The Last Slave Ships - Chapter 4 - A Finite and An Eternal Being

[JohnCraven]

August 9 is the 70th anniversary of one of the most heinous acts of World War II - an act which reverberates till this day - the execution of Sr. Theresa Benedicta a Cruce and her sister Rosa Stein at Auschwitz.

She was known as Edith Stein and was one of the most profound intellects of the 20th Century.

The ideology behind her murder I find remarkably identical to that behind many governments in the world today, including that of Barack Hussein Obama.

I think it is important to look back at this time 70 years ago and what led up to it.

Remember!

JohnCraven
New Orleans



“ Through prayer and fasting, one can stop wars, one can suspend the natural laws of nature.”
Message of July 21, 1982, from Our Lady to the six visionaries of Medjugorje.
[cited in Five Stones of Medjugorje, Live, Learn and Love Them by Mary Maddox, February 24, 2010
(http://blessedmotherguideus.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/five-stones-of-medjugorje-live-learn-and-love-them/)]


The Last Slave Ships *

By John Craven


Part II

A Mission to the Nation


Chapter 4: A Finite and An Eternal Being

A Problem of Empathy

Shangri-La was still somewhere over a lost horizon when Pope Pius XII addressed the world at Christmas in 1941. It was an address which did not please Hitler or his Nazi henchmen running the Third Reich. The New York Times and other newspapers which reported on the Pope’s Christmas Address of 1941, understood it at the time to be a clear condemnation of Nazi attacks on Europe’s Jews. On Christmas Day, 1941, The New York Times applauded the pope as a “lonely” voice of public protest against Hitler:

“The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas…In calling for a ‘real new order’ based on ‘liberty, justice, and love’…the Pope put himself squarely against Hitlerism. Recognizing that there is no road open to agreement between belligerents ‘ whose reciprocal war aims and programs seem to be irreconcilable,’ Pius XII left no doubt that the Nazi aims are also irreconcilable with his own conception of a Christian peace.” {1}

Two sisters, Sister Lucia Santos and Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, profoundly different in their upbringings and backgrounds, had listened to the pope’s Christmas address that year over the radio in their convents in Tuy, Spain, and Echt, The Netherlands. While listening to Vatican Radio was prohibited in Nazi Germany and Nazi -occupied Poland, Nazi-occupied Holland was still able to listen to Vatican Radio without prosecution. These two sisters, though seemingly worlds apart, were inextricably linked through a phenomenon which happened at Fatima, Portugal, almost a quarter of a century before where Sister Lucia beheld a vision from Our Lady, which Sister Teresa, once known as Edith Stein, and many others, would one day live.{2}{3}{4}{5}

In early 1938, Sister Lucia had seen the sign foretold by Our Lady at Fatima of the great war to come because mankind had failed to stop offending God, a war greater than World War I when many good people would be persecuted and martyred. Edith Stein also foresaw the coming war lurking in the evil behind the Nazis and Hitler very early on before most everyone else. So did Pius XII.{1}{2}{3}{4}{5}{6}

In truth, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, had helped formulate an unprecedented papal bull by Benedict XV against the growing tide of anti-semitism which had emerged in Europe at the outset of World War I when Eugenio Pacelli worked in the office of the Vatican’s Secretary of State.{4}

The papal bull, issued in 1916 by Benedict XV, was in response to the pleas of American Jews, such as Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee, to intervene to alleviate the persecution of Jews in war torn Europe where a growing number of people, including Hitler, blamed Jews for the war. The pleas of the American Jewish Committee were contained in a letter to Benedict XV dated December 30, 1915, and the pope’s response, issued through his Secretary of State, Cardinal Gasparri, came on February 9, 1916.{4}{7}

The Vatican over the centuries had issued a number of papal bulls regarding Jews, as Herman Bernstein, editor of The American Hebrew noted in response to Cardinal Gasparri’s letter, such as that of Gregory X granting papal protection to the Jews in 1272, but none, including that of Innocent IV, equaled Benedict XV’s “direct, unmistakable pleas for equality for the Jews, and against prejudice upon religious grounds,” as The New York Times reported, in an article on April 9, 1916, under the heading “Pope Urges Equality for Jews” which recognized the importance of Benedict XV’s response to the pleas of the American Jews.{7}{8}

Truth becomes flesh

In 1916, Edith Stein was one of the most brilliant students of Edmund Husserl and became his teaching assistant. Husserl’s new view of reality, phenomenology, where the world did not merely exist in a Kantian way as part of a subjective perception but existed in an objective reality fascinated Edith Stein who had fallen away from her Jewish faith and had become an atheist. “I consciously decided, of my own volition, to give up praying,” she once said.{3}{9}{10}{11}{12}{13}{14}{15}{16}

During the time that she was editing Husserl’s works, Edith Stein also published articles herself including a trilogy of phenomenological works – Psychic Causality, The Individual and Community, and The State – all of which challenged her atheism.{3}

In Psychic Causality she talks about a state of “resting in God” where the person surrenders himself and relinquishes all efforts of mind and will and how this receptivity is rewarded by new life – “spiritual rebirth” which frees him from all care.{3}

In The Individual and Community she investigated the nature of community and compared its structure to that of the person.{3}

In The State she continued her searchings into community probing into the nature of the state, its concepts of justice and even its relationship to values such as religion which was fueled by her interest in politics as a suffragette.{3}

Her atheism was further confronted by phenomenology’s ideal of objective clarity which made Revelation a viable object of scrutiny. To this end, Edith Stein studied the Greek philosophers and under Husserl’s influence she studied medieval scholasticism. And as part of a linguistics course she studied The Lord’s Prayer in Old Gothic and was very affected by it.{3}

Many who delved into the discipline of phenomenology which Husserl had developed were Jewish as was Husserl who converted to Lutheranism. Many phenomenologists were deeply spiritual people and often through delving into phenomenology it unwittingly led them to the Christian faith as it had Husserl and his colleague Adolph Reinach and Reinach’s wife, Anna, and Max Scheler. Another one would be Edith Stein, herself, who followed Husserl from Gottingen University to Frieberg in 1917 where she passed her doctorate summa *** laude on her thesis “The Problem of Empathy.”{3}

Edith Stein’s family and friends knew her to be wealthy in the faculty of empathy – of understanding other persons and relating to them. It was this gift of empathy and her pursuit of truth which led Edith to the beginnings of a real conversion.{3}

"The pursuit of truth was my only passion." This was not theory for her. She wanted a truth she could live and die for. Her philosophizing was not a sterile intellectual game but a search for a meaning in life.What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Why study, get married, have children, work? What is the rationale of all this?{3}

Edith was born on October 12, 1891, on the Jewish Feast of the Day of the Atonement in what was then Breslau, in Silesia, Germany, but would become Wroclaw, Poland. She was one of eleven children born to devout, hard-working Jewish parents. Her father died when she was very young leaving her mother to struggle in providing for her and her siblings. Edith was a strong-willed child and a brilliant student.{3}

At the outbreak of World War I, Edith interrupted her studies in 1915 to serve as a Red Cross aide at a hospital in Austria over the objections of her mother. While there she nursed soldiers infected with contagious diseases but when the hospital closed she returned to her studies and followed Husserl to his new assignment at the University of Freiburg where she became his first assistant after graduating summa *** laude on the basis of her doctoral dissertation entitled “On The Problem of Empathy.”{3}

Two encounters were to have a decisive impact on all her life’s orientation – the lectures she attended in Gottingen by Max Scheler, a recent convert to Catholicism, who introduced her to Catholic ideas about life, and the death of her friend and a colleague of Husserl, Adolf Reinach, in November 1917, who was killed in battle on the front in Flanders.{3}{9}

At Gottingen, Max Scheler’s lectures demonstrated to Edith with compelling genius that faith alone makes the human being human. Scheler argued that at the base of all moral activity one can only place humility because the sole meaning of life is to lead the person to lose himself in God and so open himself to the possibility of resurrection.{3}

"The barriers of rationalistic prejudice, something I grew up with, without being aware of it, fell and suddenly I was confronted with the world of faith. People I dealt with on a daily basis, people I looked up to in admiration, lived in that world," she would later write.{3}

During this period she went to Frankfurt Cathedral and saw a woman with a shopping basket going in to kneel for a brief prayer. "This was something totally new to me. In the synagogues and Protestant churches I had visited people simply went to the services. Here, however, I saw someone coming straight from the busy marketplace into this empty church, as if she was going to have an intimate conversation. It was something I never forgot."{9}{13}

Towards the end of her dissertation she wrote: "There have been people who believed that a sudden change had occurred within them and that this was a result of God's grace."{3}

Edith Stein had been good friends with Husserl's Göttingen assistant, Adolf Reinach, and his wife, Anna, and considered him a great lecturer and phenomenologist and revered him for possessing a “natural goodness”.{3}{11}{12}{13}

When Edith visited his widow to help arrange Adolph’s papers, she expected to find in Anna a shattered woman but instead she found in Anna a woman confident in the strength of the Cross: “it brings healing and life to all,” confessed Anna to Edith. Edith had been uneasy about meeting Adolph’s young widow but she was surprised to find in Anna a woman of faith.{3}{11}{12}{13}{16}

"This was my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power it imparts to those who bear it. It was the moment when my unbelief collapsed and Christ began to shine his light on me - Christ in the mystery of the Cross," Edith would later write.{3}{9}{11}{15}

Truth was becoming flesh in Edith. She considered her search for truth to be a prayer in and of itself.{3}{12}

In 1917, on the day following Edith’s twenty-sixth birthday and a month before Adolph’s death in battle and seemingly a world away, the last of Our Lady’s apparitions to three shepherd children occurred at the Cova da Iria, in Fatima, Portugal, concluding with the phenomenon of the miracle of the sun witnessed by 70,000 people.{2}{3}

It was during these apparitions that Our Lady told Lucia Santos and her cousins, Jacinta and Francisco Marto, that the present war would end but Out Lady warned them of a greater war to come if people do not stop offending God.. “The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated.” Our Lady told the young visionaries. Edith Stein lived to see much of the visionary prophecies of Fatima come to pass in her own life and so did Eugenio Pacelli.{2}{3}{4}{5}

Act and Potency

From 1917 to 1925, Eugenio Pacelli served as the papal nuncio in Bavaria where he witnessed firsthand the aftermath of World War II on the German people with its hunger and poverty and armed radical groups, revolution, and confusion – a time of madness.{4}{5}

From the outset, as papal nuncio, Eugenio Pacelli set a pattern of conduct which he followed throughout his entire priesthood. He helped the poor and suffering stocking the nuncio’s residence with food and clothing for the poor, especially the children. He opposed violence; he enunciated clear Christian principles; he attempted to settle differences with tyrannies of both the right and the left by patient negotiations; and he sought protection for the Church in her mission of spreading God’s word.{5}

He visited prisoners of war and engaged in endless discussions, even when crippled with the flu, and was attacked by revolutionaries who were members of the communist movement called Spartakus, which won control of Bavaria in 1919. These communist revolutionaries raked the nuncio’s residence with gun fire and insulted and threatened its occupants. Yet, after a frightening confrontation, Eugenio Pacelli, was able to persuade them to leave without any blood being shed.{5}

It was during this time that Adolph Hitler’s influence began to grow. In 1919, he wrote his first political manifesto, as a leader of the German Workers’ Party, in the form of a letter to a military officer in which he lists the “crimes” of the Jews and states that the German Workers’ Party’s final objective is the removal of all Jews from their midst. In 1921, Hitler was proclaimed leader of the National German Workers’ Party.{3}{5}

In the early 1920’s, the Nazis were just one of several violent fringe groups, but by 1923, they were able to gather more than 2000 armed fanatics and they attempted to seize control of Bavaria by force but were unsuccessful. However, their attempted coup in Bavaria gave them martyrs and attracted more desperate men to their ranks.{5}

While in prison for his unsuccessful putsch in Bavaria, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in which he presented his concept of the Aryan as the true image of God, the highest form of humanity and he presented the Jew as the exact opposite. Mein Kampf was published in 1925.{5}

