The Edith Stein Guild, formed in memory of the Jewish-born philosopher-nun who converted to Catholicism and who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942, will sponsor a mass in her memory at St. Patrick’s Cathedral here this Saturday.
The mass will be held on the 37th anniversary of Edith Stein’s death and in memory of all who died in the Holocaust. While some of her Catholic admirers search for evidence that might qualify her for sainthood, they also stress her martyrdom for Jews and Christians. The Edith Stein Guild is a Roman Catholic Society dedicated to better relations with Jews but specifically bars evangelization of Jews.
The Rev. John Kelley of Rockaway, Queens, plans to say in his homily Saturday at the mass that since Dr. Stein’s murder “we are free to realize that a new prophetic type has risen among us. By her death, even more than by her life, she condemns the demonic in our world.”
Born in 1891 in Breslau, then in Germany, now Wroclaw, Poland, Dr. Stein was the youngest of seven children in an Orthodox home. She became on agnostic at 13 and remained one until she was 21 when she began to study the views of Edmund Husserl; the German philosopher in Freiburg, Germany, where she became his assistant and a leading German philosopher.
ALWAYS CONSIDERED HERSELF A JEW
She became a Catholic in 1923 and taught at Catholic schools in Germany and Austria but she always emphasized she considered herself a Jew. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, she joined the Carmelite Order and became Sister Teresa Benedicta. In 1938 she was transferred from Cologne to The Netherlands for her own safety but she and another nun, Sister Rosa, were arrested by the SS in 1942.
In his homily, Father Kelley, who is active in ecumenical work between Jews and Christians, will note that in April, 1973, the French Bishops Committee for Relations with Jews issued a statement emphasizing Jewish ties to Israel and stressing that “Jews are called to glorify the Divine Name by the holiness of their lives. Within the Jewish community this is known as a vocation to righteousness, or Tzedekah.”
Father Kelley also will say that “if the loss of the lives of Edith Stein and the millions of Holocaust martyrs says anything at all, it certainly says that we, the witnesses of today, must accept a greater responsibility for our world and for its social structures.”
Msgr. Nicholas Moore of Our Lady of Victory Church in Manhattan, headquarters of the Edith Stein Guild, said one of the activities of the Guild is to investigate incidents of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism at American colleges.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
