Life (1891-1942)
Not all Jewish victims of the Hitlerian Holocaust were Jews in religion. Some were Jewish converts to Christianity, and in that sense martyrs of both the Old and the New Testaments. Edith Stein was a stellar example. Edith was born into a devout Jewish family of Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland). She was a warm and popular member of the Stein family. Her nephews and nieces still remember her fondly for her reading to them and telling them stories when on vacation.
Brilliant and promising from childhood on, Stein began the graduate study of philosophy at the University of Goettingen in 1913. Here she became the prize pupil of Professor Edmund Husseri, founder of the modern philosophy called “phenomenonology”. During World War I she interrupted her university studies to serve in a Red Cross hospital. After the war she returned to Goettingen and finished her doctoral studies. Her dissertation was an analysis of empathy. After earning her degree, Edith worked as a teacher, counselor, lecturer and writer, growing in prominence as a professional philosopher.
In an autobiographical memoir she wrote several years later, Life in a Jewish Family, Dr. Stein said that she had given up the practice of Judaism by the time she was 15. Her conversion to Catholicism was therefore that of an agnostic rather than a Jew. Her inclination to Catholicism was probably influenced in part by the conversion of Max Scheler, one of several leading phenomenonologists who became Catholics. But what first attracted her attention to Christianity was the inspiration of Frau Adolf Reinach, a devout Protestant woman. Her husband, Adolf Reisach, one of Edith’s university friends, was killed in action in1917. The courage with which his widow accepted the loss impressed Edith with “the cross and the divine strength which it imparts to those who carry it.” “It was the moment when my belief collapsed” she said, “and Christ shone forth; Christ in the mystery of the Cross.” Now she began to study the Catholic Christian faith. Her reading of the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila marked the turning point in her conversion. She was baptized January 1, 1922. Her family were naturally surprised, and her mother and grandmother deeply shocked. But Edith remained loyal to all her kinsfolk, and proud to “belong to Christ not only spiritually but according to the flesh.”
Although Edith now gave up her job as assistant to Professor Husseri, she continued her teaching, lecturing and writing. She undertook to reconcile the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas with the philosophy of phenomenology. In 1932 she was appointed lecturer at the Catholic Pedagogical Institute at Muenster, a state-funded position. Edith held that position for only one year because of ominous political developments. In 1933 the Nazi government issued an anti-Semitic ruling that no non-Aryan could teach in a school funded by the Reich. Actually, this repulsive law was not unwelcome to Dr. Stein in that it helped her to decide to become a Carmelite nun, a long-cherished wish. She entered the Cologne Carmel on October 14, 1933, taking the religious name Theresia Benedicta of the Cross. Her Carmelite superiors wisely decided to let her continue her scholarly studies and writing in the cloister.
For nine years Sister Stein continued her important literary and philosophical labors. In 1938, however, the Nazis began to bear down still more heavily upon religious Jews and people of Jewish ancestry. The Cologne Carmelites decided it would be safer for Sister Theresia to move to the Carmel at Echt, across the border in the Netherlands. So she went there on January 1, 1939. Her sister Rose, who had become a Catholic in 1936 but remained a laywoman, joined Edith at Echt a year later as a monastery guest. All went well until mid-1942. The Nazis occupied the Netherlands as early as 1940. They brought with them their mad scheme of ridding the world of Jews, but at first they raised no question about the 1,000 Dutch Catholics of Jewish background, ordering only the deportation of Jewish Netherlanders up to December 15, 1942. The Catholic bishops privately protested this measure of the occupying Germans. Failing to get action, they issued a pastoral letter read in all the churches on July 26,1942, denouncing the Nazi persecution of the Jews. The Nazis reacted quickly. On July 27, they ordered the immediate deportation of all Catholics of Jewish background. The reason? “Because the bishops interfered.” On August 4, Edith Stein and her sister were arrested at the Carmel of Echt and entrained to Auschwitz. When arrested, Edith said to Rose, “Come, let us go for our people.” Two weeks later Edith and Rose Stein were gassed to death at the infamous death camp. The Carmelite fulfilled her religious name: Theresia Benedicta of the Cross.
Pope John Paul II beatified Edith Stein as a martyr on May 1, 1987. Some have asked whether she is to be considered a Jewish martyr or a Christian martyr. Paradoxically, she could be considered both. But she could qualify equally as a person and as a saintly scholar. Her 17 volumes, when they have been translated into English, may identify her as a great intellectual. Sister Edith Stein would become even better known after her beatification. In the very year of her beatification a two-year-old girl in Brockton, Massachusetts, named Benedicta McCarthy after Professor Stein, accidentally ingested a lethal dose of Tylenol. Through the intercession of Blessed Theresia Benedicta, she was preserved from death. The Holy See approved the miracle in 1998. Pope John Paul II raised Edith Stein to the rank of “saint” on October 11, 1998. A saint for Catholics and a saint for Jesus.