In 1925, after Eugenio Pacelli read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the Nazis potential for violence was clear to Pacelli. And while their hatred of the Jews dominated their rhetoric, their hatred of the Church was not far behind and a few Nazis actually claimed that the long-term threat of the Church made the Church their most dangerous enemy.{5}

During this time, Eugenio Pacelli reported to Rome and told friends in diplomatic circles that a “new manifestation” of the anti-Christ had arisen, and he called Hitler “obsessed”, violent, ready “to walk over corpses” and destroy anything in his way.{5}

On March 28, 1928, in response to the concern of Pius XI and Pacelli, the Vatican’s Holy Office issued a decree condemning Nazi racial hatred of Jews:

“Moved by Christian charity, the Holy See is obligated to protect the Jewish people against unjust vexations and, just as it reprobates all rancor and conflicts between peoples, it particularly condemns unreservedly hatred against the people once chosen by God, the hatred that commonly goes by the name anti-Semitism.”{5}

Foreshadowing the darkness to befall Europe, a darkness foretold in the apparitions at Fatima, was the Cristeros war, half a world away in Mexico, driven by the same ruthless, Godless ideology and hatred which lay behind the Nazis and the Bolshevik communists. The Cristeros war claimed 90,000 dead from 1926 to 1929, including many priests, such as Fr. Miguel Pro, who were martyred by firing squads or by hanging from their church steeples by the order of the government of President Plutarcho Calles, who was an atheist and a freemason.{17}

“Vive El Cristo Rey!” – “Long Live Christ the King!” – was the rallying cry of the Cristeros.{17}

The Cristeros War came to an end through a brokered peace by the United States and the Vatican but the peace accord was quickly violated by the government of Plutarcho Calles, again foreshadowing any agreements which the Vatican would reach with the Nazis or the communists in Russia.{17}

In 1929, Eugenio Pacelli was appointed Papal Secretary of State.{5}

In 1930, the Vatican publication, L’Osservatore Romano, which speaks the mind of the Holy Father and the Church, ran a series of articles from the office of Cardinal Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli, which severely criticized Nazism. The October 11, 1930 article declared: “Belonging to the National Socialist Party of Hitler is irreconcilable with the Catholic Conscience.” These articles were reprinted in diocesan newspapers around the world, especially in Germany, where bishops and priests emphasized that what was written in these articles was official Church teaching. Additionally Pope Pius XI issued a decree stating that Anti-Semitism is not Christian.{4}{5}{18}

In the 1932 German elections Catholics overwhelmingly reject Hitler with less than fifteen percent of Catholics voting for him. But with strong support from other constituencies in Germany, this election makes the Nazis a major party and leads directly to Hitler assuming total power.{5}

On January 30, 1933, Hitler became Chancellor and Germany was irrevocably changed.{5}

The Woman

It was during these years, following the end of World War I, that Edith Stein’s spiritual conversion blossomed through her gift of empathy and in her pursuit of truth.

In the autumn of 1918, Edith Stein gave up her job as Husserl’s teaching assistant so she could work independently. She had wanted to obtain a professorship but it was impossible for a woman at that time but she was also refused a professorship on account of her Jewishness.{3}{9}{10}{11}{12}{13}{14}{15}{16}

Edith Stein went back to Breslau where she began writing articles on the philosophical foundation of psychology. She also read the New Testament, Kierkegaard and Ignatius Loyola’s spiritual exercises.{9}{11}

In the summer of 1921, she spent several weeks in Bergzabern on the country estate of Hedwig Conrad-Martius who had been another of Husserl’s pupils. Hedwig had converted to Protestantism with her husband. One evening, Edith picked up an autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila and read the whole book in one night. When she finished the book, she said to herself: “This is truth.”{3}{19}

Afterwards Edith went directly to buy a catechism and a missal. In Theresa of Avila, truth coincides with love and this was the key which Edith was looking for.{3}{13}

On January 1, 1922, Edith Stein was baptized on the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus, when Jesus entered into the covenant of Abraham. She was baptized at St. Martin’s Church in Bergzabern and took Theresa as her baptismal name. Hedwig, though Protestant, served as her sponsor and godmother. Hedwig recalled that the thirty year old Edith had “the happiness of a child and this was most beautiful.”{3}{9}

“I had given up practicing my Jewish religion when I was a fourteen year old girl and did not begin to feel Jewish again until I had returned to God,” remarked Edith later on.{9}

Edith had thought of her baptism as preparation for religious life in a convent. Everything or nothing. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to give her mother such a double blow and it was months before she found the courage to tell her mother of her conversion to Catholicism. Her mother’s reaction was heartbreaking. Her mother started weeping which is something that none in the family had ever seen Frau Stein do, even at the death of her husband. A member of the family remarked. “We simply could not conceive how our Edith’s lofty spirit could demean itself to this superstitious sect!”{12}{13}

Her spiritual director, Canon Schwind of the Cathedral of Speyer, however, remarked “This lady-philosopher! Ten theologians couldn’t answer all the questions she asks me!” He suggested to Edith a time for her to mature in her faith. In response, Edith assumed a quiet teaching post at the oldest Dominican convent in Germany, St. Magdalena in Speyer.{12}

Here, at St. Magdalena, she taught German to high school girls, novices and nuns who were preparing to teach. One of her students later testified, “The most fundamental trait of her character was surely a warm love that could penetrate into another’s mind, suffering with him, and helping him as only a Christ-centered saint is able to do.” Another student remarked, “to be honest, she gave us everything. With her, you sensed that you were in the presence of something pure, sublime, noble – something that elevated you.”{9}

Here, at St. Magdalena, she delved into the principles of the Catholic faith and at the suggestion of the Jesuit priest Erich Prziwara she began translating two of Catholicism’s most eminent theologians, Cardinal Newman and St. Thomas Aquinas. She worked very hard at translating the letters and diaries of Cardinal Newman from his pre-Catholic period. Her translation of Aquinas’ Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate included a brilliant phenomenological commentary on Thomistic metaphysics which proved to be a breakthrough in Catholic intellectual circles in Germany. And she published a comparative study of Husserl’s phenomenology and the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas for Husserl’s Seventieth birthday.{9}{12}{13}

Here, Edith learned that it was possible to “pursue scholarship as a service to God – It was not until I had understood this that I seriously began to approach academic work again.”{9}

During these years at St. Magdalena, she worked on her own work Act and Potency which was the seed of her great philosophical work Finite and Eternal Being. Her exposure to the great minds of Catholicism freed Edith immensely for they had opened vistas she had not imagined before and stimulated her to venture further. Even prayer life became more real for Edith as she would later write: “No human eye can see what God does in the soul during hours of inner prayer. It is grace upon grace. And all of life’s other hours are our thanks for them.” She called God “The Master Educator.”{3}{12}

During this time Edith started frequenting the Benedictine Abbey of Bueron to gain strength for her life and work and to celebrate the great festivals of the Church year. It was here at the abbey where she met a young abbot, Dom Raphael Walzer who became her spiritual director following the sudden death of Canon Schwind. Here, at the abbey, she enjoyed sitting in the front of the church because this allowed her to participate better. Her Jewish background helped her to understand the sacraments better. Jesus was a Jew. The Eucharist was born during the Passover Seder. “The prayer of the Church is the prayer of the ever-living Christ. Its prototype is Christ’s prayer during his human life.”{12}

In 1930, Edith met her old mentor, Husserl, again and shared with him about her faith. She would have liked him to become a Christian too. She had heard he had fallen away from the faith in God. Then she wrote down an amazingly prophetic passage: ‘Every time I feel my powerlessness and inability to influence people directly, I become more keenly aware of the necessity of my own holocaust.”{9}

Edith’s seven years in Speyer prepared Edith for her next role as a public speaker. Her great intellect as revealed in her studies on Thomas Aquinas and her writings on phenomenology and her analyses of woman’s being and proper vocation began attracting attention and she started receiving invitations lecture, first in Germany, then in Switzerland, and, then, Austria. During this time she developed her vision of the significance of women in today’s society which was grounded in faith. She stressed the unique role which a woman can live specifically because of her femininity as revealed in Christianity. Edith was a small, thin person who spoke simply in a low voice and held huge audiences spellbound.{12}

One of Edith Stein’s most profound insights into the nature of woman came with regard to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Edith considered Mary, by virtue of her fiat, her yes, to the message of an angel sent by God, to be the Co-Redemptrix with Christ. (3){16}

Edith Stein was so much in demand as a speaker that she left her teaching duties at St. Magdalena in Speyer in 1931, and moved back to Breslau where she continued to work on Act and Potency. She attempted to secure a teaching post at the University of Freiburg and though her former fellow student and colleague, Martin Heidegger, held the chair there in phenomenology, he treated her with considerable ill-will which wasn’t surprising since he was a strong supporter of the Nazis.{3}{9}

In 1932, Edith Stein received an important post at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Munster. Here she successfully combined scholarship and faith in her work and her teaching, seeking to be a “tool of the Lord” in everything she taught. “If anyone comes to me, I want to lead them to Him.”{3}{9}

On September 12th of 1932, she participated in a conference held in Juvisy, France by the Thomistic Society. She was the only woman invited and made a considerable impact on the learned company present at the conference which included Jacques Maritain, Daniel Feuling, who gave the paper for the conference, Koyre, Gilson, and Berdiaev.{3}

Professor Rosenmolh later wrote afterwards:

“The discussion was dominated entirely by Edith Stein. Certainly she had the best understanding of Husserl, having been for years his assistant in Freiberg, but she developed her thoughts with such clarity, in French when necessary, that she made an extraordinarily strong impression on the learned company of scholars.”{3}

By 1932, Edith Stein was recognized as the intellectual leader of Catholic feminism in Europe. She delivered lectures constantly, receiving invitations to lecture in Berlin, Essen, Heidelberg, Ludwigshafen, Rhinland, Zurich, Vienna, and Salzberg. Her lectures were later published as Die Frau – The Woman. She became the voice of the League of Catholic Women and the Association of Catholic Women Teachers, speaking at their conventions, acting as their advisor in plans of reform and in discussions with government officials, and advocated that Catholic thought must meet the challenging questions of the time.{3}{12}

At the same time, however, as she expressed in a letter to a religious in Speyer, Edith Stein was experiencing increasing difficulty with living in the secular world. The innermost part of her being had become her world as she would later explain in Finite and Eternal Being: “…those who live the interior life have always experienced being drawn into their innermost parts by that which draws more strongly than the total exterior world: the invasion of a new, forceful, higher life—the supernatural, divine life.” Edith was suffering because she had a vocation as a contemplative.{3}

On January 30, 1933, Adolph Hitler became Reich Chancellor of Germany and Edith’s Jewish presence at German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Munster had become an embarrassment. Her Jewish identity had been disclosed when she refused to vote for Hitler at a fixed plebiscite. Her last lecture at the German Institute was on February 25, although she stayed on there through the summer of 1933.{3}{11}

The Aryan Law of the Nazis made it impossible for her to teach. “If I can’t go on here, then there are no longer any opportunities for me in Germany. I had become a stranger in the world”. She would later write of these last days in Munster: “…now on a sudden it was luminously clear to me that once again God’s hand lay heavily on His people, and that the destiny of this people was my own.”{9}

Along with the Nazi takeover came a large-scale offensive against the Jews. On April 1, 1933, an anti-Jewish boycott was put into effect across Germany. Thousands were forced to leave their jobs and businesses without warning. Unsuspecting citizens were violently attacked. Hitler used his rearmament program, his reduction of unemployment and his appeal to national pride blinded large segments of the population who looked to the Fuhrer to lead them to a better future. But those with more foresight saw in Hitler’s carefully formatted anti-Semitism, the prelude to an all-out battle against Christianity and every other form of spiritual autonomy. {13}

