Suffering With Joy

Judaism and the Holocaust – St. Edith Stein

April 28, 2010

During a recent trip to the Dallas area I had occasion to purchase Roy Shoeman’s excellent book, Salvation Is from the Jews: The Role of Judaism in Salvation History. In another post I will write a review, but today I want to bring you some words of St. Edith Stein he highlighted that have special significance for those seeking to understand suffering and death in today’s world.

As many contemplatives do, Carmelite nun Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (what a prescient choice of name in religion that was!) kept notes on insights she obtained during prayer.  As a Jewish convert to Catholicism, she saw what the Nazis were doing to the Jews in light of the Cross. She wrote of a prayer she made during a holy hour in the convent:

I spoke with the Savior to tell him that I realized it was His Cross that was now being laid upon the Jewish people, that the few who understood this had the responsibility of carrying it in the name of all, and that I myself was willing to do this, if He would only show me how.  I left the service with the inner conviction that I had been heard, but uncertain as ever as to what “carrying the Cross” might mean for me.

Later she wrote:

I understood the Cross as the destiny of God’s people, which was beginning to be apparent at the time (1933).  I felt that those who understood the Cross of Christ should take it upon themselves on everybody’s behalf…. Beneath the Cross I understood the destiny of God’s people.

St. Edith Stein (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) 1938 passport photo

All religious write a final testament and St. Teresa Benedicta’s spirituality is evident in hers, penned in 1939:

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 Carmel 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.

She was, with her sister Rosa and a train transport composed entirely of baptized Jews, murdered at Auschwitz.

When reading her words I could not help thinking of the condition of our nation today – the blatant attacks on human life by those in power, the war on marriage and the family waged by perverted souls and government bureaucrats, the corruption of the power elite, and all those who become co-operators in the various evils designed to separate man from God, for that is the final goal of the Enemy. The similarities between the leaders and supporters of Nazi Germany and America’s leaders and their supporters today are much too close in spite of the vigorous denials given voice by the press.

As St. Edith Stein did in her day, do we understand what our society is doing and becoming in the light of the Cross? Underneath all the ideologies of the day, the war is between man and the principalities and powers as St. Paul wrote in Eph. 6:12. A reversal of the path our most powerful leaders are currently on calls for extreme sacrifice. Are we ready as St. Edith Stein was to “joyfully accept in advance” what God has chosen for us to suffer, even death, for the salvation of souls, for our country, for the conversion of sinners?

Tags: suffering