Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The Chilean people seemed to have gotten the message. On October 5, 1988, eighteen months after the papal visit, a national plebiscite formally rejected continued military rule. On December 14, 1989, Patricio Aylwin, a Christian Democrat and leader of the opposition’s seventeen-party Coalition of Parties for Democracy, was elected President of Chile with fifty-five percent of the vote, against a government candidate who garnered less than thirty percent and a conservative opposition figure who scored a mere fifteen percent. According to the arrangements agreed to between the government and the democratic opposition in early 1989, General Pinochet remained head of the armed forces, but the military’s role in Chilean public life was considerably reduced. By the early 1990s, Chile was a stable democracy.

  Argentina

  Argentina had made its democratic transition in 1983, in the aftermath of the disastrous Falklands/Malvinas War, but the government of President Raul Alfonsín was not completely secure. The armed forces retained considerable political leverage, and the popular commitment to democracy was not so firm as to make a return to military rule unthinkable. Argentina still carried the raw scars of the military regime’s “dirty war” against guerrillas and their putative sympathizers during the 1970s, in which torture was widespread and as many as 14,000 desaparecidos [disappeared] had paid with their lives for their opposition politics. The situation facing the Pope was further complicated by the fact that the Argentine hierarchy had not been as forthright in its defense of human rights as the Chilean bishops had been.18 The papal nuncio, Archbishop Pio Laghi, had made extensive efforts on behalf of political prisoners, helping save the life of Jewish dissident Jacobo Timerman (who was exiled to Israel) and repeatedly warning his Argentine audiences that their country contained an “Auschwitz” and a “Gulag.” Bishops and lay Catholics had criticized the nuncio’s assertiveness.19

  John Paul faced a difficult situation in the other country he had helped to avoid a war over the Beagle Channel. The Church had to be reconciled within itself, and the bishops had to be called to a more forthright exercise of their responsibilities as public moral witnesses. The importance of human rights had to be stressed without inflaming the restless military and jeopardizing the fragile democracy that had begun to take root. Peace, reconciliation, and the moral foundations of civil society were the primary themes of the thirty addresses John Paul gave during a week-long visit.

  On the evening of his arrival, April 6, John Paul met with President Alfonsín and members of the government at Government House in Buenos Aires, where he spoke of the necessity of the state respecting “legitimate freedom of individuals, families, and subsidiary groups.”20 In the port city of Bahia Blanca in agricultural southern Argentina, he warned against “that modern image of greed which is consumerism,” which he counterposed to “that beautiful virtue of country people, their solidarity.”21 In a homily at Viedma, John Paul stressed Christ’s “preferential love for those most in need,” which the Lord had expressed by “evangelizing the poor” and by “announcing redemption to those in prison, to the blind and the oppressed.”22

  In Mendoza, he insisted that personal conversion was essential to creating a truly civil society.23 In Tucuman, he cautioned against the nationalism and xenophobia that had almost brought Argentina and Chile to war.24 At Rosario on April 11, he spoke at length about the lay apostolate in the world and urged Argentine Catholics not to drift to the margins of public life but “to be light and salt right where you are.”25 Young people from all over the world, who had come to Buenos Aires for World Youth Day, were urged to be “‘workers of peace’ by following the ways of justice, freedom and love.”26

  John Paul was sharply criticized by left-leaning political activists and some journalists for not meeting with a group of mothers of desaparecidos. His message about the moral foundations of the free society was hardly ambiguous, however. He sharpened its imagery on Palm Sunday, when he spoke at the World Youth Day Mass about the interrogation and torture of Christ before his crucifixion, an image with “a new reality and eloquence” today. The local reference was clear to all with ears to hear.27 Later that day, his words of admonition to the Argentine bishops were also unmistakable: “remain attentive to that which society itself, [however] secularized [or] apparently indifferent, expects from you as witnesses to Christ, as guardians of absolute values….”28

  The reminder would not have been necessary had the Pope believed those expectations were being met.