--Father Robert F. McNamara
Scripture (Hosea 2L16b, 17b, 21-22)
(Year B). The work of salvation takes place in obscurity and stillness. In the heart's quiet dialogue with God the living building blocks out of which the kingdom of God grows are prepared, the chosen instruments for the construction forged. The mystical stream that flows through all centuries is no spurious tributary that has strayed from the prayer life of the church it is its deepest life. When this mystical stream breaks through traditional forms, it does so because the Spirit that blows where it will is living in it, this Spirit that has created all traditional forms and must ever create new ones. Without him there would be no liturgy and no church. Was not the soul of the royal psalmist a harp whose strings resounded under the gentle breath of the Holy Spirit? From the overflowing heart of the Virgin Mary blessed by God streamed the exultant hymn of the "Magnificat." When the angel's mysterious word became visible reality, the prophetic "Benedictus" hymn unsealed the lips of the old priest Zechariah, who had been struck dumb. Whatever arose from spirit-filled hearts found expression in words and melodies and continues to be communicated from mouth to mouth. The "Divine Office" is to see that it continues to resound from generation to generation. So the mystical stream forms the many- voiced, continually swelling hymn of praise to the triune God, the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Perfecter. Therefore, it is not a question of placing the inner prayer free of all traditional forms as "subjective" piety over against the liturgy as the "objective" prayer of the church. All authentic prayer is prayer of the church. Through every sincere prayer something happens in the church, and it is the church itself that is praying therein, for it is the Holy Spirit living in the church that intercedes for every individual soul "with sighs too deep for words." This is exactly what "authentic" prayer is, for "no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit." What could the prayer of the church be, if not great lovers giving themselves to God who is love!
The unbounded loving surrender to God and God's return gift, full and enduring union, this is the highest elevation of the heart attainable, the highest level of prayer. Souls who have attained it are truly the heart of the church, and in them lives Jesus' high priestly love. Hidden with Christ in God, they can do nothing but radiate to other hearts the divine love that fills them and so participate in the perfection of all into unity in God, which was and is Jesus' great desire….
For those blessed souls who have entered into the unity of life in God, everything is one: rest and activity, looking and acting, silence and speaking, listening and communicating, surrender in loving acceptance and an outpouring of love in grateful songs of praise. As long as we are still on the way and the farther away from the goal the more intensely we are still subject to temporal laws, and are instructed to actualize in ourselves, one after another and all the members complementing each other mutually, the divine life in all its fullness. We need hours for listening silently and allowing the Word of God to act on us until it moves us to bear fruit in an offering of praise and an offering of action. We need to have traditional forms and to participate in public and prescribed worship services so that our interior life will remain vital and on the right track, and so that it will find appropriate expression. There must be special places on earth for the solemn praise of God, places where this praise is formed into the greatest perfection of which humankind is capable. From such places it can ascend to heaven for the whole church and have an influence on the church's members; it can awaken the interior life in them and make them zealous for external unanimity. But it must be enlivened from within by this means: that here, too, room must be made for silent recollection. Otherwise, it will degenerate into a rigid and lifeless lip service. And protection from such dangers is provided by those homes for the interior life where souls stand before the face of God in solitude and silence in order to be quickening love in the heart of the church.
However, the way to the interior life as well as to the choirs of blessed spirits who sing the eternal Sanctus is Christ. His blood is the curtain through which we enter into the Holiest of Holies, the Divine Life. In baptism and in the sacrament of reconciliation, his blood cleanses us of our sins, opens our eyes to eternal light, our ears to hearing God's word. It opens our lips to sing his praise, to pray in expiation, in petition, in thanksgiving, all of which are but varying forms of adoration, i.e., of the creature's homage to the Almighty and All-benevolent One. In the sacrament of confirmation, Christ's blood marks and strengthens the soldiers of Christ so that they candidly profess their allegiance. However, above all, we are made members of the Body of Christ by virtue of the sacrament in which Christ himself is present. When we partake of the sacrifice and receive Holy Communion and are nourished by the flesh and blood of Jesus, we ourselves become his flesh and his blood. And only if and insofar as we are members of his Body, can his spirit quicken and govern us. "It is the Spirit that quickens, for the Spirit gives life to the members. But it only quickens members of its own body.... The Christian must fear nothing as much as being separated from the Body of Christ. For when separated from Christ's Body, the Christian is no longer his member, is no longer quickened by his Spirit...." However, we become members of the Body of Christ "not only through love..., but in all reality, through becoming one with his flesh: For this is effected through the food that he has given us in order to show us his longing for us. This is why he has submerged himself in us and allowed his body to take form in us. We, then, are one, just as the body is joined to the head....." As members of his Body, animated by his Spirit, we bring ourselves "through him, with him, and in him" as a sacrifice and join in the eternal hymn of thanksgiving. Therefore, after receiving the holy meal, the church permits us to say: "Satisfied by such great gifts, grant, we beseech you, Lord, that these gifts we have received be for our salvation and that we never cease praising you." (Before the Face of God)
Musical Selection (John Michael Talbot)