Description: Here is the text of Dr. Oben's lecture, EDITH STEIN, WARRIOR FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE , presented at the CIC on August 9th at 5:30PM, Feast Day.

EDITH STEIN, WARRIOR FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE

Kindness and truth shall meet Justice and peace shall kiss Truth shall spring out of the earth, And justice shall look down from heaven

Perhaps some of you love these lines from Psalm 85 as I do. Certainly Edith Stein did: she was a great lover of all the psalms, first as a Jew and then as a Catholic. I read these lines, first, because they are so apropos of our saint; and secondly, because they give witness to the righteousness of the Jewish people among whom she was raised. In her early youth she did separate herself from the Halachic way of life (that is, to live according to the Judaic prescriptions). However, after she entered the Church, she rediscovered the beauty of her Jewish heritage and sensed the continuation of Judaism within her as a Catholic. When she died she still believed another Jewish teaching, that to achieve holiness, one needs to walk humbly with God in His justice. We probably all know, Edith Stein was born in Germany. That was in 1891. She writes that, no matter where her journey will takes her, she believes that God has worked out every detail of her life in His providential plan. Is this not a shocking statement from a woman who was soon to die at Auschwitz? This happened in 1942, exactly 63 years ago today. The Catholic calendar cites this day as her official feast day, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She is the first Jew since the days of the Apostles to be canonized. Let's trace her remarkable, unique journey. We could not call her a peaceful child: she was subject to terrible tantrums. This changed when she was six: she witnessed an adult in a fit of anger and realized the ugliness. After that she was quiet and introspective. From childhood she was devoted to the concept of truth—its pristine purity—reality as it is. And this became the core of her as person. But despite the fact that she had a deep interior life, she loved social life and people, family and friends. She pursued all the normal activities of youth: dancing, art, theater, tennis, canoeing, hiking. She was artistic and creative, with a great sense of humor that too often took the form of a very caustic wit. Yet she was loved and popular because she was a very caring person. Her level of social consciousness became acute, and she began to read the daily newspaper. At high school she was an ardent suffragette and even attended some socialist events. During World War I she was a fierce Prussian and served for six months as a Red Cross Nurse. She became deeply immersed in the problems of inter-personal relations and the person in society. She writes, “My love for history was no mere romantic absorption in the past. Closely associated with it was a passionate participation in current political events as history in the making. Both of these interests probably sprang from an extraordinarily strong social conscience, a feeling for the solidarity not only of all mankind but also of smaller social entities.” Her doctoral dissertation was on the theme of empathy, which she describes as the necessary catalyst in our relations with others. By substituting ourselves for another person in the other's experience, we understand not only the other but also learn about ourselves. Our values develop as we embrace others, for recognition of another person demands our respect for the other. Hebrew Scripture describes the creation of humanity as one family. As each person is an image of God, this must embrace every religion, culture and race. Edith writes that empathy between the “I” and “the other” is the basis of social relationship. Then followed works regarding the human condition such as “Individual and Community”. Always for her it is the spiritual person who is nucleus of a just society. Community is created by the shared experience of its empathetic members. Solidarity forms by the likeness of intention, values and action in the community. A consciousness of the “we” dictates that each person is responsible for all and all for the one. The living, united community is the cradle of “characteristics that develop only through personal association, such as humility and pride, submissiveness and defiance, excellence and affability, comradeship and solidarity, in short, all social virtues and vices.” And the meaning of communal experience educates us because it unites us to all persons throughout time, to an awareness of human oneness, of the unity of humanity itself. The differences we recognize in others can enrich us in this recognition of a common humanity. Adolph Hitler had been proclaiming his ideology loudly since 1921 when he became leader of the National German Workers' Party. He spawned his two-volume work Mein Kampf in 1924 and 1926. Edith Stein's text A Treatise on the State was published in 1925, and she is clearly combating Hitler's ideology. She warns that the sovereignty of a state is fragile, because, at any time, citizens can nullify the government's mandate. The peoples' moral strength must press the need for rights in order for the right to become civil law. She urges the citizens to fight for moral integrity and human values. She warns against the shackling of religious values of the citizens by the state. Instead