Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (93 page)

Among the Carmelites, she was known as Sister Benedicta of the Cross, but on October 11, 1998, in a solemn canonization in St. Peter's Square, Pope John Paul II was the first to refer to her as Saint Teresa Benedicta. She was made a saint of the Church not because of her groundbreaking work in philosophy, her feminism, or her devoted life as a religious Catholic, but because a week after being hauled away from Echt, she was gassed in Auschwitz. In his sermon at the canonization of the woman he called "this eminent daughter of Israel and faithful daughter of the Church," John Paul II said, "May her witness constantly strengthen the bridge of mutual understanding between Jews and Christians."
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But the canonization of the convert from Judaism elicited more antagonism than mutuality,
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and was taken by many Jews as an insult. Vatican officials reacted defensively. One fired back with the reminder that the Church has long suffered from attacks by Jews, especially Bolsheviks—a rejoinder that seemed especially pointed, being made by Father Peter Gumpel, who, as we saw, is the priest advocating for the canonization of Pius XII.
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But presumably most Catholics were mystified and saddened by the dispute, for they recognized in Edith Stein the story of an innocent woman whose spiritual hunger led her to identify with the cross of Jesus Christ, and who then, as Christians thought of it, underwent a contemporary crucifixion. Like many Catholics, I was led to a new awareness of the Holocaust because of her. I was a young seminarian in the early 1960s when I picked up a book in the seminary library entitled
Walls Are Crumbling: Seven Jewish Philosophers Discover Christ,
by John M. Oesterreicher. One chapter was "Edith Stein: Witness for Love."
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What Anne Frank was just then doing for society at large—making real the horror of the still deflected genocide by giving one victim a name, a face, a voice, and a story—Edith Stein did for me and many Catholics. The complexities of her witness never entered our minds.

The complaints of some Jews about the canonization of Edith Stein amounted to questions about an implicit supersessionism, the idea that Judaism has been replaced by Christianity. As we have seen, the Catholic Church had officially rejected supersessionism,
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but when Stein was routinely referred to by Catholics as "a young woman in search of the truth," a phrase the pope used in his sermon,
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Jews were hard put to deflect the suspicion that even now the truth was being defined in exclusively Christian terms. At first, Stein had been put forward as a candidate for sainthood in the category of "confessor," meaning that her exemplary life was what had qualified her for reverence, but Pope John Paul II had insisted on honoring her as a formally declared "martyr" for the faith.
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Once again, the old Christian tendency to move death to the forefront of identity had asserted itself, but of course in this instance the means and place of death were essential. Another factor may have been at play. In order to be named a saint of the Catholic Church, a candidate must be credited with having caused two miracles, or, in the case of a martyr, one. So by declaring Edith Stein a martyr, the pope was simplifying what was needed to declare her a saint.

In proclaiming Edith Stein a martyr, the Church emphasized that she was killed as a Catholic, in retaliation for an anti-Nazi protest by Catholic bishops. But to Jewish critics, she died as a Jew, pure and simple. If she was a martyr, weren't all who died with her martyrs as well? And doesn't the very idea of Christian martyrdom, with its opening to the infinite consolations of redemption, do a further violence to Jewish victims for most of whom such consolations would have remained forever unthinkable? In these ways, didn't her canonization amount, as some Jews put it, to a "Christianizing" of the Holocaust—the ultimate supersessionism? Edith Stein, in other words, could be taken by Jews, and was, as the symbol of a theology of resurrection imposed on their dead. The cross at Auschwitz is a sacrilege.

Pope John Paul II had indicated in his sermon at the canonization that Stein's feast day, August 9, the presumed date of her murder, was to be a day on which "we must also remember the Shoah." Jews asked why Catholics could not have remembered the Shoah on the late April day that Jews themselves had already long marked as the observance of Yom Hashoah. Was the liturgical calendar also to be a realm of supersessionism?