Edith foresaw clearly the danger which awaited both Jews and Christians and felt called to take action on behalf of her people. She tried to obtain a private audience with Pope Pius XI to urge that he write an encyclical on behalf of the Jews. When this failed, she wrote a letter to the pope which was personally delivered by her spiritual advisor, Abbot Raphael Walzer, the abbot of the Benedictine Abbey at Beuron. In this letter, she warned the pope that what was happening to the Jews would then happen to the Catholics. She knew then full well the reality of the coming evil. When Pope Pius XI responded to Edith’s letter with a benediction for herself and her family, Edith realized that most people, including Abbot Walzer, could not grasp the urgency of the threat as she did.{3}{13}{14}

Edith Stein was one of the few who recognized the final outcome right from the beginning and she sought to come to terms with her people’s tragic destiny by turning to the Cross. Her friend Sister Adelgundis recalled an incident in Freiburg, when, “after looking at the crucifix on the wall and asking me to look at it with her, she made a comparison -- I no longer remember the exact words – between the divine sacrifice of the Cross and the terrible path of suffering awaiting the Jewish people.” Anti-semitic persecution was pushing Edith Stein closer to the realization of her unique vocation, the merging of Judaism and Christianity into a single redemptive unity.{13}

While Edith was correct in believing that most people didn’t realize the urgency of the threat from the Nazis and Hitler, the Church hierarchy clearly knew what kind of evil they were dealing with in Hitler and the Nazis. Under intense pressure from Hitler, including terrorizing members of the Catholic Center Party, Eugenio Pacelli agreed to negotiate a legal agreement – a concordat – between Germany and the Holy See, which was nothing but a clever propaganda stunt by Hitler. Simply by asking the Church to negotiate, Hitler makes himself look good.{4}{5}

Eugenio Pacelli did not trust Hitler, but wanted a legal basis on which to protest. Without a concordat there would be no legal grounds on which to appeal Nazi encroachments on the Church’s freedom. The concordat defined the Church’s rights within the greater rights of the State and seemed wise at the time despite the Church’s misgivings. Cardinal Fulhaber of Munich commented later: “With the concordat we are hanged, without the concordat we are hanged, drawn and quartered.”{5}

Later, back in Rome, Eugenio Pacelli told the British ambassador: “I had to choose between an agreement and the virtual elimination of the Catholic Church in the Reich.” And he said a pistol had been held to his head, and that he felt he was negotiating “with the devil himself.”{5}

Eugenio Pacelli began making numerous formal protests against the extreme anti-Semitism of Nazism. While Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli oversaw the dispatch of sixty notes in which the Vatican protested to Hitler against the persecution of Jews.{5}

Violations of the Concordat began almost immediately after its signing in 1933, and by 1934, the attempt to bring about the “virtual elimination of the Catholic Church” was clearly underway. Dr. Erich Klausener, leader of German Catholic Action was murdered in the wild June 30, 1934 Nazi purge within and outside of the party. The harassment, arrest, and imprisonment of priests and active Catholics increased. The Nazis closed some 200 Catholic publications, took over Church schools, and coerced the young into young into joining the “Hitler Youth.”{5}

In 1935, in Lourdes, France, at a Eucharistic Triduum, Cardinal Pacelli told an estimated 325,000 pilgrims, including many Germans, that “the Church will never come to terms with Nazis as long as they persist in their racial philosophy” and he scorned Nazi theories of “race and blood” as superstitious and “contrary to the Christian faith.” With such a philosophy, Cardinal Pacelli declared “the Church does not consent to form a pact at any price.”{1}{5}

The Nazis, stated Cardinal Pacelli to the massive audience at Lourdes, “are in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false concept of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult.”{1}{4}

In Germany, Hermann Goering gave the rationale for crushing the Church: “Catholic believers carry away but one impression from attendance at divine services and that is that the Catholic Church rejects the institutions of the Nationalist State..”{5}

In Rome, Cardinal Pacelli told the French Ambassador that Hitler is “diabolical.”{5}

In a meeting with the heroic anti-Nazi Dietrich von Hildebrand, Pius XII declared, “There can be no possible reconciliation” between Christianity and Nazi racism; they were like “fire and water.”{4}

Blessed of the Cross

At Easter in 1933, Edith Stein traveled to Beuron to consult with Abbot Walzer but she interrupted her journey to attend a Holy Hour at the Carmelite convent in Cologne. During the service, her attention wandered from the homilist’s words, later saying:

“I spoke with the Savior to tell him that I realized it was his Cross that was now being laid upon the Jewish people, that the few who understand this had the responsibility of carrying it in the name of all, and that I myself was willing to do this, if he would only show me how. I left the service with the inner conviction that I had been heard, but uncertain as ever as to what carrying the Cross would mean for me.”{3}{13}

Edith described evil as a living power and perverted being. She called Hitler "the Anti-Christ" and offered herself up for his downfall. She declared his ideology to be of Satan. But Edith was keenly concerned with the workings of evil in the person.{3}{10}

There is an exquisite passage in her 1932 essay, "The Natural and Supernatural in Faust". It reads:

The battle wages over the human soul; heaven and hell wrestle for it. If we could see this soul in its loneliness and need, conscious of its way only in dark distress, its way shrouded in foggy night, if we could witness its struggles, its fallings and recoveries, we would be engulfed by a trusting certainty that the soul is signified in the hand of God, that its way and end lie clear as day before the gaze of the Almighty, and that He has commanded His angels to lead it from error to light.{10}

Edith would later write in Finite and Eternal Being:

Until the end of time when God intervenes, Adam's sin continues in the war of flesh versus spirit, the darkness of the human intellect, the laziness of the will, and the evil inclination of the heart. Satan disavowed the difference between himself and God in a disobedient denial of truth. He rebels not only against God but against his own being, for in saying "no" to God, he destroys the harmony of his own being: love, joy, willing service. This denial of being simultaneously becomes hatred — of self, of all others, and of God. Thus evil is a being contrary to its own nature and direction, a perverted being . . . And for the person vacillating between good and evil there is the possibility of conversion, of cooperation with God's call to justification and grace. God can see the repentant sinner in Christ and accept Christ's expiation for the sins. For Christ is the only proxy for all sin before God; through His merit, the sinner attains contrition and grace. . This is God's compassion for the sinner, that He justifies the sinner through redemption workedby Christ. The mystery of the cross makes possible a restoration of the original order of grace as the "highest good." And the fullness of humanity leads to God's ultimate goodness — eternal life.{10}

Why did Edith not flee the country?

Edith was proud of her Jewish heritage and she was a patriotic German. She could not fathom all this racial hatred even though she was cognizant all the time of its slow cancerous growth. She understood that God was calling her for a mission. "There is a vocation for suffering with Christ and by that means for involvement in his work of salvation. Christ continues to live and to suffer in his members. The suffering gone through in union with the Lord is his suffering, and is a fruitful part of the great plan of salvation". She slowly began to realize that her long journey towards Christ was meant for this possibility to join Christ in His redemptive action. "You don't know what it means," she told her confessor, "what it means to me to be a daughter of the chosen people - to belong to Christ, not only spiritually, but according to the flesh." {12}{13}


That past November, she had thought about going to London to work. Then, following her return to Munster from her journey to consult with Abbot Walzer in Beuron after losing her position at The German Institute, an offer to teach in South America awaited Edith. She gave the offer serious consideration because she would have been with her brother Arno but she became convinced that the time had at last come for fulfilling her ambition of entering the convent. She described her decision in her diary:

“…On April 30, I attended part of the Thirteen Hours devotion which St. Ludger’s parish was celebrating in honor of its patronal feast. I arrived in the afternoon, determined not to leave until I found out if I could now enter Carmel. Just as the concluding blessing was being given, I felt the Good Shepherd giving me his consent.”{3}{11}{13}

"I said to the Lord as the words 'Jesus is in agony until the end of the world' kept repeating themselves in my mind, that it was His cross that was now being laid on the Jewish people. Most of the people did not understand this, but those who did had to bear it willingly in the name of all others. I wanted to do that..."{12}

Edith could have fled the country to save herself, Instead she chose the cross.{3}

It was here and then that she made her great decision to enter Carmel. It was her belief that the Carmelite order excels in a free and joyous participation in Christ’s redemptive action. And it was the intention of her innermost being to offer up her prayer and life in reparation for both Jew and Nazi, for the persecutor as well as the persecuted.{3}

“Saints who are determined to confidently maintain a courageous love for their enemies have experienced that they have the freedom to so love,” she postulated, “their behavior is led by supernatural love.” {3}

Her intention to pray for the Nazis was in keeping with St. John of the Cross who wrote: “God sustains and is present substantially in every soul, even that of the worst sinner.”{3}

At Pentecost, several weeks later, she wrote to her Godmother, Hedwig Conrad-Martius:

“There’s nothing to regret about the fact that I can’t continue to lecture. To me a great and merciful Providence seems to be standing behind it all. Actually, I think I see the resolution fairly clearly myself, but I’m still not free to communicate it to you.”{3}

The Arch-Abbott of Beuron, Walzer, now no longer stopped her from entering a Carmelite convent. While in Speyer, she had already taken a vow of poverty, chastity and obedience. In 1933 she met with the prioress of the Carmelite Convent in Cologne. “Human activities cannot help us, but only the suffering of Christ. It is my desire to share in it.” she told the prioress. {3}{9}{13}{14}{16}

Edith had applied to the Carmelite convent in Cologne. Though she worried that she might be considered too old – she was forty-two – the sisters were impressed with her, and in mid-June they notified her of her acceptance. Hard as it was for her to leave Munster and her friends, it was the confrontation with her family that Edith Stein dreaded.{3}

The day came when Frau Stein asked her daughter, “What do you plan on doing with the sisters in Cologne?”{13}

When Edith answered, “Join them,” peace at home was a thing of the past. Everyone in the family felt crushed. For them it was a tragedy. Edith herself clung to her friends to keep from faltering in her desperation. Her brothers and sisters did all they could to change her mind.{13}

“Why did you have to get to know Him?” demanded Frau Stein. “He was a good man – I’m not saying anything against Him. But why did he have to go and make himself God?”{13}

Edith’s niece, Susan, was twelve years old at the time and had heard much talk. She saw her grandmother suffering over the certainty of never seeing Edith again. Her grandmother was eighty-four years old and no longer traveled, and Edith was to be fully cloistered.{3}{12}

Edith later wrote about her encounter with Susan: “ ’Why are you doing this now?’ she asked – I gave her my reasons as I would an adult. She listened thoughtfully and understood.”{3}{12}

However, Susan later described her encounter with her Aunt Edith differently:

“It was characteristic of my aunt that she did not ridicule my words or answer me condescendingly. She was serious and attentive; she said she did not consider her step as a betrayal; she was leaving no one in the lurch. Her entrance into Carmel did not guarantee her any safety and would not eliminate the actual world outside. She would always be a part of her family and always remain part of the Jewish people, even as a nun.”{3}

But Susan added, “A cleft existed between her and her family which could not be reconciled although, on the other hand, we could not stop loving her.”{3}

Her last day at home was her birthday, October 12, and it was another Jewish holiday again, this time the Feast of Booths. Edith spent it with her mother in the synagogue.{13}

“In the evening,” she later wrote, “some friends dropped by to say farewell. Once they had left my mother buried her face in her hands and began to cry. I stood behind her chair, resting her old, white-haired head against my chest. We stayed like that for a long time, until I was able to convince her to go up to bed. After taking her upstairs and helping her to undress for the first time in my life – I sat alongside her at the edge of the bed until she sent me off to sleep. But I don’t think either one of us got any sleep that night.”{13}

Edith left the next day on a train to Cologne. “I did not feel any passionate joy. What I had just experienced was too terrible. But I felt a profound peace – in the safe haven of God’s will.” She wrote to her mother every week but never received a reply. Instead, her sister Rosa sent her news from Breslau.{9}

