The pope in Austria:

...Following international criticism for having received President Kurt Waldheim at the Vatican in 1987, it was predictable that the pope's meeting and appearances with him in Austria- however much they were required by diplomatic protocol- would stir a new round of recriminations...

...This may have gone too far...

...the international Jewish community something approaching "monopoly rights" to the Holocaust, ignoring the near universality of the human beings who perished in its horror...

...But it seems to have been much more of a possibility than even the most optimistic of us thought...

...Perhaps it was too much to expect, but had the pope used the occasion of his recent visit to emphasize the choice that must sometimes be made between the demands of nation and the obligation to follow Christ's teachings and example, a valuable and, given the nature of the world we live in today, much needed lesson would have been taught and the whole Austrian venture justified as much more than a purely ceremonial display...

...THE POPE IN AUSTRIA TWO SWINGS, TWO MISSES Pope John Paul II is to be forgiven if, like some of his ever-carping critics, he decides it would be well to cut back on foreign travel and spend more time at the Vatican...

...It was left to the secular press, also, to report what may have been another unfortunate aspect of the ever-present Waldheim problem...

...It is interesting, and perhaps significant, that the NC News Service reports of the Austrian visit (at least as published in the two diocesan papers I have reviewed) made no mention at all of the Mauthausen stop and devoted only a sentence or two to the Vienna meeting...

...Then, as if to cap it all, he or his advisers were caught up, one assumes innocently, in an egregious affront to the memory of an authentic Austrian martyr of the Nazi period...

...At his death, he was correspondent for Dutch and Belgian Radio.' Mr...

...Inarticulate" he most certainly was not...

...The attempt to undo that presumably unintended offense may have added to it...

...Ten Kortenaar was Commonweal's correspondent from 1971 to 1978...

...The London Times (June 25), in a story datelined Mauthausen, tells of an almost frantic search to come up with an Austrian hero the pope could mention...

...These included letters written from prison and a most remarkable apologia prepared by Jaegerstaetter at the request of the prison chaplain...

...But he understood his duty differently...

...The jubilant throngs at the cathedrals of Vienna, Salzburg, and Innsbruck, a rousing success by any measure, must be judged in the context of charges of insensi-tivity to the darker aspects of Austria's National Socialist history...

...As one who has visited the camp and is still shaken by the memory of its infamous "stairway to death" and the garden of impressive memorials almost completely dominated by a great, black, twisted menorah, I find the failure to mention the Jewish victims almost incomprehensible...

...Historical records show the martyr to have been a poorly educated, inarticulate man...

...Since the pope was scheduled for a stop in Enns, the city in which was located the induction center where Jaegerstaetter's fateful refusal had been made, I and others hoped the pope might use the occasion to make some acknowledgment of the martyr's sacrifice...

...One wonders about the ease with which these reports of Jaegerstaetter reached the ears of the pope and his advisers and their failure to check them before permitting the injustice to occur...

...He leaves his wife, Angela, and two teen-aged daughters, Cristina and Sylvie...

...On grounds of moral sensitivity one might be more critical of meetings the pope has had with others (some of them American, some Israeli) who have shared more direct responsibility for the destruction of innocent human lives than this validly elected public official who has been accused (but not convicted) of peripheral and indirect involvement in war crimes...

...Fellow villagers, interviewed in person, remember Jaegerstaetter as always speaking his mind and fervent in his denunciation of Hitler and the Nazi movement...

...As papal visits become more promotional in nature, whatever spiritual purposes they are intended to serve are in danger of being diminished or even negated by concern-or, as in this case, perhaps, lack of adequate concern-for their public relations impact...

...The issue is too easily personified as "the Waldheim problem...

...A devout Catholic-daily communicant and sacristan of the village church-he was convinced that the Nazi regime was immoral and its war unjust...

...One can understand why the pope would have decided it was prudent not to go ahead with the plans to honor this martyr, but that does not make it any less an injustice that calls for papal redress...

...On the other hand-as the promoters of the tour undoubtedly would have pointed out-a "good show" might have been spoiled...

...I do not agree with those who condemn the formal diplomatic meetings, whether as host or as guest, with the president of what is perhaps the' 'most Catholic'' of European states...