  “A DAUGHTER OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE”

  Two and a half weeks after his return from Buenos Aires, John Paul began his second pastoral pilgrimage to West Germany. Its centerpiece, and one of the most controversial acts of his pontificate, was the beatification in Cologne on May 1 of a Carmelite nun, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, more familiarly known as Edith Stein.

  The eleventh child of Siegfried and Auguste Stein, Edith Stein was born in Breslau, today’s Polish city of Wrocław, on October 12, 1891; it was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Siegfried Stein, a merchant, died at forty-eight before Edith had celebrated her second birthday. Her mother, a woman of deep Jewish piety, was left to raise seven surviving children and manage a financially troubled lumber business. She thought of Edith, her youngest, as a “last testament” from her husband. A brilliant child who lost her faith in her mother’s God in adolescence, Edith remained impressed by Frau Stein’s religious devotion.

  As she grew, Edith Stein became consumed with a passion for getting at the truth of things. This passion took a decisive intellectual turn when, during her early studies at the University of Breslau, she read the Logical Investigations of Edmund Husserl, the founding father of phenomenology. Transferring to the University of Göttingen in order to work directly with Husserl, Edith Stein quickly became one of his greatest students and met the leading figures of the phenomenological movement, including Adolf Reinach, with whose Lutheran family she became close friends. When Reinach was killed in Flanders in World War I, Edith was powerfully struck by the hope with which his young widow accepted his death. It was the young philosopher’s first experience of faith mediated by a Christian experience of the cross.29

  Edith Stein became Husserl’s graduate assistant in 1916 and moved with “the Master,” as his students called him, to the University of Freiburg, where she received the doctorate in 1917. Her religious wrestling was intensified by the political chaos of Germany’s defeat in World War I; she read the New Testament and Kierkegaard and wrote essays on the nature of human community and its relationship to the state. The moment of enlightenment came when she was visiting her friend and fellow phenomenologist Hedwig Conrad-Martius, and her husband. When her hosts went out for the evening, Edith looked through their library for something to read. She chose St. Teresa of Avila’s autobiography and quite literally could not put it down. Having stayed up the whole night reading it, she said to herself, on finishing it the next morning, “This is the truth.” Edith Stein bought a missal and a catechism, studied them, and asked the local parish priest in Bergzabern, near the Conrad-Martius farm, to baptize her. Impressed by her knowledge of Catholicism, the priest cut short the usual period of instruction. Edith Stein was baptized on January 1, 1922, taking the Christian name Teresa, with the Lutheran Hedwig Conrad-Martius as her godmother. Frau Stein wept when Edith told her of her conversion. Edith continued to attend synagogue with her mother, praying the psalms during the service out of her Latin breviary, and Frau Stein was moved: “Never have I seen anyone pray as Edith did.”

  Edith Stein had wanted to enter a Carmelite convent immediately after her conversion, but decided to wait in order not to provoke an embittered break with her mother. She taught for eight years at the Dominican high school for girls in Speyer. During this period, she began making fresh translations of Thomas Aquinas and planned a habilitation thesis that would bring phenomenology and Thomism into conversation while qualifying her to teach at the university level.

  From 1928 to 1932, Edith Stein traveled
extensively throughout Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, sketching a distinctively Christian feminism. It was a pioneering attempt to develop a Catholic understanding of women’s vocations in the contemporary world, and a challenge to the Nazi ideology, which claimed that life, for women, was “children, kitchen, and church”—period. She saw the storm clouds that threatened European life and challenged educated Catholic women to reject the strictures of “party viewpoint” through “rigorous discipline in the school of work and…the liberating power of divine grace.”30

  As anti-Semitism began to corrupt German public life, Edith Stein struggled with her desire to enter the convent and pursue a contemplative vocation. Her spiritual director and friends continued to insist that she was too valuable to the Church as a public figure and ought to remain in active life. Her brief tenure as a lecturer at the University of Münster was cut short by new anti-Semitic regulations and she turned down an offer of a teaching position in South America. Finally, on April 30, 1933, she was at prayer in a parish church when she felt that “the Good Shepherd was giving…his consent” to her entering the Carmelites. After a wrenching, emotionally draining farewell with her mother and her family, Edith Stein, forty-two, entered the Carmelite convent at Cologne. She was clothed with the habit on April 15, 1934, taking the religious name “Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce”—Teresa, Blessed by the Cross.