Edith joined the Mary Queen of Peace Carmel in Cologne on October 14, 1933, the eve of the feast day of its founder, St. Theresa of Avila. Her investiture took place on April 15, 1934, and Edith Stein was now known as Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce – Teresa, Blessed of the Cross. Frau Stein did not attend Edith’s clothing with the habit because she considered it to be the ultimate break between her daughter and the Jewish people and for years afterwards she refused to answer any of Edith’s weekly letters from Carmel.{3}{9} {13}

Abbot Walzer was surprised at the speed with which Edith Stein settled into her new environment. His fear had been that, once in Carmel, she would grow restive within the confines of the enclosure, surrounded by sisters of limited academic background. Fortunately events did not bear him out. Edith Stein neither worried about the austerities and restrictions of Carmelite life, nor looked for permission to do scholarly work. Her vocation to Carmel was genuine; no hidden motive obscured the purity of her intention. When she arrived at the convent, it was with full understanding that the whole of the Carmelite vocation consisted in the individual's response to God's claim of love. She had learned this studying the life of Thérèse of Lisieux, whom she spoke of in a letter of 1933:

"My impression was, that this was a life which had been absolutely transformed by the love of God, down to the last detail. I simply can't imagine anything greater. I would like to see this attitude incorporated as much a possible into my own life and the lives of those who are dear to me."{13}

Edith Stein did not consider her official incorporation into convent life as an excuse to become oblivious or unsympathetic to the needs of her neighbor. She worked at maintaining her correspondence with the friends and associates who depended on her advice.{13}

As the political situation worsened, Edith Stein's Jewish friends began visiting the convent to discuss their plans for emigration. Invariably, they left the parlor strengthened and consoled. For Edith Stein, there was no contradiction between the demands of a life of prayer and the call to fraternal charity.{13}

While generously sharing the blessing of her contemplative vocation, Edith Stein was fully aware of the insecurity of her own position. Her political insight led her to expect the worst: As she told one visitor, it was more than likely that the Nazis would come and take her from the enclosure.{13}

During the novitiate year, Edith Stein gradually turned to writing, in accord with her Provincial's wishes. She completed Life in a Jewish Family which she had begun in Breslau in the painful months before she entered Carmel for the dual purpose of honoring her mother and to present the true nature of Jewish humanity to the young Nazis being taught to hate Jews by way of false stereotypes. She also completed the index for her translation of St. Thomas and contributed to a number of periodicals. She received a commission from her superiors to finish the manuscript of Act and Potency which needed full-scale revision.{13}

On April 21, 1935, she took her temporary vows.

Occasionally, Frau Stein wrote to Edith, even addressing one letter to “Sister Teresa” and on one occasion, without saying a word to anyone, according to Edith’s sister, Rose, Frau Stein visited the new Carmel in Breslau, but Frau Stein was despondent and unreconciled to her daughter’s decision. Frau Stein’s health continued to deteriorate.{11}{13}

Edith completed her study in the summer of 1936 and while waiting for an answer from the publishers on her revised manuscript of Act and Potency which she had re-titled Finite and Eternal Being she received the news of her mother’s death on September 14, 1936.. The news coincided with the renewal of her vows. “My mother held on to her faith to the last moment. But as her faith and her firm trust in God were the last thing that was still alive in the throes of her death, I am confidant,” Sr. Teresa later wrote, “that she will have met a very merciful judge and that she is now my most faithful helper, so that I can reach the goal as well.” The following winter Edith had the joy of seeing her sister Rosa enter the Catholic Church which Edith was able to witness because of a fall down a flight of steps which had left Edith with a broken wrist and ankle and forced her to be hospitalized outside of the enclosure.{13}

Edith was most unhandy at housework, holding a broom in front of her and just pushing it as she walked up and down a room, causing the other nuns to burst into laughter every time they saw her with a broom which didn’t embarrass Edith at all. Her sewing was so inadequate that the prioress would have another of the nuns correct the scapulars that Edith had sewn together when Edith wasn’t looking.{3}

Yet, the stories Edith told and her humor enchanted the nuns, and, above all they were struck by her humility, her modesty. The sisters were enchanted with her capacity to incite laughter in herself and others – “I have never laughed so much during my whole life,” she once said, “as I have these two years as a novice.” She never referred to her importance in the outside world. Her love and goodness were natural. She intuitively felt the state of mind of others and knew what they needed and how to encourage it. She had a need to help other people. {3}

Edith showed signs that she was still artistically inclined by writing poetry and creating plays for the nuns’ entertainment and still having a great love of music and copies of paintings on cards of artists she loved, such as Rembrandt. Edith was always enchanting with her childlike laughter and happiness.{3}

In 1936, the cruel and oppressive anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws were passed in Germany and Vatican Radio, in repeated broadcasts condemned the injustice and inhumanity of these new laws. During this time, Edith Stein received word from the publisher that her work Finite and Eternal Being could not be published under her own name because she had been born a Jew and under the Nuremberg Laws she had lost all her rights.{3}{5}

In 1937, Cardinal Pacelli drafted the encyclical Mit Brenneder Sorge, which Pope Pius XI issued in March. The encyclical, written in German, was a fulfillment of Edith Stein’s petition to the Vatican for such an encyclical which she made to Pius XI in 1933. The encyclical was prepared with great input from Bishop Clemens August, Count von Galen, who was known as the “lion of Munster” for his fearless homilies against the evils of Nazism. Mit Brenneder Sorge, in diplomatic but in no uncertain terms, condemned Nazi racism and worship of the state and infuriated the Nazis who responded with more persecution of Catholics. Pius XI followed this encyclical five days later with the encyclical Divini Redemptoris which condemned the evils of atheistic communism, the foundational underpinnings of Nazism, and which, likewise, infuriated Josef Stalin.{1} {4}{5}{6}{20}{21}

In Dresden, Jewish intellectual Victor Klemperer recorded in his diary for May 22, 1937, the observation that “the papal pastoral,” although banned in Germany, was being passed around by hand like a chain letter. Everyone seems to be reading it, he noted.{5}

On the night of January 25, 1938, the great Aurora – the sign foretold to Lucia Santos and Jacinta and Franciso Marto at Fatima in 1917 of a greater war to come – covered all of Europe. Lucia recognized this great war beginning on March 12, 1938, when Hitler and the Nazis annexed Austria. Surely, St. Teresa Benedicta a Cruce witnessed it as well from the window of her cell in the Carmel of Cologne but she had already known that the great war foretold at Fatima was well under way by then and being fought everyday on the soil of her native Germany since Hitler came to power.{2}{3}

Sister Lucia had tried several times to get the Holy Father to consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary as Our Lady had asked to stop Russia from spreading its errors but Pius XI never acted on her request. Our Lady had told Sister Lucia and her cousins, Fransisco and Jacinta Marto of a worse war to come should the world not stop offending God and that many good people would be martyred.{2}

When Hitler paid a formal state visit to Italy in 1938, and he came to Rome, Pius XI expressed sorrow and outrage at Mussollini’s invitation: “To honor a cross which is not Christ’s in the Eternal City,” as Pius XI referred to the swastika, was an unhappy sign of Mussolini’s “old anticlericalism.” Pius XI refused to meet with Hitler.{5}

In a speech given in 1938, Martin Bormann, a top Nazi and a favorite of Hitler, stated boastfully: “We Germans are the first to be appointed by destiny to break with Christianity. It will be an honor for us. A thousand ties link us to the Christian faith, they will be broken at a single blow. Our intention is not to raze the cathedrals to the ground, but to fill them with a new ideology and with proclamations of a new faith.”{5}

Edith Stein made her eternal profession on April 21, 1938, and had printed on her devotional picture the words of St. John of the Cross: “Henceforth my only vocation is to love.”{9}

Edith Stein’s entry into the Carmelite Order was not escapism. “Those who join the Carmelite Order,’ she declared, “are not lost to their near and dear ones, but have been won for them, because it is our vocation to intercede to God for everyone.”{9}

In particular, Edith Stein interceded to God for her people: “I keep thinking of Queen Esther who was taken away from her people precisely because God wanted her to plead with the King on behalf of her nation. I am a very poor and powerless little Esther, but the King who has chosen me is infinitely great and merciful. This is great comfort.”{9}

Though the situation in Germany was growing steadily worse, Edith refused to abandon hope. She was convinced she had a mission to accomplish on behalf of her people though the precise nature of it eluded her. She had enough of a sense of it that she wrote to Mother Petra:

"I firmly believe that the Lord has accepted my life as an offering for all. It's important for me to keep Queen Esther in mind and remember how she was separated from her people just so that she could intercede for them before the king. I myself certainly am a poor and insignificant little Esther, but I take comfort from the fact that the King who has chose me is infinitely kind and merciful."{13}

In her 1938 letter to Mother Petra, St. Teresa Benedicta wrote about when she entered Carmel in 1933:

"I understood the cross as the destiny of God's people, which was beginning to be apparent at the time. I felt that those who understood the Cross of Christ should take it upon themselves on everybody's behalf. Of course, I know better now what it means to be wedded to the Lord in the sign of the cross. However, one can never comprehend it, because it is a mystery."{9}{11}{13}

"I firmly believe that the Lord has accepted my life as an offering for all. It's important for me to keep Queen Esther in mind and remember how she was separated from her people just so that she could intercede for them before the king. I myself certainly am a poor and insignificant little Esther, but I take comfort from the fact that the King who has chose me is infinitely kind and merciful," wrote Sr. Teresa Benedicta to Mother Petra.{9}{11}{13}

In September, 1938, Hitler invaded the Sudetenland.{3}

On November 9, 1938, the anti-Semitism of the Nazis became apparent to the whole world during “Kristalnacht”. The S.S. attack of November removed any lingering doubts about the true state of affairs. The morning after the attack there was still an odor of death hanging over the streets of Germany. All through the night, Jewish citizens had been mercilessly driven from their homes with billy clubs, and their businesses demolished or confiscated. Thirty to forty thousand Jews were sent to concentration camps which already existed as early as 1933.{3}{9}

As news of these events made their way into the convent, Edith Stein listened like "someone numbed with pain." Without condemning the murderers, she was overcome with horror at the abyss of sin and suffering that threatened to swallow both friend and enemy. Characteristically, however, she soon transformed this initial response into an act of voluntary atonement.{13}

“It is the shadow of the Cross which is falling on my people. If only they would see this! It is the fulfillment of the curse which my people called upon its own head. Cain must be persecuted, but woe to whoever lays hands upon Cain. Woe also to this city and this country when God's wrath descends upon them for what they are now doing to the Jews,” prophesied Edith Stein.{16}

Edith Stein's brother and sisters, roused by the terrible occurrences of the Kristallnacht, applied to emigrate to America. This was no easy matter: The German government demanded overseas sponsorship for each of the would be emigrants. Else and Erna Stein and their families were lucky enough to make the necessary arrangements and sail to America, and Arno Stein had already settled there, but Paul and Frieda Stein's applications were turned down. Rosa's future was another issue to be determined. As for Edith herself, with Palestine barring the way to further immigration, the Prioress decided to have her transferred to the Dutch convent of Echt.{13}

Fearing for the safety of both Edith and her nuns, Mother Petra had Edith smuggled across the border to the Carmel in Echt, Holland, during the night of December 31, 1938.{3}{9}{11}{12}{13}

Leaving Cologne was again a difficult separation. As one sister reported it:

"She left the convent on December 31, 1938. It was a painful separation for everybody. I had come to feel a heartfelt love and admiration for her and wondered what life would be like without her. On account of the upcoming departure, the last Christmas together was very subdued. Then it came time for her to go. We gathered in the recreation room to say good-bye. One by one, she embraced the sisters, but by the time she reached me, I couldn't keep back the tears any longer, and all I said was her name. That shook her a little; for a moment she lost her self-control and began to cry with me. But it was only an instant; then, she regained her composure and left." {3}

Though from the practical standpoint, Edith was no more able to make herself useful in Echt than in Cologne, the sisters came to treasure "their philosopher" for her dedication towards ordinary tasks. She appreciated their understanding:

