c. 1998 Religion News Service
WASHINGTON _ Cardinal William Keeler, the U.S. Roman Catholic Church’s top official for Jewish-Catholic relations, has told Catholic bishops the forthcoming canonization of Edith Stein _ a Jewish convert to Catholicism _ should not be used as either an excuse to proselytize Jews or to”appropriate”the Holocaust for the Catholic Church.
Pope John Paul II is scheduled to canonize Stein _ make her saint _ on Sunday, Oct. 11 at the Vatican. Stein, who had converted to Catholicism and become a nun, was executed by the Nazis on Aug. 9, 1942.
In an Oct. 2 memo to the bishops made public Monday, Keeler noted the process of making Stein a saint _ she was beatified, or declared blessed and a martyr of the church in 1987 _ has been one of the most sensitive issues in Catholic-Jewish relations over the past decade.”Indeed, the past decade since the beatification has taught us the immense complexity of the issues, both theological and historical, that the figure of Edith Stein raises for our dialogue with the Jewish people,”Keeler said.
Stein was born in 1891 in what is now Wroclaw, Poland, and raised in a Jewish household. A writer and teacher, she became, by some accounts, an atheist and then converted to Catholicism in 1930 and became a Carmelite nun.
In 1938 she was sent to a convent in the Netherlands to evade Nazi persecution but after the Dutch bishops issued a a pastoral letter denouncing the deportation of Jews, the Gestapo began rounding up Catholics who had converted from Judaism. Stein was sent to Auschwitz.
Because she had been declared a martyr, the church required that only one _ rather than the normal two _ miracle be attributed to her for her to be declared a saint. The Vatican verified the healing of Benedicta McCarthy, in Brockton, Mass., in 1987 after the toddler swallowed a massive dose of Tylenol, as the miracle.
In the new memo,”Advisory on the Implications for Catholic-Jewish Relations of the Canonization of Edith Stein,”which updated a 1987 statement by the Bishops Committee for Ecumenical and International Affairs, Keeler said two underlying concerns had been raised by Jewish scholars and groups about the canonization.”The first was that the raising up of a convert of Jewish background for Catholic veneration might occasion the development of organized movements within the church to proselytize and convert other Jews.” Such movements, Keeler said,”while perhaps well-intentioned, have almost invariably led to severe diminishment of the religious freedom of the Jewish people in Christian lands, and at times to forced conversions, expulsions, and other forms of persecution.”Happily,”Keeler said, the bishops’ Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs is able to report there has”not been any hint of an organized conversionary effort using Edith Stein’s name being developed among Catholics.”Her intellectual and spiritual journey, from which Catholics have so much to learn, is presented as her own, a model for Catholics, not a model for Jews,”the memo said.
The second major concern raised by Jewish scholars in conversations with the bishops, Keeler said, was that”raising up a Jewish convert as symbolic of the millions of victims of the Shoah (Holocaust) might lead to an appropriation by the church of the Holocaust itself, by making it seem that the church, not the Jewish people, was the primary victim of Nazi genocide.” A similar concern is at the center of the current dispute between some Polish Catholics and Jews over a Catholic campaign to erect some 150 crosses at the Auschwitz death camp.
But Keeler said the beatification of Stein is seen by the church”as a unique occasion for joint Catholic-Jewish reflection and reconciliation.”In honoring Edith Stein, the church wishes to honor all the millions of Jewish victims of the Shoah,”the advisory said.”Christian veneration of Edith Stein does not lessen but rather strengthens our need to preserve and honor the memory of the Jewish victims”and will generate among Catholics”a continuing and deepened examination of conscience regarding the sins of commission and omission perpetrated by Christians against Jews during the dark years of World War II, as well as reflection on those Christians who risked their very lives to save their Jewish brothers and sisters.” Keeler’s memo quoted a number of Jewish scholars, however, who said that while they were grateful for the bishops’ earlier statement in 1987,”major obstacles continue to exist.” Among those issues still needing to be resolved is the”painful paradox”of her identity _”that while Edith Stein died precisely because the tormentors of the Jews considered her to be Jewish, to those in the midst of whom she suffered and died she cannot have been deemed Jewish at all,”the memo said, quoting Rabbi Daniel Polish.
Added Keeler:”This is a most delicate matter and one that will require much serious dialogue, not so much to resolve as simply to clarify.”One the one hand, the issue of `Who is a Jew?’ is not entirely resolved within the Jewish community. On the other hand, the Catholic church can only and doubtlessly should accept at face value the integrity of individuals who come to it through God’s gift of faith to them.”And in Edith Stein’s mind, we know, she never for a moment felt that she had ceased to be a Jew. … As a church, we cannot pretend that she died as anything other than one of the millions of Jews murdered in the Shoah.”
DEA END ANDERSON