing what everyone else had accepted." Only Franziska, his wife, continued to discern this path of nonviolent resistance alongside him.

It is clear from Zahn's biography that Franz's resistance was not rooted in political ideology or ego, but in his profound Christian faith, a faith he shared with his wife Franziska. His letters from prison reveal a man prepared not just to die, but to suffer in the likeness of Christ. "If one has to suffer," he wrote, "then let it be for the sake of truth and justice." He was executed by guillotine on August 9th 1943, at Brandenburg-Gorden Prison - alone but at peace.

Franz Jägerstätter treasured the Gospel above all. He rejected the lie that violence in the service of the state could ever be compatible with the teachings of Jesus. He knew, as Zahn wrote, that "his decision to refuse the oath and suffer the penalty of death was a personal witness, a solitary one-but a witness nonetheless." His life embodies today's Gospel: "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Franz's treasure was not his reputation, his freedom, his family, or even his life-it was his relationship with the God of nonviolence who he encountered daily in prayer, the Sacraments, and Scripture.

The Gospels do not allow for neutrality in the face of slaughter. It calls us to lament, to give witness, and to action. It calls us to treasure every life, just as Jesus does-especially the lives of those being destroyed using our money, our tacit complicity, or our inaction.

Franz witness continues to speak powerfully today. For we too face an equally urgent moral reckoning; namely the ongoing genocide in Gaza-marked by systematic bombing and destruction of homes, hospitals, and entire neighbourhoods, the weaponisation of food, water and aid, causing starvation and displacement of civilians- this demands more than silence or charity. The nonviolent Gospel of Jesus demands conscience, truth-telling, and resistance.

To see children buried under rubble, or families starving under siege, and do nothing is to align ourselves with Empire, not with Jesus. Yet many in the global churches have largely failed to speak clearly and courageously. Like many Christians in Franz's day, we risk confusing loyalty to the state with fidelity to the Gospel. "It is clear," Zahn writes, "that Jägerstätter expected no support from the institutional Church. His decision was grounded in a personal response to the Gospel."

Yet we must remember that in 2007 the Catholic Church beatified Franz because he is considered a martyr who died for his faith and conscience. A reminder that prophets are not always welcome in their own communities, or in their own churches. It can take time for prophetic risk to be recognised by the institutional church.

Today, around the world, Christians and people of all faiths and none, are engaging in nonviolent direct action in solidarity with the people of Gaza. Young Conscientious Objectors in Israel are daring to say no to military service by burning draft cards and going to prison rather than to take part in genocide. In the Netherlands students have occupied university buildings to demand divestment from arms manufacturers. Faith communities in the USA have held sit-ins in federal buildings. In France trade union members have physically blocked shipments of weapons at ports. In the UK activists have blocked arms factories continuing to produce and sell weapons to Israel. These acts of public witness reveal a deeper truth: that we are called not just to believe in peace, but to choose peace, and to interrupt the machinery of war.

Such witnesses are not only needed in Gaza. Across the world, modern-day conscientious objectors are bearing witness to Gospel nonviolence-often in isolation. In Russia, for example, young men and women are refusing to serve in Putin's war in Ukraine. Some flee the country. Others go underground. Still others are imprisoned. Their refusal, like Jägerstätter's, is often misunderstood, dismissed as cowardice, or even branded treason. But they are standing in the long tradition of Gospel resistance: choosing nonviolent resistance over violence, even when no one else is watching. They deserve our solidarity and support.

These acts of love are not soft or sentimental, they are courageous, creative, faith filled, and sacrificial. It is the love that Franz Jägerstätter showed in solitary defiance of Hitler's regime. It is the love the Gospel demands of us now.

So, we must ask: Where is our treasure? Is it in social respectability? In political neutrality? In national identity? Or is it in the Gospel which calls us to love our enemies, put down our swords, and lay down our lives for the least among us?

Gordon Zahn, reflecting on Jägerstätter's life, writes, "Franz was not trying to start a movement. He simply could not do what he knew to be wrong." That clarity, that conviction, that simplicity-is precisely what the Gospel asks of us. Not heroism, but faithfulness.

The world does not need more passive believers. It needs disciples willing to treasure what Jesus treasured-and whose hearts are set where his heart was: with the suffering, the crucified, and the oppressed.

Franz Jägerstätter's life was solitary. It was a witness. May we not only admire him-but imitate him.

Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, pray for us. Amen