"Already, in such a short time, I've experienced so much kindness that I can't help feeling grateful. It's clearly God's will that has brought me here - and that is the safest haven of peace."{3}{13}

During the year, Edith Stein composed three acts of self oblation - for the Jewish people, for the averting of war, and for the sanctification of her Carmelite family. Unwilling to bear the Cross in name alone, she wanted to be genuinely conformed to her crucified Lord. And, as a sister at Echt remarked:

"When a person of Edith Stein's caliber offers that kind of sacrifice, God takes up the offer."{3}{13}

By Work and By Love

On January 9, 1939, Cardinal Pacelli sent messages to the archbishops of the world asking them to try to persuade their governments to throw open their doors to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who are seeking to escape from German persecution. On January 10, 1939, Cardinal Pacelli wrote to American cardinals asking them to intercede for exiled Jewish professors and scientists.{5}

On March 2, 1939, Cardinal Pacelli was elected pope, taking the name Pius – Pius XII. He prays that he will be the Pope of Peace and calls on nations to avoid war at all costs. He calls for a peace conference at the Vatican to prevent war but the major powers are not willing to attend.{5}

The Nazis and the Italian Fascists were less than pleased with Cardinal Pacelli’s election as pope. On the day after Cardinal Pacelli’s election to the papacy, the Nazi newspaper Berliner Morgenpost stated its position clearly: “The election of Cardinal Pacelli is not accepted with favor in Germany because he was always opposed to Nazism and practically determined the policies of the Vatican under his predecessor.”{4}{5}

On August 22, German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop went to Russia to sign the German-Russian “Non-Aggression Pact” which would lead to Hitler’s invading Poland on September 1, 1939, and what many consider to be the start of World War II. Hitler summoned his Nazi leaders and all his army commanders to inform them of what to expect after the Polish army is destroyed: “Things will then happen which would not be to the taste of the German generals – the destruction of the Polish intelligentsia, in particular the priesthood by the SS.”{5}

On October 20, Pius XII issued his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, which is concerned with the oneness of human beings. In paragraph 48, dealing with the Church’s openness to all. It describes St. Paul’s vision of “the new man who is renewed unto knowledge, according to the image of Him that created him. Where there is neither Gentile or Jew.” The encyclical made the Nazis furious. The French, however, were so pleased that they printed 70,000 copies of Pius XII’s encyclical and had them dropped over Germany.{5}{6}{22}

On October 28, 1939, The New York Times summed up Pius XII’s encyclical in a headline: “Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism: Urges Restoring of Poland.”{5}

Before Hitler invaded Poland, Sr. Teresa Benedicta a Cruce wrote her last will on June 9, 1939:

"Even now I accept the death that God has prepared for me in complete submission and with joy as being his most holy will for me. I ask the Lord to accept my life and my death ... so that the Lord will be accepted by His people and that His Kingdom may come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and the peace of the world."{9}

A few weeks after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Edith Stein wrote an impassioned essay, “Hail Holy Cross, Our Only Hope.” In her essay, she reveals her personal anguish as a former nurse during World War II, in her inability to personally attend the wounded and dying, and to console others in their misery.{3}

In his 1939 Christmas message to the Cardinals, Pius XII referred to the invasion of Poland and related events:

“We have been forced to witness a series of acts which are irreconcilable, both with the practices of international law, and with the principles of natural right based on the elementary feelings of humanity; acts which demonstrate in what chaotic and vicious circles we are now living…”

“We find premeditated aggression against a small work-loving, peaceful people on the pretext of a threat which never existed nor was possible. We find atrocities and illicit use of means of destruction against old men, women and children. We also find contempt for freedom and for human life, from which originate acts which cry to God for vengeance,” as The Tablet of London reported on December 30, 1939.{4}{5}

On January 23, 1940, The New York Times headline read: “Vatican Denounces Atrocities in Poland; Germans Called Even Worse Than Russians.”{5}

On January 24, 1940, the Manchester Guardian wrote: “Tortured Poland has found a powerful advocate in Rome” and noted that the broadcasts of Vatican Radio warn “all who care for civilization that Europe is in mortal danger.”{5}

On January 27, 1940, Vatican Radio proclaimed to the world the dreadful cruelties marked with uncivilized tyranny that the Nazis were inflicting of the Jewish and Catholic Poles. The German ambassador protested while the Nazis jammed the broadcasts.{4}

Throughout 1940, The New York Times quoted Vatican Radio’s repeated broadcasts about the barbarous acts of the Nazis.{5}

A group of high German officers opposed to Hitler plot to overthrow him and end the war. They secretly approached Pius XII and asked for help. The Pope, in an act that could cost him his life if discovered, agrees to contact the British and relay the desire of the Germans to open discussions which could lead to peace and prevent millions of deaths. The Pope contacted the British, but they are not interested in talking with any Germans, even Hitler opponents.{5}

Pius XII ordered publication of a large volume, 565 pages, entitled “The Persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich,” in London, by Burns and Oates. It is a translation from the German of eyewitness accounts of the merciless Nazi program to crush the Church. It contained pastoral letters by many German bishops, and also revealed close cooperation between Catholics and Jews.{5}

On March 11, 1940, Pius confronted Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, concerning Nazi crimes in Poland against Poles and Jews. This heated confrontation was reported in the New York Times on March 14, 1940, under the headline: “Pope is Emphatic About Just Peace: Jews’ Rights Defended.”{5}

After Germany defeated France, thousands more Jews faced seizure and deportation by the Nazis. Pius XII, in response, sent a secret letter to the Catholic bishops of Europe entitled Opere et Caritate which means “By Work and By Love. It instructs bishops to help all who are suffering racial discrimination at the hands of the Nazis. They are told to read the letter in their churches to remind their faithful that racism is “incompatible with the teachings of the Catholic Church.”{1}{5}

During Christmas 1940, the Pope’s Christmas Eve allocution to the Cardinals condemned the war as one of the most horrible in human history and pleads for help for those suffering and a quick peace to end the suffering.{5}

The Science of the Cross

In 1940, Edith’s sister Rosa came to Echt by way of Belgium after a series of narrow escapes from Germany and became portress for the nuns. Rosa wanted to become a religious but instead became a third order Carmelite. Just at this time, reports began to arrive of the dissolution of Carmelite convents in Germany and Luxembourg. Edith Stein prepared for the worst. For years she had been confronting the idea of having to live outside the cloister; now it was an imminent possibility. A letter conveyed her reaction:

"We may have committed ourselves to the enclosure, but that doesn't put God under any obligation to let us stay in the cloister forever...Yes, we have the right to pray we can be spared this experience but only as long as we sincerely add: Not my will, but thine, be done."{13}

On May 10, 1940, Hitler invaded Holland. Edith Stein was once again within the reach of the anti-Semitic persecutors. Correspondence with the Carmelites in Cologne became increasingly difficult, since along with the troops had come the Gestapo, the German secret security police. Beginning on September 1, 1941, both Edith and Rosa were forced to wear the yellow Star of David on which was inscribed the word, “Jew”.{1}{3}

The year the Germans entered Holland, the sisters elected Sister Antonia to be their prioress. Eager to make use of Edith Stein's intellectual abilities, the new superior assigned her to teach the postulants Latin and begin training Rosa in the basics of Carmelite life. She also asked her to write a book on St. John of the Cross in commemoration of the upcoming centenary in 1942. In order to leave her free for research, Sister Antonia dispensed her from regular housework.{13}

In Echt, Edith Stein hurriedly worked to complete her study of "The Church's Teacher of Mysticism and the Father of the Carmelites, John of the Cross, on the Occasion of the 400th Anniversary of His Birth, 1542-1942." In 1941 she wrote to a friend, who was also a member of her order: "One can only gain a scientia cruces” – knowledge of the cross – “if one has thoroughly experienced the cross. I have been convinced of this from the first moment onwards and have said with all my heart: 'Ave, Crux, Spes unica' which means “I welcome you, Cross, our only hope." Her study on St. John of the Cross is entitled: "Kreuzeswissenschaft" which means The Science of the Cross.{3}{23}

From the start, the project proved a source of deep joy:

"I'm just beginning to collect material for a new book. Our dear Mother wants me to return to intellectual work as far as the organization of our life and present circumstances permit, and I'm glad to have the chance to work on work on something like this again before my brain gets completely rusty."{3}

Like Ignatius of Antioch, who shortly before his martyrdom told his congregation, "Now I am beginning to be a Christian." Edith Stein considered herself a beginner right to the end of her life. She set about studying St. John with the spirit of a humble disciple:

"As a result of the work I'm engaged in, I find myself living almost continually in the world of our holy Father St. John. This is truly a great grace. Do pray, Reverend Mother, that I may produce something worthy of his celebration."{3}

From the beginning of the war, Vatican Radio was regarded by the Nazis as anti-German, and Germans were forbidden to listen to it. In 1941 this order was more vigorously enforced through the arrest, imprisonment and even execution of anyone caught listening to it.{5}

On March 30 and 31, 1941, Vatican Radio began special broadcasts to France and Spain, speaking of “the wickedness of Hitler” and denouncing Nazi racial theories and lies, “which have reached scandalous proportions.”{5}

The Spanish government of General Franco began allowing Jews to enter Spain from France and as many as 250,000 Jews may have gone to Spain from France during the early years of the war.{5}

On April 30, in an Easter message, Pope Pius XII condemned “atrocious forms of fighting and mistreatment of prisoners and civilians.”{5}

On December 25, Pius XII delivered his Christmas message of which The New York Times wrote in an editorial: “The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas” and Pius, according to the Times, had “placed himself squarely against Hitlerism.”{4}

On January 20, 1942, at Wannsee, Germany, the decision for “the Final Solution” – the extermination of the Jews – was announced at a meeting of key Nazi leaders.{5}

On March 9, 1942, a Vatican official in Slovakia warned of “an atrocious plan” to deport 80,000 Jews. In response, Cardinal Maglione, Pius XII’s Secretary of State, sent a strong note of protest to Slovakia. However, the Slovak officials ignore the protest, saying the Jews are being sent “to work.”{5}

By the beginning of 1942, Edith Stein realized that to keep her new community out of danger, she would have to find a way to get out of Holland. National Socialism, determined to bring about the complete extermination of the Jews, was extending S.S. operations to all the occupied countries, like a vast network of death.{3}

As the gas chambers and crematoria rose in the East, Edith and Rosa and thousands of other Jews were required to report periodically to the Gestapo by the S.S. in Maastricht and the Council for Jewish Affairs in Amsterdam. During these interrogations, which often lasted for hours, Jews were forced to stand at a three meter distance from the S.S. officials and they were required to wear the Yellow Star of David.{3}{13}

Though the Dutch Christians responded to these indignities by treating the Jews with emphatic respect, many of them putting on the star themselves to demonstrate their sympathy, the arrests continued unchecked.{13}

Edith was certainly not set on death but she was prepared for it. She once wrote that she carried on her person the passage from Matthew 10:23 which reads: "When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next.”{3}

In an attempt to get Edith out of the country, the prioress applied to the Le Paquier Carmel in Switzerland where Edith was well known to the Swiss from her lectures in Zurich before she entered the Cologne Carmel. However, they could take only Edith and she refused to go without Rosa which caused further delay. Hoping to bring the sisters to safety, the Carmelites in Cologne did what they could to support the efforts of the Echt Carmel. In time, arrangements were made for Rosa at a house for third order Carmelites near Le Paquier. All that was needed was authorization from Dutch authorities. While they waited, Edith continued to write and wait in faith.{3}{13}

In June in the diocese of Montauban, in response to the continuing arrests and deportations of French Jews, Bishop Pierre-Marie Theas reminded Catholics: “I express the outrage of my Christian conscience. The present anti-Semitic measures mock human dignity and violate the most sacred rights of the human person and family.”{5}

In July, Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard of Paris and all the cardinals and bishops of France sign a joint protest to the Vichy government against the deportations. Under direct instructions from the pope, L’Osservatore Romano and Vatican Radio gave full reports on all such actions.{5}