For Jews, though, the implications of the canonization had become more problematic because of other events. One week before the Edith Stein ceremony, the pope had named as "blessed" Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, the wartime primate of the Catholic Church in Croatia. We already took note of Stepinac's beatification, but seeing it in the context of the Stein canonization suggests more fully why questions keep surfacing. After the war, Stepinac was condemned by Tito's government as a Nazi collaborator, and while he may not have been a collaborator, the church over which Stepinac presided during the war had been mortally compromised by the pro-Nazi Ustashi regime and was implicated in many crimes, especially against the "schismatic" Serbs.
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It did not assuage such suspicions when, not long after Edith Stein's canonization, reports surfaced—I was the main reporter—that the Vatican had dishonestly manipulated its own saint-making procedures, certifying as a Stein-sponsored "miracle" (the single one that was needed) the recovery of a sick child that a supervising medical expert insisted—in formal but secret testimony to Church investigators—was routine. The child was cured not by a miraculous intervention but by standard medicine, an outcome that "was what was to be expected."
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The canonization itself was based on a knowing deception at the highest levels of the Catholic Church.

The canonization of Edith Stein, in other words, revealed the lengths to which the Church was prepared to go to renegotiate its own history during the Holocaust. This woman's story is being told to make Catholics victims of the Nazis along with Jews, and it is being told to reinforce, again, the centrality of martyrdom in faith, and to reaffirm the religious superiority of Christianity over Judaism. But there is another way to tell the story of Edith Stein—as an object lesson in Church denial.

The saint's story as a Catholic began with Teresa of ûvila as the source of her conversion, and as her namesake. But nothing reveals the painful complexity of a Jew's conversion to Catholicism more sharply than Saint Teresa's own history, which we touched on earlier. Her grandfather Juan'Sánchez de Cepeda was a
converso,
but he had "relapsed" from Christianity back into Judaism. In 1485, he appeared before the Inquisition in Toledo, along with his wife and children, including Teresa's father, who was a child of six at the time. They were given the choice of reconverting to Christianity or being burned alive. As Saint Teresa's luminous career shows, they decided in favor of the former.
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Edith Stein's story casts the Catholic memory back into that panorama of forced conversion of Jews by Catholics, of which the Inquisition was only one peak in a range.

Here we find the full significance of the move to make a saint of Pope Pius IX—the nineteenth-century antimodern pope who issued the "Syllabus of Errors" and demanded that Vatican I proclaim his doctrinal infallibility. For our purposes, the thing to note about this putative saint is that he approved the unwilled baptism of Jewish children in territory under his control, and that he personally joined in sponsoring the kidnapping of a Jewish child.
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The great-great-niece of that child called the beatification of Pius IX the "reopening of a wound."
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That and other recent moves show that the Church, despite a contrary rhetoric, has yet to purge itself of a deep antagonism to the independent integrity of the Jewish religion, and that is why honoring a Jewish convert as a saint was bound to raise questions.

In 1933, a decade after her conversion and only weeks after the Fulda Episcopal Conference lifted its ban on Catholic membership in the Nazi Party, Edith Stein took her first extraordinary initiative as a Catholic, one that received little attention in the Vatican's 1998 canonization celebration. Before Easter in 1933, as she would later date it, she wrote to Pope Pius XI to request a private audience during which to plead for an encyclical condemning Nazi antisemitism.
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At about the same time, probably while she was waiting for a reply, she was informed by her employer, a Catholic teachers' college in Münster, that she could no longer keep her position as a teacher because she was "non-Aryan,"
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although, as a Catholic institution, this college would not yet have been required to take such a step.
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That spring, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who had interviewed Stein for a professorship and rejected her,
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gave his notorious pro-Nazi speech at Freiburg.

We do not know what such events meant to Stein, but it was now that she began to consider acting on a long-deferred wish to enter the contemplative life. That same April, she applied for admission to the Carmelite convent in Cologne.
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In philosophy, she had demonstrated, as the scholar Rachel Feldhay Brenner put it, "the tendency to incorporate, rather than eliminate, to reaffirm, rather than reject."
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Her contemplative vocation, if anything, would sharpen that method, enabling a plunge into Christian spirituality, while events simultaneously forced a deepening of her Jewish identity, even as she redefined it according to the dominant supersessionism of the Church.

