When we think of Franciscan saints, it is above all the founding years of the Order in the 13th century that come to mind. Yet it is easy to forget that in every century there have been people who lived the Franciscan charism credibly and convincingly in their own time. The 20th century, too, had members of the Third Order whose lives can be an example to us and who have left an impulse that still speaks to our own time.
In what follows I have written four short biographies, by way of example, of people who belonged to the Third Order, that is, to the Secular Franciscan Order (OFS). Their work shows how important Franciscan spirituality still is today, and what powerful and creative impulses for life St Francis of Assisi still gives. These four stand for thousands of sisters and brothers of the Secular Franciscan Order on every continent who have tried, quietly and simply, to make the Franciscan ideals real in their lives.
- Franz Jägerstätter – conscientious objector in the Second World War
- Ellen Ammann – Franciscan ideals in the service of the Catholic women's movement
- Louis Massignon – bridge-builder in Christian–Muslim dialogue
- John XXIII – the Pope of the Second Vatican Council
Franz Jägerstätter – conscientious objector in the Second World War
Franz Jägerstätter was born on 20 May 1907 in St. Radegund in Upper Austria. Because he was born out of wedlock, he was at first called Franz Huber, until his mother married the farmer Heinrich Jägerstätter, who was a good stepfather to him and whose name he took. As a young man he worked as a miner, and when his stepfather died childless in 1930, he took over the farm. In 1933 he himself became the father of a daughter born out of wedlock. Although he did not marry the mother, he acknowledged that he was the father, provided for the girl and visited her regularly. In 1936 he married Franziska Schwaninger. The couple did without a wedding celebration and made a pilgrimage to Rome instead. Three daughters were born of the marriage: Maria, Aloisia and Rosalia.
After his wedding he engaged more and more deeply with the Christian faith, read the Bible and often went to Mass. In National Socialism, which was then growing ever stronger in Austria too, he recognised a world view profoundly opposed to the Christian faith. In the referendum on Austria's annexation to Germany (the Anschluss) he cast the only “no” vote in the whole village. His resistance to National Socialism showed itself at first in his withdrawing more and more from the public life of his community, refusing the favours the Nazi party offered and giving nothing to the party, although he was otherwise a very generous man.
In 1940 he was called up for basic training in the Wehrmacht. He obeyed the call-up, but during this time he came to see that fighting for the National Socialist state could not be reconciled with his Christian conscience. Together with a comrade he joined the Third Order. At first he was exempted from service because he was indispensable on his farm. During this time he said publicly that if he were called up, he would refuse military service. Everyone around him, even the bishop in person, tried to change his mind, but Franz Jägerstätter held fast to the decision of his conscience. Only his wife Franziska supported him in his stand.
When he received his call-up papers in February 1943, he reported for duty but declared that he refused to serve with a weapon. He was taken to the remand prison in Linz, where he learned for the first time that others too were refusing military service and offering resistance. On 4 May he was transferred to Berlin-Tegel; a military court sentenced him to death for “undermining military morale”, and he was executed on 9 August.
Franz Jägerstätter was a man of prophetic courage. At a time when the Catholic Church was still caught in a false understanding of obedience and urged its members to take an active part in a war of annihilation, he trusted in the non-violence and the self-sacrifice of the Gospel. Against a false loyalty to the state and the authorities he set the true loyalty to Jesus Christ. Although he received no support at all from the church hierarchy of his day, he held fast to the decision of his conscience, yet without criticising the Church. Finally, on 26 October 2007, Franz Jägerstätter was beatified in the Mariendom, Linz Cathedral. His feast day is 21 May, the day of his baptism.
Ellen Ammann – Franciscan ideals in the service of the Catholic women's movement
Ellen Ammann was born Ellen Sundström in Stockholm on 1 July 1870. Her father was a versatile man who worked as a teacher but was also active as an ornithologist and a political journalist. Her mother felt drawn to the Catholic Church and had converted before Ellen was born, without making it public. Ellen and her sister were baptised Protestant but brought up Catholic, and they attended the “Fransk Skola”, the French school in Stockholm run by religious sisters.
A year after she finished school, Ellen's father died. She got to know the Munich orthopaedist Dr Ottmar Ammann, who was lodging with the family while he trained in the famous Swedish remedial gymnastics. They married in 1890 and moved to Munich, where Ottmar Ammann ran a private orthopaedic clinic. Ellen Ammann looked after the business side of the clinic, and between 1892 and 1903 she became the mother of six children.
Despite her many duties as a mother, she not only deepened her spiritual life but also followed closely the problems in society connected with the “social question” and with the women's movement. In 1895 she joined the Marianischer Mädchenschutzverein (a Catholic society for the protection of girls), and in 1897, together with other women, she founded the Munich Bahnhofsmission, a railway station mission that cared especially for the many young women arriving from the countryside, who in their naivety were often intercepted at the station itself by professional gangs and traffickers.