it is to foster the free development of its citizens and secure heir lives. By the term “nation” we imply a culture founded on unique folklore, a national personality, and a consciousness of spiritual unity and common values. Edith raises questions very relevant to our world scene today. She asks: “What is the possibility of a combination of nations in one state?” and “….Must a state be built on a uniform ethnic community, or is a state possible which embraces in itself a majority of independent and demarcated units of people?” She answers in part: “Only where state loyalty and national personality are in conflict does danger exist that one of them will go down, or even both. This is just as possible with a uniform nationality as with more than one, where one people is privileged at the expense of the other.” There can be no international peace, she writes, unless there is justice in every nation. She could have been speaking of the violent confrontations between peoples we witness constantly, and the resulting disbursements of states leading to masses of people on the move. As a philosopher, she was informed by the science of phenomenology: this is a study of the essence and structure of all phenomena: concepts, events, things, persons, judgments, etc. She finally found the Supreme Reality—God—and became a Catholic in 1922. Under the influence of Aquinas, she is now a Christian Philosopher. Her resulting works are so important that John Paul II, in his encyclical, Faith and Reason, cites her as one of the important Christian philosophers of our day, along with Gilson, Berdyaev and Maritain. During 1928 to 1933, while Hitler was gaining more and more of a following, Stein was giving public lectures throughout Europe for the Catholic Women's Movement that was highly supported by the Church. She spoke out fearlessly against the ideology of National Socialism: the sickness of the time, the disorders and lack of principle, the dehumanization of sexuality, and the loss of spiritual orientation. In opposition to Hitler's slogan designed to denigrate women, “Kirche, Kueche, Kinder” (Church, Kitchen, Children), she urged them to become informed and to assume their civic responsibilities, for politics was now a religious concern. Women were to be active members of society and church as well as the heart of the family. Of course, she pioneered for equal educational and professional opportunities for women. As a philosopher as well as advocate for human rights, she analyzed the natures of man and woman, their relationships, and roles in society. These talks have been published as Essays on Woman. Pope John Paul II acknowledged the great influence these lectures have had on the Church and on society. Edith Stein conceived of Christ's redemptive action as God's supreme justice, and she wanted the Passion of Christ to be hers. She takes upon herself God's work: she writes that once you are a friend of God you can do nothing else. Her concern in prayer and writing is that each individual may find total fullness as a human being, as an individual person, as a man or woman. She writes that God intends this for each one of us. We are made in His image and likeness, and He plants this image as a seed to be brought to perfect fruition. He helps us through His grace, but needed also are education and our own personal abandonment to an excellence of being. This pursuit of an excellence of being as His image is the meaning of our lives. This requires God-like attributes: love, compassion, justice and the free surrender of self to our Creator. This total surrender of self to our Creator is the highest act of personal freedom. Her faith in Christ was absolute. Yet she states that she cannot believe that salvation depends on adherence to any one religion. This was more than thirty years before the Declarations of Vatican Council II in the 60s. She strongly believed that those who are searching for truth are really searching for God, whether they know it or not. This to her means the non-believer as well as believer. And, she writes, because Christ died to redeem all humanity, the Mystical Body of Christ includes all human beings, except those who willfully choose to stay in sin. There is only one Holy Spirit and this is the same spirit who spoke through the prophets. So the Jews also are included in the Mystical Body of Christ. She writes that each person is entitled to human rights equally as an image of God. He is the source of all human rights. Rational man is able to determine justice in light of God's law (natural law). But she not only wrote about the principles of human rights, she fully lived them. As soon as Hitler took over in 1933, she appealed to Pope Pius XI to issue an Encyclical denouncing Hitler's anti-Semitism. She could do this because, by now, she was esteemed as a philosopher, educator, and intellectual leader of the Catholic Woman's Movement. In this letter, now become famous as an outcry at a time when all were silent, she warned that Catholics as well as Jews would be sacrificed at the altar of Hitler's bigotry and barbarism. It reads in part: “But the responsibility …also falls on those who keep silent in the face of such happenings. …Everything that happened, and continues to happen on a daily basis, originates with a government that calls itself “Christian.” For weeks not only Jews but also thousands of faithful Catholics in Germany, and, I believe, all over the world, have been waiting and