At Berlin, in the place called Plötzensee in Germany, Blessed James Gapp, priest of the Society of Mary and martyr, who with steadfast spirit proclaimed that the wicked tenets of the military regime, hostile to human and Christian dignity, in no way accorded with Christian doctrine. On this account, exposed to persecution, he betook himself into exile in France and Spain, but, seized by agents, was at last put to death by beheading.
Lifespan: 1897–1943
Beatified: 24 November 1996 by Pope John Paul II
Memoria liturgica: 13 August
“To shed blood for Christ and for the Church is for me the best and most sublime thing.”
Jakob Gapp was born into a large family in Wattens, Tyrol (Austria), on 26 July 1897. He attended the Franciscan gymnasium at Hall until he was called up for military service; after the war he entered the Marianists and was ordained a priest in April 1930 at the cathedral of Freiburg.
He began his ministry between Freistadt and Graz, quickly establishing himself as the priest who, beyond teaching and spiritual direction, went out to seek the poor rather than waiting for them to come to him. It is said that he would even go without lighting the stove in his own room, so as to have a little wood or coal to bring to the most destitute families.
His other defining characteristic, which did not go unnoticed, was his firm opposition to Nazism. He had studied and formed himself on the pastoral directives of the German and Austrian bishops and, in particular, on the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge of Pius XI, reaching the stark — and in some respects uncomfortable — conclusion that the Catholic faith is absolutely incompatible with National Socialist politics. If one adds to this the quality — sometimes mistaken for a fault — of speaking one’s mind without reserve, one can easily imagine the risks he was beginning to run.
In 1938 he was sent as assistant pastor to Breitenwang-Reutte in Tyrol, where his catechism classes in the schools immediately put his position at risk: he taught his pupils that one must love everyone, regardless of race or religion — which, from a Gospel standpoint, admits of no objection, but plainly clashed with the racial policy that was a cornerstone of Nazism.
He found himself on the blacklist, among those to be monitored by the Gestapo for the circulation of dangerous ideas. Suspended from teaching and subsequently transferred to another parish, he returned to his family in Wattens, but was soon forced to leave there as well, on account of a sermon deemed too forthright. “God is your God, not Adolf Hitler” was a refrain of his preaching.
Misunderstood and misjudged even among his fellow priests, Father Gapp began to pay with isolation and loneliness for his uncompromising opposition to Nazism, which many refused to share. After a brief stay in France he was sent to Spain, and all his movements were closely followed by the Gestapo, which by now regarded him as a formidable adversary — a kind of roving danger, made all the more threatening by his intelligence and cultural formation, which gave him considerable influence over those who listened to him.
With the feeling that all around him had been reduced to scorched earth, at the end of 1940 he requested a year’s exclaustration from the Holy See, which was promptly granted; but outside the Congregation he lasted little, and two months later he was already asking for readmission, while within him the perception of imminent martyrdom was becoming clear: “To shed blood for Christ and for the Church is for me the best and most sublime thing.”
For the Gestapo this was the psychologically opportune moment to lay a deadly trap. Two agents, posing as Jews who wished to convert to Catholicism, patiently managed to win his trust and accompany him to France, to Hendaye, where on 9 November 1942 he was arrested. The resources and effort expended to secure his arrest bore witness to how greatly that priest was feared.
Immediately transferred to Berlin and summarily tried, on 2 July 1943 he was sentenced to death “for high treason”; the sentence was carried out by decapitation on the evening of the following 13 August. His body was sent to the medical laboratory of the University of Berlin for the well-known Nazi experiments, and was not returned to his family, so as to forestall any possible posthumous honour.