As word spread of her vision and her gift for organisation, she was invited to Cologne in 1903 for the founding of the Katholischer Deutscher Frauenbund (Catholic German Women's League), the first nationwide organisation for Catholic women in Germany. A year later she founded its Bavarian branch in Munich. To give the work of the volunteer helpers a solid foundation, she initiated training courses for social and charitable work, which in 1916 led to their recognition as a two-year school.
But Ellen Ammann wanted to give social work not only an organisational and academic foundation but also roots in the Christian faith. So in 1914, together with some women friends, she began her novitiate in the Capuchin Third Order in Munich, which she completed in 1916 with her profession (her promise). Building on this, she encouraged the formation of a group of women who lived unmarried, though not in a convent. In 1919 this association was recognised by Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich as the “Vereinigung Katholischer Diakoninnen” (Association of Catholic Deaconesses – not to be understood here in the sense of an ordained ministry). Although she was herself married, she remained bound to this community as its leader until her death.
In that same year, 1919, a turbulent time of many revolutions and attempted coups, she became a member of the Bavarian state parliament for the Bayerische Volkspartei (Bavarian People's Party). Again and again she worked especially for women, families and people in need. In 1923 she played a leading part in putting down Hitler's putsch in Munich: the ministers loyal to the constitution met in her school for women and coordinated the resistance to the putsch from there.
Her work as a member of parliament and the community of Catholic deaconesses she had founded remained the centre of her work until her death. On 23 November 1932 she died of a stroke after a speech in parliament. In this last speech she had once again stood up for large families and warned of the dangers of National Socialism. At her own wish Ellen Ammann lay in state in the habit of the Capuchin tertiaries, and on 25 November 1932 she was buried, with a great many of the people of Munich, above all the poor, taking part.
Louis Massignon – bridge-builder in Christian–Muslim dialogue
Louis Massignon was born on 25 July 1883 in Nogent-sur-Marne, near Paris. His father was a sculptor and a freethinker, and so Louis Massignon, too, grew up far from the Church. After leaving school he began to study geography and became particularly interested in the French colonial territories in North Africa. This led him to learn Arabic.
In 1907 he set out on an archaeological expedition to the Middle East. After a stay in Cairo he travelled on to Baghdad, where he was deeply touched by the hospitality of the family that took him in. It was in Baghdad that the decisive and dramatic turning point of his life came. In the turmoil of the crumbling Ottoman Empire he was arrested as a spy after a camel ride through the desert, interrogated and threatened with death. He spent the night bound in prison, and a high fever brought him to the brink of death. In this situation a Muslim recited over him the sura of the Qur'an that in Islam is said for the dying. This set off a visionary experience of God in Louis Massignon. God came to him as a stranger entering as a guest, and as the judge of the life he had led until then. Some time later there followed a second vision, in which God revealed himself to him as the infinitely loving and healing God of Christianity.
Slowly Louis Massignon recovered from the crisis, and in the end he was released. All his life he remained grateful that Islam had given the impulse for his conversion. In France he became involved in dialogue with Islam (which at that time was purely academic, not theological). He made contact with Charles de Foucauld, who in Algeria was pursuing a mission of silent presence among Muslims. He wrote his major scholarly work on the Islamic mystic al-Hallaj, and in 1922 he became professor of Islamic studies in Paris. He built up a far-reaching network of contacts with Western and Islamic scholars and believers, and worked for mutual respect and understanding. One of his basic ideas, quite new for its time, was that God can speak to people and lead them to himself within Islam too. So the aim of meeting Muslims was not necessarily to bring them to convert to Christianity as quickly as possible. After initial mistrust, this idea gained more and more ground in the Church, and it helped decisively to shape the stance of the Second Vatican Council towards Muslims.
Again and again he turned to the person of St Francis, in whose visit to the Orient he saw an example for himself. (See: Francis of Assisi and Islam ) Finally, in 1931, he was received into the Third Order. He founded a community of prayer in which Christians were to pray on behalf of Muslims, so that the redeeming work of Jesus Christ might bear fruit for Muslims too. Towards the end of his life, with the permission of the Vatican, he transferred to the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, so that he could celebrate Mass in Arabic and so be closer to the culture to which he owed his conversion to Christianity. He died on 31 October 1962.
Louis Massignon has a lasting importance as a scholar in European Islamic studies. Above all, though, he matters as someone who professed his Christian faith fully and wholeheartedly, and yet met his Muslim partners in dialogue with respect, love and a deep reverence for their culture and their faith. On the Islamic side, too, Louis Massignon is still regarded today as a man with whom dialogue and friendship were possible. This is where we as members of the Secular Franciscan Order can take up his legacy, at a time that meets Muslims in general with mistrust and reduces Islam to its fundamentalist variant. Our time, too, needs bridge-builders: people who are ready to engage with what is other and foreign without losing their own identity in the process.