hoping for the Church of Christ to raise its voice to put a stop to this abuse of Christ's name. Is not this idolization of race and governmental power that is being pounded into the public consciousness by the radio open heresy? Isn't the effort to destroy Jewish blood an abuse of the holiest humanity of our Savior, of the most blessed Virgin and the apostles?” So knowing well the danger, she decided to stay in Germany rather than to emigrate. Her intention: to spend her life as an offering for world peace. In 1933, she became a Carmelite because she believed that order excelled in a spirit of joyous expiation. She prayed for the oppressor as well as the oppressed. Most of all she identified with her own Jewish people deprived not only of human rights but of life, the divine gift of God. Her first professional effort as a Carmelite was to begin an autobiography of her youth: Life in a Jewish Family. This was to counteract the Nazi caricature of the Jews by a faithful portrayal of Jewish humanity. Her awareness of the continuity of Judaism within herself after baptism can be likened to that of the apostles in the early Church. Also, she believed that the suffering of the Jews was a continuation of the crucifixion of Christ throughout time. And she prayed in solidarity with all soldiers suffering on both fronts and with their families suffering with them. She said once to a priest: “Who will do penance for the evil being committed in Germany?” Of course, she did. We can believe that in the concept she termed Stellvertretung, she offered herself as substitute for the divine punishment due to the Nazis. But despite her inner suffering here in the Carmel in Cologne, she wrote perhaps her most important philosophical treatise, Finite and Eternal Being. In April, 1938, Edith Stein refused to vote for Hitler at a mock plebiscite, and her Jewish identity was disclosed. Then in November of that year, thousands of Jews were attacked and sent to concentration camps. The nuns feared for her safety, and during the night of the New Year, smuggled her out of the country to a Carmel in Holland. In 1940, her sister Rosa who had also become Catholic came to live with her at the convent. Edith was mindful of the constant threat of immanent arrest; she deliberately disciplined herself against physical hardships--hunger, severe weather, and hard labor. Yet she continued to write, producing a study of St. John of the Cross, Science of the Cross; this work can be seen also as descriptive of her own spiritual journey as she bound herself to the Crucified Christ. More and more she was learning of atrocities against the Jews. There was even an undercurrent of anti-Semitism in her convent. Her poetry of the time evidences she was undergoing agony. She writes in a poem “Der Naechste” ( Our Neighbor), “We cannot separate love for God from love for man. We acknowledge God easily, but our brothers? Those with whom we don't identify in his background, education, race, complexion. We could not have imagined that love for God could be so hard.” On July 26th, 1942, a clerical letter protesting the treatment of the Dutch Jews was read from every pulpit in Holland. On August 2nd, every baptized Jew in Holland was arrested including Edith and Rosa. They were brought to two Dutch camps: first briefly to Amersfoort, then for a few days to Westerbork. There according to many witnesses, some Jewish, Edith lovingly tended the women and children. A guard describes her as a saint in her demeanor and action. She had appealed for release for her sister and herself. Yet, strangely, towards the very end before they were sent to Auschwitz, when a Dutch guard asked her, should she not try again, she said “No. She could not accept freedom because she was baptized, while the Jews continued to suffer. It would nullify everything she believed in; her entire life would count as nothing.” They were in the transport of August 7th and arrived at Auschwitz on August 9th. The sisters were among those who were immediately gassed on arrival. More than anything, Edith Stein wanted to live the Passion of Christ and she did. Her thoughts were centered on Divine Justice and Divine Rights, which become vital to us as human justice and human rights. Each person stands responsible before God in His divine justice. Her answer to the evils of her time that were destroying this justice was to live and die in the love of God. We know that His love and power was in her enabling her to do all this. God gives us saints when we need them. We can look to Edith Stein, Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, for answers in our own time, this age of barbaric cruelty and injustice to God's creatures all over the world, now. But she is a symbol of the universal oppression that shrieks for justice through all time and space. She helps us to know God's love and to live that love. We need to remember her example in our personal relationships as well as struggles for a better world. But basic to all else, she helps us to know ourselves in the light of God, as the persons He wishes us to be. On this her feast day, let us pray that we might live in her intention to become an “other Christ”, which is to achieve total personality. We can pray to her that we may live in empathy with Christ and His intentions for all humanity. Perhaps Edith Stein would say that, in conforming to our Creator's intention for us as persons, we are bowing to His justice.

Freda Mary Oben, PhD