On July 1st, 1942, the education of Jewish Catholic children was forbidden in Holland by the Nazis, which meant the children could not attend Catholic schools, their only means of learning.{3}

Meanwhile, throughout Holland, resistance to the deportations was mounting. Catholic and Protestant church leaders, unwilling to remain silent any longer, agreed to send a joint telegram to Reichskommisar SeyssInquart. German authorities, in an apparently conciliatory mood, promised that "Jewish Christians" would be left unmolested. The bishop informed Edith Stein's community of this development as soon as he learned it, and everyone at Echt breathed easier.{13}

It was a short-lived respite. As the deportation of the majority of Jews continued, the bishops of the Protestant and Catholic Churches in Holland and Belgium decide to express their concern publicly, “acting in consort with the Holy Father”, to denounce the “barbarous deportation of Jews”. They composed a joint pastoral letter for their congregations that included the text of their telegram to the Reichskommisar. SeyssInquart heard of their intention at the last moment and vetoed it. While some of the denominations bowed to the command, the Bishop of Utrecht informed the Occupation that it had no right to intervene in ecclesiastical affairs. By his authority, the following pastoralletter, telegram included, was read in all the Catholic parishes of Holland on July 26, 1942:

"Dear Brethren: When Jesus drew near to Jerusalem and saw the city before him, he wept over it and said, 'O, if even today you understood the things that make for peace! But now they are concealed from your sight'...Dear brethren, let us begin by examining ourselves in a spirit of profound humility and sorrow. Are we not partly to blame for the calamities which we are suffering? Have we always sought first for God's kingdom and his righteousness? Have we always fulfilled the demands of justice and charity towards our fellowmen?...When we examine ourselves, we are forced to admit that all of us have failed...Let us beseech God...to swiftly bring about a just peace in the world and to strengthen the people of Israel so sorely tested in these days, leading them to true redemption in Jesus Christ."{6}{13}

While the Dutch waited for the enemy to retaliate, Edith and Rosa Stein received news that Paul and Frieda Stein, along with their families, had been deported to Theresienstadt. The two sisters prepared to meet the same fate any moment.{13}

One week after the bishop's protest, the dreaded vengeance came and the results were tragic. The Nazi authorities in the Netherlands were outraged at what they saw as audacity on the part of the Catholic bishops. In retaliation, euphemistically, they "refused to guarantee the safety of Catholic Jews" In Amsterdam, 18,000 workers walked off of their jobs to protest the Nazi persecution. Afterwards, the Germans declare martial law and enforce it so brutally that the strike is crushed in three days. On August 2, in a single sweeping operation, all Jewish Catholics were put under arrest, including the members of Catholic religious orders. Since Nazi officials did not dare to move against the Catholic hierarchy directly, they vented their fury on the Jewish Catholics, dragging them into the march to the East in atonement for the Church's defiance.{3}{4}{5}

That year, August 2 fell on a Sunday. Edith Stein spent the day in her usual manner, praying and working on the unfinished manuscript on John of the Cross.{13}

It was five in the afternoon when the prioress was summoned to the parlor where two S.S. officers waited to question her about Edith Stein. Assuming they had come to discuss the emigration, Sister Antonia sent Edith Stein to speak to them. The officers immediately ordered her away from the grille, giving her five minutes to pack her things. This threw the convent into a state of confusion. Sister Antonia, realizing her mistake, attempted to negotiate with the S.S. men, but without success. The other sisters hastily gathered a few necessary items for Edith Stein, who appeared momentarily dazed. Quickly recovering, she asked the sisters for their prayers and told them to renew their appeal to the Swiss Consulate.{13}

By the time she reached the convent gate, Rosa was already waiting. The two sisters sorrowfully said farewell to the rest of the community. Meanwhile, the street had filled with local residents incensed over the latest act of violence. Surrounded by the crowd and unable to fully absorb the situation, Rosa began to grow disoriented. Seeing this, a neighbor recalled, Edith Stein took her by the hand and said reassuringly, "Come, Rosa. We're going for our people." Edith Stein understood that the last stage of her journey had begun. Together with Rosa she walked to the corner and got into a waiting squad car. In a few minutes, Echt had been left behind.{13}

The next day, August 3, was a long drawn-out agony for the prisoners. A mood of extreme depression prevailed among them, the women in particular. Their were fifteen members of religious communities who were imprisoned at Amersfoort along with three hundred other Catholic Jews. Five of the fifteen - two priests, a lay brother and two nuns - belonged to the Loeb family, all of them members of the Trappist order. Two friends of Edith Stein, likewise German refugees, were also there: Dr. Ruth Kantorowicz, who had been staying with the Ursulines in Venlo, and Alice Reiz, who had been working in Almelo with the Good Shepherd Sisters. Despite the circumstances of the reunion, the women were grateful to be together. During that day at Amersfoort, the religious gathered regularly to pray the Divine Office and recite the rosary, spontaneously grouping around Edith Stein as their center. "The influence she exerted by her tranquil bearing and manner was undeniable," one witness remembered.{13}

One witness, Peter Loesen, recalled Edith Stein’s presence:

"What I still recall very clearly is the unworried, or perhaps even cheerful, way that she and the other brothers and sisters accepted the situation. There was no way to tell that a few hours before the police had caught them completely unaware. They even took care of some of the children. This was so different from the attitude of the other prisoners, who seemed paralyzed with fear - and with good reason."{13}

Twelve hundred Jews were put on a train and taken to the central detention camp of Drente-Westenbork...Physical deprivation. Psychological suffering. Emotional pain. "What distinguished Edith Stein from the rest was her silence," wrote a survivor. "Many mothers were on the brink of insanity and sat moaning for days, without giving any thought to their children. Edith Stein immediately set about taking care of these little ones."{12}

Back at Echt, the nuns had spent three anxious days worrying about the fate of the kidnapped sisters. Finally, on August 5, they received a telegram through the Council for Jewish Affairs. An identical message relating to Ruth Kantorowicz had been forwarded to the Ursuline house in Venlo. The telegrams requested warm blankets, medicines and other basic necessities for the two women. Greatly relieved, the Echt Carmelites competed with each other in finding provisions for the prisoners. Two local men volunteered to drive the trucks to Westerbork.{13}

On August 6, The New York Times headline read: “Pope is said to plead for Jews listed for removal from France”. Also, at this time, in Toulouse, France, Archbishop Jules Gerard Saliege’s pastoral letter, which the French police knew about and demanded be withdrawn, was sent to and read in all the churches in his diocese: “There is a Christian morality that confers rights and imposes duties: frightful things are taking place. The Jews are our brothers. They belong to mankind. No Christian can dare to forget that!”{5}

The BBC broadcasts news of this. L’Osservatore Romano praises Salieg as a hero of religious courage. The Vatican Radio broadcasts the letter and comments for four successive days.{5}

August 6, the day the men made the journey, was the last day the Jews spent at Westerbork. In the morning they were informed of the impending departure and given permission to write. Edith Stein's final letter, written in a large, firm handwriting on two small pages from an appointment calendar, is a request to the sisters at Echt for warm clothing and toilet articles for Rosa. The note has a matter-of-fact, almost cheerful, tone and closes with the words:

"A thousand thanks. Greetings to all. Your Reverence's grateful child. B."{13}

To it was attached a final plea addressed to the Swiss Consulate.{13}

For Edith Stein, the time of uncertainty was over. Rather than being sent back to the convent, she was to follow the way of the Cross to the end, in the company of her Jewish brothers and sisters. The men from Echt who, thanks to the kindness of the Dutch police, were able to meet with her when they arrived a few hours later, found her in a relaxed, almost jovial mood. The Prioress of Echt later wrote down an account of what the men had seen:

"After a few very tense moments, the barbed-wire gates opened, and there in the distance we could see Edith Stein dressed in her black and brown habit, together with her sister Rosa. The meeting was both happy and sad. They shook hands with us warmly, but could hardly speak at first - so happy were they to see people from Echt. After a little while, the ice was broken, we handed out the things the Carmelites had sent. The men recalled how grateful Edith Stein was for all the kindness the Council for Jewish Affairs had shown. One thing that had made her particularly happy was finding priests in the camp who were working with the sisters to comfort the prisoners. She related all this in a calm and quiet manner. We had both been smoking as she spoke, and after she finished, in the hope of relieving the tension a little, we jokingly offered her a cigarette. That made her laugh. She told us that back in her days as a university student she had done her share of smoking, and dancing too..."{13}

"For all her quiet composure, there was a lighthearted happiness in the way she spoke to us. The glow of a saintly Carmelite radiated from her eyes. You could feel the heavenly atmosphere that her faith had created around her. Several times she reminded us to tell Reverend Mother not to worry about her and her sister Rosa...In the camp they had heard that either that night or the one following they would be transported to their native Silesia to work in the mines. Wherever they were headed, they told us, whatever work they were assigned, prayer would remain their first obligation. She hoped she could offer her suffering for the conversion of atheists, for her fellow Jews, for the Nazipersecutors, and for all who no longer had the love of God in their hearts."{13}

In the middle of the night before August 7, the Westerbork prisoners were unexpectedly awakened to listen to the names of those to be deported. Apart from six exceptions, the list included everyone. As morning came, thousands of men, women, and children crossed through the camp in an endless line, escorted by the S.S. commandos who had taken the place of the camp police.{12}

Slowly they made their way to the train, the religious in their habits standing out strangely. The few who were being left behind stood and waved farewell. Shortly before her death she said to a priest, "Who will do penance for the evil that the Germans are inflicting?"{10}{12}

In the middle of the night before August 7 - just five days following their deportation from Echt, the whole contingent started the final journey towards their last stop - Auschwitz. Witnesses say Sister Theresa Benedicta, still clad in her Carmelite habit, remained very serene. Serenity isn't freedom from the storm, it is peace within the storm.{12}

The train arrived at Auschwitz in the early hours of August 9. Once there, the people found themselves being separated, the men from the women. Decisions of who were to live and who were to die were made. Those spared would be subjected to hard work or certain unusual medical experiments; few would survive more than a month. The children, the elderly, the women who looked too frail, were selected for immediate death. They were given wash cloths for the supposed "shower" and marched directly to the cottage for gassing with Cyclon-B. The gas chamber was within sight of the pit of despair where a year earlier Fr. Maximillian Kolbe was murdered and cremated on the anniversary of the Assumption. Sister Therese Benedicta walked to her death. She died in the choking poison gas. Her body was then dumped as rubbish in a common lot . Eventually 100,000 Dutch Jews or 80% of the nation of Holland would follow Edith to Auschwitz.. Edith was 50 years old.{12}

On August 27, 1942, the New York Times ran the headline: ”Vichy seizes Jews; Pope Pius Ignored.”{5}

An Interior Castle

“How can one describe the purity, the light which shone from Edith Stein at the time of her conversion, the total generosity which one felt in her and which was to bear fruit in martyrdom,” Jacques Maritain would one day testify.{3}

In her conversion, Edith Stein experienced Christ Incarnate. She also tells us that the birth of Christ is an announcement of the struggle between good and evil. His birth must be followed by the cross. She wrote in an essay "The Mystery of Christmas":

The Christian mysteries are an indivisible whole . . . Thus the way from Bethlehem leads inevitably to Golgotha, from the crib to the Cross. (Simon's) prophecy announced the Passion, the fight between light and darkness that already showed itself before the crib . . . The star of Bethlehem shines in the night of sin. The shadow of the Cross falls on the light that shines from the crib. This light is extinguished in the darkness of Good Friday, but it rises all the more brilliantly in the sun of grace on the morning of the Resurrection. The way of the incarnate Son of God leads through the Cross and Passion to the glory of the Resurrection. In His company the way of every one of us, indeed of all humanity, leads through suffering and death to this same glorious goal.{10}

In 1941, Sr. Theresa Benedicta a Cruce had written to a friend and member of her order: “One can only gain a scientia cruces if one has thoroughly experienced the cross. I have been convinced of this from the first moment onwards and have said with all my heart: ‘Ave, Crux, Spes unica’ – I welcome you, Cross, our only hope.”{3}

The Prioress of the Echt Carmel went into Sr. Theresa Benedicta’s cell to gather her few possessions which were mostly writings, many completed, many left unfinished. One of St. Theresa’s possessions was a well-worn bible. Within the bible some passages were marked.

