Pope Intends to Canonize German Nun as a Saint

Benedicta McCarthy was a toddler 10 years ago when she swallowed a massive dose of Tylenol and was rushed to a Boston hospital comatose, her liver and kidneys about to fail.

Her parents prayed to the martyred nun who was Benedicta’s namesake to help save the little girl’s life. They called it a miracle when their daughter recovered. Her Jewish doctor called it a miracle. And now the Vatican has declared it a miracle too. The pope has announced that he intends to canonize as a saint Sister Teresia Benedicta of the Cross, a German nun better known as Edith Stein.

Stein will make no ordinary saint. She was born a Jew and converted to Catholicism in 1933 in the midst of a brilliant academic career. She was deported by the Nazis and gassed at Auschwitz in 1942. The prospect that the Catholic Church would canonize her has long provoked the ire of some Jews resentful at what they say was church passivity while the concentration camp ovens blazed on.

But the parents of young Benedicta, now 12, embrace Stein’s story as a modern-day parable, a warning of the worst that can happen when Christians forsake the Gospel of nonviolence preached by Jesus.

“Stein is a magnifying glass. She received the hate, the oppression and in the end, the killing that Jews have received for 1,700 years at the hands of Christians,” said Benedicta’s father, the Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.

Snuggling shoulder-to-shoulder with her daughter on the couch in the family’s living room, Mary McCarthy said, “We’re so grateful, from the time Benedicta came home from the hospital. It always was miraculous to us. . . . Now I’m happy that others will hear about it and will get to know Edith Stein.”

*

Benedicta is the 12th of 13 children born to the couple, intellectuals who home-school their children and have named several in memory of martyrs and thinkers both famous and obscure. They named one son Thomas Merton McCarthy in honor of the monk they so admired. A daughter is named Kateri McCarthy, after the church’s only Native American saint, Kateri Tekawitha. Another daughter is Tzipora McCarthy, in memory of Elie Wiesel’s sister, who died in the Holocaust.

Benedicta was born Aug. 8, 1984, at 7:45 p.m.--Aug. 9 Auschwitz time, the anniversary of Edith Stein’s death. Benedicta’s father, a lawyer-turned-priest in the Melkite Rite of the Catholic Church, which allows its clergy to marry and have children, had come to know the story of Edith Stein after working as a theologian of nonviolence.

Born in 1891 in what is now Wroclaw, Poland, Stein was raised in a Jewish household, but converted at the age of 30. Ten years later, she joined the Carmelite order, taking the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

She was sent to a convent in the Netherlands to evade Nazi persecution in 1938. But after the Catholic bishops there read a pastoral letter from the pulpits denouncing the deportation of Jews, the Gestapo retaliated by rounding up Catholic Jews as well and sending them to concentration camps for extermination.

*

As a prisoner in Auschwitz, Stein is said to have gathered the children, washed their hair and found them food. She was 50 years old when she died.

The McCarthys came to know about her in 1983, when they were preparing to start the first of their annual 40-day fasts that begin on Aug. 9, the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. “Aug. 9,” said Rev. McCarthy, “is the low point of Christians betraying the teachings of Jesus.”

The couple’s 13th child, Ananda King, named for Martin Luther King, died on the day of her birth in 1986. A year later, when Benedicta was 2 1/2, the McCarthys went away on a retreat--their first since their children were born--leaving the younger ones in the care of the older ones. On their return home, their two eldest children ran into the street to tell them that Benedicta was in the hospital with seizures, and no one knew why.

They arrived at their local hospital about the time doctors were figuring out that the little girl had ingested a large amount of Tylenol. Apparently she had torn open sample packets of Tylenol the family had been given. And though many children who overdose on Tylenol suffer no ill effects, Benedicta was having a rare severe reaction. The local hospital was unequipped to deal with such serious poisoning, and Benedicta was transferred to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

“I did not expect her to recover from this,” said Ronald Kleinman, a pediatric gastroenterologist who treated her there. Her kidneys were losing function and her liver was five times its normal size. She had a staphylococcus infection. The doctors prepared for a liver transplant, but there were no livers available.

“Things went from bad to bad to worse to worse,” the Rev. McCarthy said. “The doctors began to use cold language to tell you that things weren’t going well. . . . They have gradual ways to brace you for the event of death.”

Mary McCarthy called her sister, Teresa Smit, in Wisconsin. “When she called and said that Benedicta was close to death,” Smit recalled in a telephone interview, “it was just an automatic and natural response, knowing that Benedicta was named after Edith Stein, it seemed like this was who we should all pray to.” As one person phoned another, the prayer spread in a chain across the country.

Within days, Benedicta came out of a coma. Her liver shrunk to normal size. She walked out of the hospital carrying a balloon and pushed the elevator button. “I thought it was miraculous that she recovered,” Kleinman said. “Other youngsters at this stage often don’t turn around.”

Nine years later, Kleinman found himself at the Vatican, testifying before a tribunal of eight Roman doctors and clergy representing the church’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints. They were trying to determine scientifically whether Benedicta’s recovery could legitimately be declared a miracle attributable to Stein’s intercession.

“It was not a cakewalk,” Kleinman said of the tribunal’s interview. “It went on for almost five hours, and we were arguing for almost the whole five hours. I don’t think they realized how sick she was.”

The Catholic church had beatified Stein in 1987 as a martyr--which meant the church required only one verified miracle instead of two to declare her a saint. So Benedicta McCarthy’s case alone was sufficient.

A Vatican spokesman said last week that the pope will probably elevate Stein to sainthood at a Mass in Rome later this year. Rabbi Leon Klenicki, director of the department of interfaith affairs for the Anti-Defamation League, said of Stein’s imminent sainthood, “I feel unhappy about it. . . . It is part of the church’s tendency to Christianize Auschwitz--to compensate by showing they suffered too. I have no doubt that many Catholics suffered, but we were by birth condemned to the gas chambers.”

For her part, Benedicta, a quiet child who plays piano, swims and dances, has no memory of her brush with death and can think of no explanation. “I think it was just a miracle,” she said.