During the month of August, the Catholic Church celebrates the feast
days of two people who were killed in the concentration camp in Auschwitz,
Poland. Edith Stein, aka., St. Teresa Benedicta
of the Cross, was murdered in Auschwitz on August 9, 1942, and Maximilian Kolbe
was murdered in Auschwitz on August 14, 1941.
The dates were set aside by the Church in their honor on the dates of
their deaths, today and next Tuesday .
Both were canonized as saints of the Catholic Church, Stein on October
11, 1998 and Kolbe on October 10, 1982, both by St. John Paul II.
To include all that can be said about these two saints is impossible in
in the short space of this blog. Indeed,
entire books have been written. I am
thinking this morning about the facts associated with their lives that assisted
their causes for canonization.
First, Stein. She was the
seventh child of a prosperous Jewish family in southern Poland, not far,
actually, from Auschwitz. She was raised
in the Jewish faith and was known for her brilliant mind. She studied atheistic philosophy at a
university in Germany and, as a result of her studies, abandoned the Jewish
faith and became an atheist. She became a respected professor of philosophy
at the University of Freiburg in Germany and became very well known. However, she would soon change her mind about
God after studying the life of the great Catholic mystic and Doctor of the
Church, St. Teresa of Avila. So stunned
was she about what she read in this book that she began a formal and thorough
study of the Catholic religion. She was
baptized a Catholic on January 1, 1922, along with her sister, Rosa. After this, she became a Carmelite nun at
their cloistered convent in Cologne, Germany, an order founded by Saint Teresa
of Avila so many centuries earlier. She
transferred to a similar cloister in Holland after the Nazis burned her home to
the ground. Here, she wrote two books of
her own that are known as deep spiritual works.
After the Nazis invaded Holland, they captured her and Rosa and
transported them to Auschwitz where they were treated as Jews and were both
marched into the gas chamber. Her
writings, following the lead of St. Teresa of Avila, were instrumental in
herself being declared a Doctor of the Church.
Second, Kolbe. He was also from
Poland, born in 1894. At the age of 12,
he claimed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary. A few years later, at obviously a very young
age, he was allowed to enter a seminary.
He took final vows in 1914 and was sent to Rome to attend the Pontifical
Gregorian University, where he, too, studied philosophy and obtained his
doctorate. He was ordained a priest in
1918. This was followed by foreign
travel to China and Japan where he engaged in religious activity and founded
monasteries. Poor health caused him to
return to Poland in 1936. He was
arrested and sent to Auschwitz in 1941.
He is perhaps best known for the circumstances that caused his death (by
fire in a crematory). The Nazis arbitrarily
selected ten prisoners to die because an 11th had escaped. One of those condemned began to wail and ask
for mercy. Kolbe, feeling compassion for
the man, asked to be killed in his place.
The Nazis obliged.
The stories of these two great saints of the Catholic Church are moving
reminders of how Catholic men and women, people of great faith, are often
murdered for their faith. We call them
martyrs. Martyrdom often leads to canonization. Some may want to draw
parallels between these and those of other religions who are killed defending
their faith by seeking out and killing so-called infidels. There is a difference. Catholic martyrs defend their faith, to be
sure, but never does such death involve violence of any kind against another.
St. Teresa Benedicta and St. Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us. Amen!
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