Jewish-Born Nun, Killed by Nazis, Is Made a Saint

Pope John Paul II bestowed sainthood Sunday on Edith Stein, a Jewish-born Catholic nun killed by the Nazis in 1942, and said the Roman Catholic Church will use her feast day each year to commemorate the Holocaust.

Speaking at a canonization Mass in St. Peter’s Square, the pope paid tribute to “the millions of Jewish brothers and sisters” slaughtered by the Nazis and pleaded for no recurrence of such a “brutal plan to wipe out a people.”

“For the love of God and man, I once again raise my voice in a heartfelt cry: Never again may such a criminal act be repeated against any ethnic group, any people, any race, in any corner of the Earth,” John Paul said, drawing applause from a crowd of thousands.

“It is a cry I send out to all men and women of goodwill and all who believe in the eternal and just God,” he added in a strong voice. “We should all be together on this. Human dignity is at stake.”

The pope’s words, delivered under towering marble figures of the Jews who founded Christianity, were an answer to some objections raised by Jews to the elevation of the modern era’s first Jewish-born Catholic saint. But his effort did not put the controversy to rest.

Many Jewish leaders still say the church is laying unjust claim to the martyrdom of a woman who died because she was a Jew. Her canonization, they argue, sends a message that the best Jews are those who convert to Catholicism and that the church was exclusively a victim of the Holocaust rather than a collaborator.

Stein, born into a German Jewish family in 1891, was an atheist before her conversion in 1922 in the midst of an academic career as a philosopher. In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler rose to power, she entered a monastery, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Five years later, she was smuggled out of Germany and sent to the Netherlands, where her Carmelite superiors, aware of her Jewish origin, thought she would be safer. But the Nazis arrested her in 1942, along with 200 other Catholics who were at least partly Jewish, as a reprisal against the Dutch Catholic bishops for their speaking out against Hitler’s persecution of Jews. She died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz on Aug. 9 that year.

This chain of events was cited 11 years ago by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints in affirming that Nazi hatred of the church was a factor in Stein’s persecution and thereby made her a Catholic martyr.

But in recounting her final days Sunday to a multinational audience that included German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek and Jewish members of Stein’s family, John Paul acknowledged that the nun was killed because the Nazis considered her a Jew.

The pope also recalled that she turned down a chance to renounce the bishops and save herself from deportation from the Netherlands, telling her captors: “Why should I be excluded? . . . If I cannot share the fate of my brothers and sisters, my life is, in a certain way, destroyed.”

She was, the pope said, “an eminent daughter of Israel and a faithful daughter of the church.”

In extolling her “quest for truth” that led to religious faith, the pope held up Stein as a role model for Christians but was careful not to recommend her path for Jews.

“The value of her testimony,” he emphasized instead, “is to render ever more solid the bridge of mutual understanding between Christians and Jews. . . . In the martyr, Sister Teresa Benedicta, so many differences meet and are resolved in peace.”

The 78-year-old pope has made Catholic-Jewish reconciliation one of the chief goals of his reign. He prayed at Auschwitz in 1979, and, seven years later in Rome, became the first pope ever to visit a synagogue. Under him, diplomatic ties between the Vatican and Israel were established in 1994.

In March, a Vatican document he initiated called for “an act of repentance” on behalf of Catholics who during the Holocaust did not say and do more to stop it.

But in the view of many, these efforts have fallen short. Many Jewish leaders want an outright Vatican apology for complicity in Nazi atrocities and a condemnation of Pope Pius XII for his public silence at the time.

Jews who had protested plans for Stein’s sainthood said the pope’s words at Sunday’s ceremony did not overcome their objections.

Tullia Zevi, a former president of the Italian Jewish community, said Stein was “an ambiguous choice” for sainthood that “could hurt dialogue between Christians and Jews.”

“Turning Edith Stein into a saint will not atone for the silence of Pope Pius XII nor for passive collaboration in the anti-Semitism that led to her murder,” said Shimon Samuels, European representative of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization.

Stein’s family and many Catholics as well had urged the Vatican to issue a stronger mea culpa at Sunday’s Mass. Among them was Father Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, who co-celebrated the Mass with the pope and 20 cardinals, bishops and religious leaders.

McCarthy, a member of a Greek Catholic sect that allows its clergy to marry, traveled here from Brockton, Mass., with his 14-year-old daughter, Benedicta. After swallowing Tylenol as a toddler, she escaped death from liver poisoning in a miracle attributed by the Vatican to her family’s prayers to Stein.

Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore, who also attended the ceremony, addressed the issue of Catholic guilt more explicitly than the pope did Sunday. In a letter to American Catholics last week in his role as director of the U.S. Catholic office for Jewish relations, Keeler wrote:

“While it cannot be said in any sense that the murderers were practicing Christianity in perpetrating mass murder, meditation upon the martyrdom of Edith Stein must stress the guilt of Christians and call all today to repentance, even as they rightly point to the saintliness of her life and death.”