Okay, when I was looking for a saint for today, I almost passed on Blessed Franz here. The photograph that was used for him showed him in a German military uniform and—well, you can imagine how poorly that reflected on Franz. But it turns out that there’s a reason he is often shown wearing the uniform: he refused to fight for the German army in World War II, finding the arguments for war morally repugnant. A quote offered up at one site was informative of his views:
“It is very sad”, he wrote, “to hear again and again from Catholics that this war waged by Germany is perhaps not so unjust because it will wipe out Bolshevism…. But now a question: what are they fighting in this Country – Bolshevism or the Russian People?
“When our Catholic missionaries went to a pagan country to make them Christians, did they advance with machine guns and bombs in order to convert and improve them?… If adversaries wage war on another nation, they have usually invaded the country, not to improve people, or even perhaps to give them something but usually, to get something for themselves…. If we were merely fighting Bolshevism, these other things – minerals, oil wells or good farmland – would not be a factor.”
Not surprisingly, he’s been designated the patron of conscientious objectors. As a layman, married with children, he’s also atypical of many of the canonized saints.
The other fascinating thing is that his cause for the sainthood was advanced not under Pope Francis as one might have guessed, but under Pope Benedict, yet another case where the secular left-right distinctions often fall apart when looking at Catholicism and the clergy (during the lead up to the last conclave, I found myself frequently pointing out to people online that the college of cardinals who elected Benedict was nearly identical to the one that elected Francis. There’s a lot of human sin in the Catholic hierarchy, but I think there’s also some genuine desire to fulfill God’s will as well).
The drawing itself is decent, I think I’m getting better at working in the medium of crayons on graph paper.
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