Pope Begins W. German Visit With Conciliatory Words

Pope John Paul II opened his second papal pilgrimage to West Germany on Thursday by extending a conciliatory hand to Jews who were offended by his plan to beatify today a Jewish-born nun who was killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz in 1942.

In a series of passionate remarks after his arrival in Cologne on Thursday evening, John Paul dismissed controversial assertions by some Catholics that the martyred Carmelite nun, Sister Theresa Benedicta a Cruce, was executed because she was a Roman Catholic, not because she was born Jewish.

Repeatedly referring to the nun as Edith Stein, her name before she converted to Catholicism, the pontiff asserted that “Edith Stein saw her being transported to Auschwitz as an expression of solidarity with the Jewish people, of which she was a member and with which she felt connected right up to the moment of her agonizing death. She said to her sister (who went to the death camp gas chamber with her), ‘Come, we will go for our people.’ ”

In another of several references to the nun’s Jewishness, the Pope said, “Edith Stein, as a Jew and a Catholic nun, demonstrated her solidarity with the Jewish people by sharing their suffering and martyrdom.”

Objections to the beatification ceremony, a step toward sainthood in the Catholic church, came from a variety of Jewish leaders ranging from a member of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) to the head of the Union of Italian-Jewish Communities, which has enjoyed close relations with the Vatican in recent years. The critics had expressed apprehension that the beatification would emphasize a statement in Stein’s will, in which she dedicated her life and death “for the sins of the unbelieving Jewish people.”

Many Jews found that line in her will offensive and suggested that if it received recognition in the beatification ceremony, the move would signal a step backward in the Vatican’s growing acceptance of Judaism.

Admiration for Judaism

But in a significant passage of his speech to West Germany’s Catholic bishops Thursday night, the pontiff stressed his admiration for Judaism in almost the same words he used to praise Jews as “our older brothers” during an historic appearance at the Rome Synagogue last year.

“Edith Stein, who entered the Carmelite convent in Cologne in 1933, was a daughter of the Jewish people,” he told the bishops. “In solidarity with them and in Christian hope she shared her sufferings on the way to the shoah (the Hebrew word for annihilation). After all, salvation is from the Jews, said Jesus. . . . We Christians must never forget these roots of ours. The apostle of the nations reminds us that ‘You do not support the root; the root supports you,’ ” the Pope concluded, quoting the Apostle Paul.

In another passage of a speech that was scathingly critical of Germany’s Nazi past, John Paul drew a parallel between “the organized murder of so-called inferior beings” and modern-day abortion, an analogy that in itself is likely to become controversial.

‘Advocate of Life’

Speaking of a wartime German Catholic cardinal who protested Hitler’s extermination of the mentally defective and retarded, the pontiff said the church today “must be no less ready to make itself the advocate of life. . . . “

“In view of the frighteningly high number of abortions and the increase in the illicit practice of so-called ‘mercy killing,’ the mission to protect life has again assumed great significance and urgency for us bishops in today’s society,” John Paul said.

The Pope’s relatively brief German visit follows by only 2 1/2 weeks an exhausting 14-day trip to Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, and it precedes by only a little more than a month his third papal visit to his native Poland, scheduled to begin June 8.

In addition to beatifying Edith Stein in Cologne today, the pontiff will beatify a Jesuit priest, Father Rupert Mayer, in Munich on May 3. Mayer was one of Germany’s few Catholic priests who spoke forcefully against Hitler’s Nazis and was several times imprisoned before being banished to a monastery until the end of World War II.

Beyond Cologne and Munich, John Paul will visit Bonn, Muenster, Kevelaer, Bottrop, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Augsburg and Stuttgart. He will return to Rome on May 4.