  Her superiors asked her to continue her scholarly and popular writing. She revised her habilitation thesis into her major philosophical work, Finite and Eternal Being, and wrote three other books, including The Science of the Cross—all the while living the rigorous prayer life of a Carmelite. (On Sundays she would often say, “Thank God, I don’t have to write today. Today I can pray.”) Edith Stein’s mother died on September 14, 1936, unreconciled to her daughter’s decision to enter the convent, which she regarded as her final break with the Jewish people. Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross made her final vows on April 21, 1938, learning only later that Edmund Husserl had professed his faith in God on his deathbed shortly before. After the Kristallnacht of November 8, 1938, Edith Stein worried that her presence in the Cologne Carmel was endangering the other nuns. The prioress eventually agreed and arranged for her to be transferred to the Carmelite convent at Echt in Holland. She left Cologne on December 31, 1938.

  Edith Stein had long had a premonition that her fate and the fate of the Jewish people, whom she believed she had never abandoned, were providentially intertwined. After arriving in Echt, she wrote her last testament. Its conclusion suggests an intuition of what lay ahead, and an embracing of it in “the science of the cross”:

  I joyfully accept in advance the death God has appointed for me, in perfect submission to his most holy will. May the Lord accept my life and death for the honor and glory of his name, for the needs of his holy Church—especially for the preservation, sanctification, and final perfecting of our holy Order, and in particular for the Carmels of Cologne and Echt—for the Jewish people, that the Lord may be received by his own and his kingdom come in glory, for the deliverance of Germany and peace throughout the world, and finally for all my relatives living and dead and all whom God has given me: may none of them be lost.

  Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Holland in May 1940. The “science of the cross” now became the overwhelming reality of her life. As the SS noose tightened on the Jews of Holland, Edith Stein realized that she was putting her convent in danger. She and her prioress tried to make arrangements for her transfer to a Carmel at Le Paquier in Switzerland, along with her sister Rosa, who had converted to Catholicism after Frau Stein’s death and was the lay doorkeeper at the Echt convent. But there was no room for Rosa at Le Paquier, and Edith refused to leave without her. On July 26, 1942, a pastoral letter from the Primate of the Netherlands was read in all the Catholic churches of the country, condemning the deportation of Dutch Jews to the death camps. In retaliation, all Jewish converts to Catholicism were arrested on August 2, including members of religious orders. At 5 P.M., the SS came to the Echt Carmel for Edith Stein and her sister. After stops at Roermond, Amersfoort, and a transfer camp at Westerbork, they were transported east by rail beginning on August 7, arriving at Auschwitz II-Birkenau on August 9. There, at the railroad tracks where fates were instantly decided, Edith and Rosa Stein were selected for immediate execution and died in the gas chambers that same day.31

  One of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century, Edith Stein was a “paradigmatic figure” for John Paul II, as he once put it.32 She was a modern woman and a proto-feminist, a first-class intellectual and a converted skeptic. She had found liberating truth in Catholicism, not obscurantism or patriarchy. She was a contemplative who had an active life, and who saw her scholarly work and her intense life of prayer as a service to the world. She was a witness to the truth, who had defied cruel material force with the power of faith. She was a German who had lived the providential entanglement of Judaism and Christianity.