Around the time of her application to the Carmelites, Edith Stein received her answer from the Vatican. She was invited to attend, with numerous other people, a purely ceremonial audience with the pope. There was no question of a private word with His Holiness; uninterested in the honorific, she declined the invitation, appealing the refusal of her request. She then received a papal blessing in the mail.
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This effort of Stein's to elicit a Vatican statement in defense of Jews is often assumed to have been an attempt to get the pope to influence the Nazis, which defenders of the papal silence always assert would have been impossible, given Hitler's diabolical character. But in 1933, Hitler was not "Hitler" yet. And Edith Stein would have already understood that it was her fellow Catholics who needed influencing. As an encyclical had mobilized them to "passive resistance" once before, might not a firm word from Rome have done so again?

After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Edith Stein fled from the convent in Cologne to Echt. It was on December 19 that she wrote to a friend, "I have often wondered since, whether my letter"—to the pope—"may sometimes have come to mind."
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On July 6, 1942, Anne Frank's family moved into the hidden attic. A week later, a group of Dutch churchmen sent a telegram to the Nazi authorities denouncing the deportation of Jews from Holland. They added a special plea for baptized Jews, which proved to be a mistake, because it put the Nazis in a position to bargain with the Church. The Nazis replied that if the clergy ceased its protest, baptized Jews would be exempted from deportation. The open arrests and deportation of Jews continued, and at least some of the Dutch Catholic bishops could not accept the tacit agreement. The archbishop of Utrecht, perhaps in cooperation with other Catholic bishops, wrote a pastoral letter to the Catholics of the Netherlands that included the text of the telegram, denouncing "the measures already undertaken against Jews" as "contrary to the deepest conviction of the Dutch people and ... to God's commands of justice and mercy." The Nazi reaction was swift. Something like two hundred Catholic-baptized Jews were promptly arrested, including, on August 2, Edith Stein and her sister Rosa.
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Years later, a Dutch official who had met the Carmelite nun in the transit camp at Westerbork, in northern Holland, reported that he asked if he could help her, apparently referring to her obvious status as one of the baptized (she was wearing a full habit). She demurred, saying, "Why should there be an exception made in the case of a particular group? Wasn't it fair that baptism not be allowed to become an advantage?"
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The point of the story is not to honor Sister Benedicta for going willingly to her death, an emphasis the Vatican gave it in naming her a martyr. This is especially so since there are also reports that she sought in Westerbork to provoke an intervention by the Swiss consul.
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What is notable, and what the Vatican fails to emphasize, is that, at the end of her life, Sister Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein, rejected the distinction between baptized and nonbaptized Jews as defining the circle of Catholic concern. And more important, that she tried to fight Nazism in the only way she knew, via the Church. The Dutch bishops had joined her in that, but few others in the Catholic hierarchy ever did.
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The true epiphany of Edith Stein's story is that, in a visceral rejection of Christian theology, she refused to see the Jews as disadvantaged before God. Because of the world into which she was thrust, she was forced out of the supersessionist mold.
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' That said, it is also important to acknowledge that many of Sister Benedicta's earlier assumptions about the guilt of her "unbelieving people" reflected Christian religious antisemitism. "It is the shadow of the Cross which is falling upon my people," she is reported to have said in 1939. "If only they would see this! It is the fulfillment of the curse which my people called upon its own head."
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In drafting her will some years before she died, she is understood to have offered her life in atonement for Jewish unbelief.
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On the occasion of her canonization,
L'Osservatore Romano
honored her for saying to Rosa, as the SS took them off, "Come, we are going for our people." That "for" implies not only an expiation, but two thousand years of superiority, which is why the saint's niece, Suzanne Batzdorff, who is Jewish, insists that her aunt's fate was "to die with her people, not for her people."
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