...That was Jaegerstaetter's situation also...

...As readers of this journal probably know, I was privileged to be the accidental "discoverer" of Franz Jaegerstaetter, an Austrian peasant beheaded in Berlin in 1943 for refusing to serve in Hitler's army...

...of much greater concern is the pain this must cause the heroic widow who still lives and has borne already too great a measure of such pain for forty-five years...

...He was "poorly educated," his formal education having ended at approximately our fifth-grade level...

...Whatever validity "Holocaust theology" may enjoy in the context of Judaism (where, in fact, it has become a matter of heated debate), it is not an application to be made by the principal spokesperson for Christianity...

...It should not have been too hard for our Polish pope to understand how difficult it can be to separate a truly Christian commitment from political implications when living under an aggressively anti-Christian totalitarian regime...

...For him, there was "no alternative" but to be true to the commands of conscience...

...A year ago the Bishop of Linz organized a three-day commemoration of what would have been Jaegerstaetter's eightieth birthday...

...Meeting with representatives of Vienna's Jewish community, the pope's strongly worded and undoubtedly heartfelt acknowledgment of the Shoah, and his call for efforts to make certain it will never happen again, implied that this sacrifice of millions can be seen as part of divine redemption for all humankind...

...but to deny the place of priority it justly claims or, as in this case, omit all mention of it is an altogether different matter...

...According to this report, "The original idea was to beatify, or at least honor, a Christian conscientious objector, Franz Jaegerstaetter, during the pope's visit yesterday to Mauthausen...

...That this opposition was politically motivated is beyond question, but this "political" motivation was linked to Jaegerstaetter's conviction that Hitler was an enemy of the Catholic church and, given time, would seek to destroy her...

...That point has yet to be grasped by many Austrians...

...The results of his most recent visit to Austria are a case in point...

...And there was suspicion that he had acted politically and not solely out of Christian conviction...

...One may argue against the tendency of some to grant Desmond O'Grady writes from Rome: "Commonweal's former Rome correspondent, Henry Ten Kortenaar, was knocked down by a car and died without regaining consciousness on June 14 while crossing a street in Rome...

...At the very least the pope should initiate a thorough investigation of the facts of the case and, no less important, the sources of misinformation, and then make proper amends...

...but he had spent much of his free time reading the Bible, devotional pamphlets, and-several times-the pastor's copy of a book about martyrs and saints...

...Had anyone bothered to check, I could have assured them that every word attributed to the martyr in my book was taken from hand-written documents (in the old German script) in the possession of the widow and the village pastor...

...The Mauthausen stop, if intended, even in part, to neutralize the objections of meeting with Waldheim, actually aggravated an already difficult situation...

...After summarizing Jaegerstaetter's story, the article continued, "As late as February Bishop Florian Kunt-ner was convinced that Austria had found a truly appropriate war hero...

...GORDON C. ZAHN Gordon C. Zahn is the National Director of the Center on Conscience and War...

...For his pains, the bishop was roundly censured by veterans and their relatives for honoring a man who had "betrayed" and "abandoned" his fellow Austrians, thereby "demeaning" those who, like Waldheim, had done their "duty...

...May he rest in peace...

...Might it have been a question as to the wisdom of honoring a conscientious objector and thereby risking too direct a criticism of Waldheim who still insists that he did nothing more than his "duty" and that he had "no alternative...

...My wounded professional ego is a minor concern...

...John Paul's visit to Mauthausen, Austria's notorious concentration camp, might have tempered the criticism to some extent were it not for the fact that his failure to give specific mention to the large number of Jewish victims who perished there provided additional reason for his critics to take offense...

...Then, worried messages came from Rome: "Apparently some of the Austrian hero's words had been manufactured after his death...

...Unfortunately he did not...

...But there is more...

...This is a matter of special interest and importance for me personally and may be discounted by the reader for bias...

...As long as the Vatican preserves the fiction of temporal sovereignty, this must be expected...

...A new edition of his In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jaegerstaetter (Templegate) is available from the Center, 610 Rutherford, Charlestown, MA 02129...