John XXIII – the Pope of the Second Vatican Council
The future Pope John XXIII was born Angelo Roncalli on 25 November 1881 in the small northern Italian village of Sotto il Monte. He was the fourth child and the first son of a large farming family. He never forgot where he came from or his family, and always thought of them with gratitude. His gifts and intelligence, as well as his interest in religion, were recognised early on, so that through the good offices of the local priest he received a scholarship to the bishop's grammar school in Bergamo. There he also studied theology, and on 10 August 1904 he was ordained a priest.
The young Roncalli spent his first years as a priest as private secretary to Radini-Tedeschi, Bishop of Bergamo. The bishop was liberal in his basic outlook and very open above all to the social problems that were then stirring Europe. Since the reigning Pope at the time, Pius X (who gave his name to today's traditionalist movement), was very conservative, Roncalli came to know early on the wide spectrum of opinion within the Catholic Church. During this time he was also received into the Third Order, the Secular Franciscan Order. Throughout his life this bond with Franciscan spirituality was important to him, and he often spoke of it.
After serving as a military chaplain in the First World War from 1915, he was moved to Rome in 1921, where he was put in charge of the papal missionary society for Italy. In 1925 he was then sent as papal envoy to Bulgaria, and from 1934 to Turkey. Neither post was dishonourable in name, but in reality both were without influence and far removed from any chance of helping to shape the life of the Church. Many people saw this, with good reason, as sidelining a man whose loyalty was beyond doubt, but whose openness of mind and natural liberality were viewed with suspicion in the Vatican of the day. As Pope, John XXIII once had his personnel file brought to him, which he had never been allowed to see before. In it he found the note: “Suspected of modernism.” Beneath it he added in his own hand: “I, Pope John XXIII, declare that I have never been a modernist.”
What marks this phase of his life, which after all took up the greater part of his career, is on the one hand the unshakeable loyalty and humility with which he fitted into the church hierarchy, and on the other the energy and creativity with which he filled his position, which did not necessarily meet with enthusiasm in Rome. He made contacts with the Orthodox churches and so came to know a new facet of Christian life. He strengthened the small Catholic communities for whose pastoral care he was responsible. In the Second World War he saved the lives of hundreds of Jews, yet as a matter of course he also visited the Italian occupying troops in Greece.
In December 1944 he was then moved to France as nuncio. There the Catholic Church was in a difficult position, because a large part of it had been close to the Vichy government, which collaborated with Hitler's regime. Roncalli was regarded as untainted and diplomatically skilful, so he was trusted to mediate and to clear up the situation. He himself commented: “When the horses can't go on, you take the donkeys.” Finally, having brought his mission to a fairly successful close, he was appointed Bishop of Venice in 1953. For the first time in his life he now had a position in which he could devote himself mainly to pastoral care – something he had longed for all his life.
In 1958 Pope Pius XII died. After his long pontificate the Church was in a state of inner unrest. The College of Cardinals was unusually small and ageing, so it was unclear who would become the next pope. In this situation Roncalli, already fairly old, was elected as a compromise candidate between conservatives and progressives. Because of his age, nobody expected any great decisions from him. But already in choosing the name John XXIII he made it clear that he meant to depart substantially from the line of his predecessors.
And soon after taking office he announced his plan for a great council that would interpret the teaching of the Church anew for the present day and proclaim it afresh. Even before the Council it became clear what great hopes Catholics all over the world, from lay people to bishops, placed in it. At the same time the cardinals of the Curia tried to organise everything so that no new and far-reaching decisions could be made. At the opening of the Council on 11 October 1962, John XXIII gave a great speech that set the Council's course and swept aside all conservative misgivings in favour of an open discussion turned towards the future. With some justification this speech can be called the most important event not only of his pontificate but of his whole life. It reflects all his optimism and his trust that the Holy Spirit guides the Church.
He said: “We, however, are of a completely different mind from all these prophets of doom. In the present course of human events, through which humanity seems to be entering a new order, one must far rather recognise a hidden plan of divine Providence. Through the passing of the ages, through the works of human beings and mostly beyond their expectations, it pursues its own goal. (…) The chief task of the Council is to guard the sacred heritage of Christian doctrine and to explain it by effective methods. But it is not our task merely to guard this precious treasure, as if we were concerned only with what is old; rather, we now want to set to work joyfully and fearlessly on what our age demands, and to continue along the path the Church has travelled for twenty centuries.”
John XXIII did not live to see the end of the Council. He died of cancer on 3 June 1963. But his impulses were taken up, and the Council was brought to its conclusion. It allowed the Catholic Church to arrive in the world of 20th-century thought; it made possible the growth of powerful new branches of the Church in Asia and Africa, and a leading role for the Church in the dialogue between religions that our time needs. Even though our problems are different from those of 50 years ago, there are two things we can learn from John XXIII: his unshakeable trust that God will lead the Church to a good end, and the openness with which he met the most diverse ways of thinking.