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Biography

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Jakob Gapp was born on 26 July 1897 in Wattens, in the Tyrol, then part of Austria-Hungary, the seventh child of Martin Gapp and Antonia Wach. His father worked in a factory and the household was of modest means. After elementary schooling in Wattens he had to contribute to the family’s support. In 1915, during the First World War, he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army and served on the Italian front. He was wounded in 1916 and received decorations for bravery; by the end of the war he had been promoted to lieutenant. The experience of the war and its aftermath shaped his later insistence that Christian faith could not be reconciled with nationalist idolatry or racial ideology.

In 1920 he entered the novitiate of the Society of Mary (the Marianists) at Greisinghof in Upper Austria. He made first vows in 1921 and perpetual vows in 1925, studied theology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, and was ordained a priest on 5 April 1930. He then taught in Marianist schools in Austria, including Graz and Freistadt. Colleagues and pupils remembered him as a demanding but devoted teacher of religion who spoke plainly about social justice, the dignity of every person, and the incompatibility of National Socialist doctrine with the Gospel. After the Anschluss of March 1938 he refused the Hitler salute, would not take part in the Nazi-organized plebiscite in the manner expected of him, and continued to criticize the regime in class and from the pulpit.

His superiors, fearing for his life, sent him first to France and in 1939 to Spain, where he taught in Marianist houses in San Sebastián, in the Valencia area, and in Cádiz. Even in exile he remained outspoken against National Socialism. In 1942 Gestapo agents posing as Jewish refugees who wished to receive instruction in the Catholic faith lured him from Spain into German-occupied France. He was arrested near the border, taken to Berlin, and held in prison while the authorities prepared a case against him for undermining the German war effort and opposing the Nazi state.

A Nazi court condemned him to death. He was executed by guillotine at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin on 13 August 1943. Like many of those put to death at Plötzensee, his body was not returned to his family for burial. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 24 November 1996 in Saint Peter’s Square, together with the Austrian diocesan priest Otto Neururer. The Church keeps his feast on 13 August. Blessed Jakob Gapp is remembered as a Marianist religious and priest who chose fidelity to Christian teaching over accommodation with a totalitarian regime, and who accepted exile, imprisonment, and death rather than recant that witness.

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