A passage in the Book of Wisdom was marked with a poorly sewn brown scapular which Sr. Theresa Benedicta a Cruce had placed there:

Court not death by your erring way of life,

nor draw to yourselves destruction

by the works of your hands.

Because God did not make death,

nor does he rejoice in the destruction

of the living.

For he fashioned all things that

they might have being; and the

creatures of the world are wholesome,

And there is not a destructive drug

among them nor any domain of the

nether world on earth,

For justice is undying.

It was the wicked who with hands

and words invited death,

considered it a friend, and pined for it,

and made a covenant with it,

Because they deserve to be in its possession. [Wisdom 1:12-16]{24}

In the Book of Ezekiel, a passage in Ezekiel was marked with a Yellow Star of David:

The hand of the Lord was upon me, and brought me forth in the spirit of the Lord: and set me down in the midst of a plain that was full of bones. And he led me about through them on every side: now they were very many upon the face of the plain, and they were exceeding dry. And he said to me: Son of man, dost thou think these bones shall live? And I answered: O Lord God, thou knowest. And he said to me: Prophesy concerning these bones; and say to them: Ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will send spirit into you, and you shall live.

And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to grow over you, and will cover you with skin: and I will give you spirit and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord. And I prophesied as he had commanded me: and as I prophesied there was a noise, and behold a commotion: and the bones came together, each one to its joint. And I saw, and behold the sinews, and the flesh came up upon them: and the skin was stretched out over them, but there was no spirit in them. And he said to me: Prophesy to the spirit, prophesy, O son of man, and say to the spirit: Thus saith the Lord God: Come, spirit, from the four winds, and blow upon these slain, and let them live again. And I prophesied as he had commanded me: and the spirit came into them, and they lived: and they stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

And he said to me: Son of man: All these bones are the house of Israel: they say: Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost, and we are cut off. Therefore prophesy, and say to them: Thus saith the Lord God: Behold I will open your graves, and will bring you out of your sepulchres, O my people: and will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall have opened your sepulchres, and shall have brought you out of your graves, O my people: And shall have put my spirit in you, and you shall live, and I shall make you rest upon your own land: and you shall know that I the Lord have spoken, and done it, saith the Lord God. [Ezekiel 37:1-14]{25}

In the Gospel of St. John, the Prioress found a well-used rosary encompassing Pilate’s condemning Jesus to death along with a devotional picture of St. Theresa Benedicta a Cruce:

Pilate therefore said to him : Art thou a king then?
Jesus answered : Thou sayest that I am a king.
For this was I born, and for this came I into the world;
that I should give testimony to the truth.
Everyone that is of the truth, heareth my voice.

Pilate saith to him : What is truth?
And when he said this, he went out again to the Jews,
and saith to them : I find no cause in him.

But you have a custom that I should release one
unto you at the pasch : will you, therefore,
that I release unto you the king of the Jews?

Then cried they all again, saying :
Not this man, but Barabbas.
Now Barabbas was a robber. [John 18:37-40]{26}

And he entered into the hall again, and he said to Jesus :
Whence art thou? But Jesus gave him no answer.

Pilate therefore saith to him : Speakest thou not to me?
Knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee,
and I have power to release thee?

Jesus answered : Thou shouldst not have any power against me,
unless it were given thee from above. Therefore, he that hath
delivered me to thee, hath the greater sin. [John 19:9-11]{26}

Then therefore he delivered him to them to be crucified.
And they took Jesus, and led him forth.

And bearing his own cross, he went forth to that place
which is called Calvary, but in Hebrew Golgotha.
Where they crucified him, and with him two others,
one on each side, and Jesus in the midst.

And Pilate wrote a title also, and he put it upon the cross.
And the writing was : Jesus of Nazareth, The King of the Jews.

This title therefore many of the Jews did read :
because the place where Jesus was crucified
was nigh to the city : and it was written in Hebrew,
in Greek, and in Latin.

Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate :
Write not, The King of the Jews;
but that he said, I am the King of the Jews.

Pilate answered : What I have written, I have written. [John 19:16-22]{26}

Now there stood by the cross of Jesus, his mother,
and his mother’s sister, Mary of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalen.

When Jesus therefore had seen his mother and the disciple
standing whom he loved, he saith to his mother :
Woman, behold thy son.

After that he saith to the disciple :
Behold thy mother.
And from that hour,
the disciple took her to his own. [John 19:25-27]{25}

The Prioress of Echt Carmel found the words of St. John of the Cross printed on the devotional picture: “Henceforth, my only vocation is to love.”

In the fall of 1942, a small package sent by courier from the wife of the Swiss ambassador to Spain, arrived at the Carmel where St. Theresa of Avila began her great work. The Prioress of Avila opened the package to find a manuscript: “The Science of the Cross”.

Before The Dawn

Word had reached Sr. Lucia dos Santos that the pope would indeed consecrate the entire world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary at the 25th anniversary of Fatima on October 13, 1942, together with the bishops of Portugal. Pius XII repeated this act of consecration on December 8 at St Peter’s in Rome with the bishops who were present in Rome. However, because only some of the bishops of the Catholic Church participated in these consecrations in union with the pope and that these consecrations did not specifically mention Russia, Sr. Lucia knew that Russia would not be converted in the way Our Lady had requested at Fatima and, consequently, stopped from spreading its errors. However, as Sr. Lucia would later learn, the course of the war would be greatly affected by these consecrations all the same.{2}

In his Christmas message of 1942, Pius XII expressed his concern “for those hundreds of thousands who, without ay fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or progressive extinction.” This was widely understood to be a public condemnation of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. {27}

It was Pius XII’s conclusion to his 1942 Christmas message to the world which most upset the Nazis:

Beloved Children, may God grant that while you listen to Our voice your heart may be profoundly stirred and moved by the deeply felt seriousness, the loving solicitude, the unremitting insistence, with which We drive home these thoughts, which are meant as an appeal to the conscience of the world, and a rallying-cry to all those who are ready to ponder and weigh the grandeur of their mission and responsibility by the vastness of this universal disaster.

A great part of mankind, and, let Us not shirk from saying it, not a few who call themselves Christians, have to some extent their share in the collective responsibility for the growth of error and for the harm and the lack of moral fiber in the society of today.

What is this world war, with all its attendant circumstances, whether they be remote or proximate causes, its progress and material, legal and moral effects? What is it but the crumbling process, not expected, perhaps, by the thoughtless but seen and depreciated by those whose gaze penetrated into the realities of a social order which hid its mortal weakness and its unbridled lust for gain and power? That which in peace-time lay coiled up, broke loose at the outbreak of war in a sad succession of acts at variance with the human and Christian sense. International agreements to make war less inhuman by confining it to the combatants to regulate the procedure of occupation and imprisonment of the conquered remained in various places a dead letter. And who can see the end of this progressive demoralization of the people, who can wish to watch helplessly this disastrous progress? Should they not rather, over the ruins of a social order which has given such tragic proof of its ineptitude as a factor for the good of the people, gather together the hearts of all those who are magnanimous and upright, in the solemn vow not to rest until in all peoples and all nations of the earth a vast legion shall be formed of those handfuls of men who, bent on bringing back society to its center of gravity, which is the law of God, aspire to the service of the human person and of his common life ennobled in God.

Mankind owes that vow to the countless dead who lie buried on the field of battle: The sacrifice of their lives in the fulfillment of their duty is a holocaust offered for a new and better social order. Mankind owes that vow to the innumerable sorrowing host of mothers, widows and orphans who have seen the light, the solace and the support of their lives wrenched from them. Mankind owes that vow to those numberless exiles whom the hurricane of war has torn from their native land and scattered in the land of the stranger; who can make their own the lament of the Prophet: "Our inheritance is turned to aliens; our house to strangers." Mankind owes that vow to the hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline. Mankind owes that vow to the many thousands of non-combatants, women, children, sick and aged, from whom aerial war-fare—whose horrors we have from the beginning frequently denounced—has without discrimination or through inadequate precautions, taken life, goods, health, home, charitable refuge, or house of prayer. Mankind owes that vow to the flood of tears and bitterness, to the accumulation of sorrow and suffering, emanating from the murderous ruin of the dreadful conflict and crying to Heaven to send down the Holy Spirit to liberate the world from the inundation of violence and terror.

And where could you with greater assurance and trust and with more efficacious faith place this vow for the renewal of society than at the foot of the "Desired of all Nations" Who lies before us in the crib with all the charm of His sweet humanity as a Babe, but also in the dynamic attraction of His incipient mission as Redeemer? Where could this noble and holy crusade for the cleaning and renewal of society have a more significant consecration or find a more potent inspiration than at Bethlehem, where the new Adam appears in the adorable mystery of the Incarnation? For it is at His fountains of truth and grace that mankind should find the water of life if it is not to perish in the desert of this life; "Of His fullness we all have received." His fullness of grace and truth cows as freely today as it has for twenty centuries on the world.

His light can overcome the darkness, the rays of His love can conquer the icy egoism which holds so many back from becoming great and conspicuous in their higher life. To you, crusader-volunteers of a distinguished new society, live up to the new call for moral and Christian rebirth, declare war on the darkness which comes from deserting God, of the coolness that comes from strife between brothers. It is a fight for the human race, which is gravely ill and must be healed in the name of conscience ennobled by Christianity.

May Our blessing and Our paternal good wishes and encouragement go with your generous enterprise, and may they remain with all those who do not shirk hard sacrifices—those weapons which are more potent than any steel to combat the evil from which society suffers. Over your crusade for a social, human and Christian ideal may there shine out as a consolation and an inspiration the star that stands over the Grotto of Bethlehem, the first and the perennial star of the Christian Era. From the sign of it every faithful heart drew, draws and ever will draw strength; "If armies in camp should stand against me, my heart shall not fear." Where that star shines, there is Christ. "With Him for leader we shall not wander; through Him let us go to Him, that with the Child that is born today we may rejoice forever."{27}

The New York Times editorial of December 25, 1942, was specific:

“The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas…He is about the only ruler left on the Continent of Europe who dares to raise his voice at all.”{4}

Even the Germans themselves saw it as a public condemnation: “His speech is one long attack on everything we stand for...He is clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews…He is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals,” so read an internal Nazi analysis of Pius XII Christmas message. An interpretation by the Gestapo of Pius XII 1942 Christmas address bemoaned: “in a manner never known before…the Pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order.”{4}{5}

Pius XII, despite the potential for more reprisals against the Church and the subjugated peoples of Nazi Europe, as had happened following his 1941 Christmas address, spoke out forcefully once more against this evil which had enveloped Europe even when many Jewish leaders urged the pope to be silent.{1}{4}{5}{6}

In the spring of 1943, Jesus appeared to Sr. Lucia and expressed his great joy to her over the consecrations of the entire world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary which Pius XII had performed. Jesus promised her that these consecrations would shorten the war.{2}

In early 1943, where previously the Allies had been losing, the Allies began winning decisive battles. In February, 1943, Germany lost the Battle of Stalingrad. It was the first major defeat for Hitler’s war machine and began turning the tide in favor of the Allies and marked the beginning of the end of the Third Reich. After the fall of the Third Reich, Russia remained unconverted from atheistic communism and continued to spread its errors throughout the world, shackling hundreds of millions of poor souls to an atheistic ideology which was every bit as evil as the “blood and race” ideology of The Third Reich. The consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary by the pope in union with all the bishops of the world, as requested by Our Lady of Fatima, would not take place for another forty years, according to Sr. Lucia dos Santos, when it would be performed on March 25, 1984, by a survivor of both Nazi-occupied and Soviet-occupied Poland, as well as, an assassin’s bullet, Karol Wojtytla,who, as Pope John II, would canonize St. Theresa Benedicta and Saint Maximilian Kolbe, and who also was a student of phenomenology.. The Soviet Union fell in 1989 within five years of the pope consecrating Russia to Mary. In 1942, however, the overarching evil of the time was Hitler’s Third Reich.{1}{2}{3}{4}{5}{6}{21}{28}