  The cause for her beatification had been introduced by the archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Joseph Frings, in the early 1960s. In 1983, Frings’s successor, Cardinal Joseph Höffner, formally proposed that she be beatified as a martyr. Poland’s Cardinal Józef Glemp seconded Höffner’s proposal. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints eventually agreed to process the cause on the dual grounds of both Edith Stein’s virtues and the manner of her death. On January 25, 1987, with John Paul II present, the Congregation made the unprecedented decision to confirm Edith Stein as both a confessor, a woman who had lived a life of heroic virtue, and a martyr.33

  The decision settled the question of Edith Stein’s beatification, for as a martyr, she could be beatified without a confirming miracle. The announcement of her impending beatification launched a controversy in Israel, Western Europe, and North America, however. Some Jewish scholars and organizational leaders, arguing that Edith Stein had died solely because she was a Jew, claimed that this was an attempt to “Christianize” the Holocaust. Others feared that the Pope would use the beatification to launch a new wave of Catholic proselytization. Underlying at least some of the agitation was the suspicion that this was a ploy by the Church to deflect attention from its own historic role in European anti-Semitism. Jewish representatives made their concerns known personally to John Paul.34 He responded with one of the great sermons of the pontificate, at the beatification Mass in Cologne on May 1, 1987.

  Its very first sentence honored Edith Stein in her Jewishness, and in her identification with the ancient biblical theme of redemptive atonement: “Today we greet in profound honor and holy joy a daughter of the Jewish people, rich in wisdom and courage, among these blessed men and women. Having grown up in the strict traditions of Israel, and having lived a life of virtue and self-denial in a religious order, she demonstrated her heroic character on the way to the extermination camp. United with our crucified Lord, she gave her life ‘for genuine peace’ and ‘for the people.’”

  The first biblical reading of the Mass had been taken from the Hebrew Bible’s book of Esther, the story of a daughter of Israel who had prayed for the deliverance of her people from the archenemy Haman. The liturgy of beatification, John Paul said, “places this more than two-thousand-year-old prayer for help in the mouth of Edith Stein, a servant of God and a daughter of Israel in our century.” A new “insane ideology” and a new archenemy had arisen, with a “new plan for the destruction of the Jews,” to be undertaken “in the name of a wretched form of racism and carried out mercilessly.” John Paul then recounted the death of a woman killed precisely because she was a Jew and a Catholic, and who had offered her impending death for the safety of her people:

  On leaving their convent [in Echt] Edith took her sister by the hand and said, “Come, we will go for our people.” On the strength of Christ’s willingness to sacrifice himself for others, she saw in her seeming impotence a way to render a final service to her people. A few years previously she had compared herself with Queen Esther in exile at the Persian
court. In one of her letters we read: “I am confident that the Lord has taken my life for all…I always have to think of Queen Esther who was taken from her people for the express purpose of standing before the king for her people. I am the very poor, weak, and small Esther, but the King who selected me is infinitely great and merciful.”

  The truth that Edith Stein had found and for which she was prepared to die—the truth that had found and possessed her—was not abstract and intellectual, but concrete and personal. Like other modern souls who found religious belief untenable, she had sought the truth in her studies and in her mind. But she found a deeper truth—“not the truth of philosophy, but rather the truth in person, the loving person of God.” Her life, in which she “had sought the truth and found God” was a lesson in intellectual openness, an example of true intellectual freedom.

  Avoiding no issue, John Paul then took up the question of Edith Stein’s conversion and its impact on her relationship with her family and with the Jewish people: “For Edith Stein, baptism as a Christian was by no means a break with her Jewish heritage. Quite on the contrary she said: ‘I had given up my practice of the Jewish religion as a girl of fourteen. My return to God made me feel Jewish again.’ She was always mindful of the fact that she was related to Christ ‘not only in a spiritual sense, but also in blood terms.’” And so, John Paul said, “in the extermination camp she died as a daughter of Israel ‘for the glory of the Most Holy Name’ and, at the same time, as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, literally, ‘blessed by the Cross….’”