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ng(JTA) — A Canadian cardinal with Jewish ancestry honored a philosopher-nun murdered by the Nazis due to her personal Jewish parentage.
Cardinal Michael Czerny, 76, gave a homily Tuesday and led a mass in Oswiecim, the Polish identify for the city of Auschwitz, the place Sister Teresa Benedict was despatched to the gasoline chambers by the Nazis on Aug. 9, 1942.
Born Edith Stein in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland) to an Orthodox Jewish household, Stein transformed to Catholicism in her 30s. She joined the Carmelite Order — a monastic group based on Mount Carmel in what’s now Israel in the course of the Crusades.
In 1998, Stein was canonized by Pope John Paul II as Saint Teresa Benedetta della Croce in a transfer that was met by opposition from the Jewish group as a result of she had been persecuted for being born a Jew, not as a result of she was Catholic.
In his speech marking the eightieth anniversary of Stein’s homicide, Czerny, whose mom’s household have been Jewish converts to Catholicism, spoke about his household’s destiny below the Nazi regime, and famous the parallels to Stein’s story.
Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Czerny emigrated along with his dad and mom to Canada as a younger youngster. Regardless of their conversion to Catholicism, his maternal grandparents and two uncles “shared the Jewish origins that the enemy abhorred,” Czerny mentioned. “My maternal grandmother Anna, my grandfather Hans and my uncles Georg and Carl Robert, have been all interned in Terezín, the place Hans died.”
Terezín, or Theresienstadt in German, was a Nazi-run focus camp in what was then Czechoslovakia.
“My grandmother and uncles have been transported to Auschwitz,” he added. “From right here my uncles have been despatched to labor camps and finally murdered there.”
“Remembering each Edith and Anna with the 6 million others,” Czerny mentioned, “we mourn and repent, ‘Lest we overlook.’”
Stein was instructing at a Catholic faculty in Speyer, Germany, when the Nazis rose to energy. She and her older sister Rosa, who had additionally transformed to Catholicism, have been transferred to the Netherlands for their very own security, however have been arrested by the Nazis on Aug. 2, 1942. The 2 sisters have been murdered within the gasoline chambers at Auschwitz seven days later.
In her 1938 autobiography, Edith Stein revealed that she had written a letter to Pope Pius XI 5 years earlier, pleading with him to arrange the Catholic Church in opposition to the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Debate over the function of the Church in the course of the battle has solely intensified because the launch of the Vatican’s wartime archives in 2020, with many Jewish leaders and historians of the period objecting to the continuing beatification of Pius XII, Pius XI’s successor, and urging the Church to supply extra particulars in regards to the Vatican’s actions in the course of the Holocaust.
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