Jewish historian, Orthodox Rabbi, and Israeli diplomat, Pinchas Lapide, in his book,”The Last Three Popes and the Jews,” concluded that during the Nazi period, “Pius XII, the Holy See, the Vatican’s Nuncios, and the whole Catholic Church saved between 700,000 and 800,000 Jews from certain death.”{4}

Within the walls of the Vatican itself, it has been estimated that between 4,000 and 7,000 Jews were given asylum under the trained machine guns of the Third Reich, until Italy and Rome was liberated by the Allies. This asylum included many professors and academics from Rome’s universities.{6}

“Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth,” testified Albert Einstein in an article published in Time magazine on December 23, 1940. “I had never any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom.”{4}

Hitler murdered over 3,000 Catholic priests during the war, such as Father Maximillian Kolbe, as well as, thousands of other Catholic religious, such as Sr. Teresa Benedicta a Cruce, who was once known as Edith Stein, and still the Vatican, under Pius XII, worked to save as many Jews as possible.{1}{3}{4}{6}

“What the Vatican did will be indelibly and eternally engraved in our hearts,” wrote Israel Zolli, the Chief Rabbi of Rome in a statement of thanks after the war. “Priests and even high prelates did things that will forever be an honor to Catholicism.”{4}{6}

Over the years Israel Zolli had found much common ground in the wealth of ideas in Hebraism and Christianity. He was especially attracted to the lives and ideals of the Christian saints which he found reminiscent of the pietists of Hassidic literature whom he had loved deeply since his childhood. He found that he loved both Hebraism and Christianity and held the idea, perhaps an illusion, perhaps as Edith Stein had believed, that he was able to unite both religions until a mystical phenomenon challenged him to see things anew.{28}

In Rome, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, 1944, the anniversary of the birth of Edith Stein, it was the dawn of a new beginning. Rome had been liberated in June and D-Day had broken through fortress Europe. The War was going badly for the Axis powers.

“It was the Day of Atonement in the fall of 1944,” Zolli would later write. “and I was presiding over the religious service in the Temple. The German Jews like to call this “the long day,” but it is not long; it is a day of enormous content if one is able to comprehend it. I remember, when I was a child, seeing my mother and father weeping during the most touching moments of the Atonement Day service. Now tears have gone out of fashion; I myself cannot weep. The day was nearing its end, and I was all alone in the midst of a great number of persons. I began to feel as though a fog were creeping into my soul; it became denser, and I wholly lost touch with the men and things around me. A candle, almost consumed, burned on its candlestick near me. As the wax liquefied, the small flame flared into a larger one, leaping heavenwards. I was fascinated by the sight of it, looked with wondering amazement at the simple spectacle. I said to myself: In this flame there is something of my own being. The tongue of fire flickered and writhed, tortured; and my soul participated, suffered.”

In the evening there was the last service, and I was there with two assistants, one on my right and the other on my left. But I felt so far withdrawn from the ritual that I let others recite the prayers and sing. I was conscious of neither joy nor sorrow; I was devoid of thought and feeling. My heart lay as though dead in my breast. And just then I saw with my minds’ eye a meadow sweeping upward, with bright grass but with no flower. In this meadow I saw Jesus Christ clad in a white mantle, and beyond His head the blue sky. I experienced the greatest interior peace. If I were to give an image of the state of my soul at that moment I should say: a crystal-clear lake amid high mountains. Within my heart I found the words: “You are here for the last time.” I considered them with the greatest serenity of soul and without any particular emotion. The reply of my heart was: So it is, so it shall be, so it must be.

Nearly an hour later my wife, my daughter, and I were at home for supper after the fast. After supper my wife took some newspapers and went to her room, and so did my daughter. I remained in my working-room to write letters and read magazines. When I was tired I went to my bedroom. The door of my daughter’s room was shut. Suddenly, my wife said to me: “Today while you were before the Ark of the Torah, it seemed to me as if the white figure of Jesus put His hands on your head as if He were blessing you.” I was amazed but still very calm. I pretended not to have understood. She repeated what she just said, word for word. At that very moment we heard the “Little Trumpet” – so we used to call our younger daughter, Miriam, when she called from afar, “Papaaa!” I went to her room. “What is the matter?” I asked. “You are talking about Jesus Christ,” she replied. “You know, Papa, tonight I have been dreaming that I saw a very tall, white Jesus, but I don’t remember what came next.”

I wished them both goodnight and, wholly untroubled, went on thinking about the unusual concurrence of events. Then I went peacefully to sleep. {28}

After the war, Israel Zolli converted to Roman Catholicism and because of his deep admiration for what Pope Pius XII had done during the war on behalf of the Jewish people, Israel Zolli took the name Eugenio as his Christian name in honor of Pius XII.{4}{28}

Often in her lectures and writings, as Dr. Freda Mary Oben recounts, Edith Stein would counsel her audience and readers that if there were only one thing to tell them it would be to live as God’s child, in his hands. This means to surrender oneself totally in perfect trust and humility. It means to do God’s will, not one’s own, to put all sorrows and hopes in his hand. Such surrender is the highest act of freedom available to the person.{10}

God resides in each one of us, and it is the Triune God. The divine life within us is the divine Trinitarian life. Sr. Teresa Benedicta a Cruce wrote in The Science of the Cross:

The soul in which God dwells by grace is no impersonal scene of the divine life but is itself drawn into this life. The divine life is three-personal life: it is overflowing love, in which the Father generates the Son and gives him his Being, while the Son embraces this Being and returns it to the Father; it is the love in which the Father and Son are one, both breathing the Holy Spirit. By grace this Spirit is shed abroad in men’s hearts. Thus the soul lives its life of grace through the Holy Spirit, in Him it loves the Father with the love of the Son and the Son with the love of the Father.{10}

What a powerful statement! She also wrote that our meeting with the Crucified Christ within us creates a further kind of trinity: the intentions of Christ, ourselves, and those we serve. “One’s own perfection, union with God, and works for the union of another person with God and his/her perfection absolutely belong together.”{10}

So Edith Stein’s redemptive role was unique in its duality: as a Jew, she suffered for her people and as a Christian, she imitated Christ her Lord, united to him as he suffered for Jews and gentiles alike. And her cross was intensified by the anguish she herself was bringing to her family by her conversion and entrance into the religious life. How could they understand that it was their suffering that had helped put her in Carmel?{10}

Yet, in a letter after her mother’s death, Edith Stein was able to write concerning her family:

But I trust that from eternity, Mother will take care of them. And – I also trust –
in the Lord’s having accepted my life for all of them. I keep having to think of
Queen Esther who was taken from among her people precisely that she might
represent them before the King. I am a very poor and powerless little Esther.
But the King who chose me is infinitely great and merciful. That is such a great
comfort.{10}

Such is the prayer of a saint. {10}



Citations

* Title taken from the article by the same name published online by the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society

Part II

Chapter 4

{1} “A Righteous Gentile: Pope Pius XII and the Jews” by Rabbi David G. Dalin
[ www.catholiceducation.org/articles/facts/fm0020.html ]
{2} Fatima for Today, Fr. Andrew Apostoli, C.F.R., Ignatius Press, 2011
{3} Edith Stein – Scholar * Feminist * Saint by Freda Mary Oben, Ph.D., Alba House
New York, 1988
{4} [ http://www.defendingthebride.com/sn/pius.html ]
{5} [ http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=1438 ]
{6} [ http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/piusdef2.html ]
{7} [ http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9E01E5DD113FE233A25754C1A9629C946796D6CF ]
{8} [ http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/G10JPROT.HTM ]
{9} [ http://www.Vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_19981011_edith_stein_en.html ]
{10} [ http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=4743 ]
{11} [ http://www.helpfellowship.org/Edith_Stein_now_a_saint.htm ]
{12} [ http://www.fatherpius.littleway.ca/carm01.html ]
{13} [http://www.angelfire.com/ca5/stjoseph/formdocs/edith-stein.htm ]
{14} [ http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Cross-Currents/182027741.html ]
{15} [ http://www.secondexodus.com/html/patronsaints/stteresabenedicta.htm ]
{16} [ http://www.marycoredemptrix.com/CenterReview/St_Edith.pdf ]
{17} [ http://www.catholicsun.org/2012/05/31/cristiada-blessed-miguel-pro-jesuit-priest-and-martyr-part-i/ ]
{18} [ http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPLDOC/P11ANSEM.HTM ]
{19} [ http://www.karmel.at/eng/teresa.htm ]
{20} [ http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_14031937_mit-brennender-sorge_en.html ]
{21} [ http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19031937_divini-redemptoris_en.html ]
{22} [ http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_20101939_summi-pontificatus_en.html ]
{23} [ http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08480a.htm ]
{24} New American Bible ~ The Book of Wisdom ~ Chapter 1:12-16
[ http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0839/__PLI.HTM ]
{25} [Ezechiel 37:1-14] {Doauy-Rheims Version of The Holy Bible}
The Holy Bible ~ Douay Rheims Version, revised by Bishop Richard Challoner,
A.D. 1749-1752, published by TAN Books and Publishers, Rockford, Illinois
{26} [John 18, John 19] {Douay-Rheims Version of The Holy Bible}
The Holy Bible ~ Douay Rheims Version, revised by Bishop Richard Challoner,
A.D. 1749-1752, published by TAN Books and Publishers, Rockford, Illinois
{27} [ http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/P12CH42.HTM ]
{28} Before The Dawn, Eugenio Zolli, Sheed and Ward, New York, 1954

[JohnCraven]

On Mark Levin's show tonight, September 10, 2012, the eve of the terrorists attacks of 9-11, a lovely French lady immigrant to the United States spoke to the kind of tyranny which Edith Stein faced in her life, especially after the rise of Hitler to power in Germany in 1933, by pointing out it is coming again ever so subtly but it is coming all the same unless we continue to reverse course as we began to do with the elections in 2010.

Please consider what lay ahead when you vote as much as what lay behind.

Remember!

JohnCraven
New Orleans



Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and
the rule of law under God is acknowledged.
Ronald Reagan

Remarks to the Convention of Evangelicals
March 8, 1983
[ http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1983/30883b.htm ]

Mark 9:27-28 “Why could we not cast him out?”
asked his disciples as to why they couldn’t cast out an evil spirit,
and Jesus said to them, “This kind can go out by nothing,
but prayer and fasting.”


Pray, hope and don’t worry! -- Saint Padre Pio

[JohnCraven]

Please remember at some point today that one of the great lights of both Christianity and Judaism was born on this date, the Day of Atonement, on October 12, 1891.

I believe that Saint Theresa Benedicta a Cruce (St. Theresa, Blessed of the Cross) - born Edith Stein - will someday and hopefully soon, will be declared a doctor of the church as was one of her favorite saints recently Pope Benedict XVI - St. John of the Cross.

Her works were brilliant! Her martyrdom and that of her sister Rosa was profound and both prophetic and a fullilment of prophecy as told to the children of Fatima by our Lady of Fatima!

Please pray to Saint Theresa Benedicta a Cruce for her intercession with the Almighty to stop the same hatred that has arisen in our own world through the evil of Islamic terrorism - the same very evil which murdered her and millions of others.

JohnCraven
New Orleans



Show me Thy ways, O Lord
Show me Thy ways, O Lord
Help me love when I’m hated
Spread joy unabated
Show me Thy ways, O Lord
(Hazel Shade, 1966)
Elvis Pressley
Cd: Elvis – Peace in The Valley
The Complete Gospel Recordings
Track 21: Show Me Thy Ways, O Lord
[http://www.lyricsdepot.com/elvis-presley]