August 9th is the feast day of St. Teresa Benedicta (Edith Stein) - philosopher, martyr and saint.

Catholic News Agency:

On August 9 the Catholic Church remembers St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, also known as St. Edith Stein. St. Teresa converted from Judaism to Catholicism in the course of her work as a philosopher, and later entered the Carmelite Order. She died in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1942.


Edith Stein was born on October 12, 1891 – a date that coincided with her family's celebration of Yom Kippur, the Jewish “day of atonement.” Edith's father died when she was just two years old, and she gave up the practice of her Jewish faith as an adolescent.

As a young woman with profound intellectual gifts, Edith gravitated toward the study of philosophy and became a pupil of the renowned professor Edmund Husserl in 1913. Through her studies, the non-religious Edith met several Christians whose intellectual and spiritual lives she admired.

After earning her degree with the highest honors from Gottingen University in 1915, she served as a nurse in an Austrian field hospital during World War I. She returned to academic work in 1916, earning her doctorate after writing a highly-regarded thesis on the phenomenon of empathy. She remained interested in the idea of religious commitment, but had not yet made such a commitment herself.

In 1921, while visiting friends, Edith spent an entire night reading the autobiography of the 16th century Carmelite nun St. Teresa of Avila. “When I had finished the book,” she later recalled, “I said to myself: This is the truth.” She was baptized into the Catholic Church on the first day of January, 1922.

And:

After completing her final work, a study of St. John of the Cross entitled “The Science of the Cross,” Teresa Benedicta was arrested along with her sister Rosa (who had also become a Catholic), and the members of her religious community, on August 7, 1942. The arrests came in retaliation against a protest letter by the Dutch Bishops, decrying the Nazi treatment of Jews.


St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942. Blessed John Paul II canonized her in 1998, and proclaimed her a co-patroness of Europe the next year.

Just another unremembered act of courage - Anti-Nazi German Martyrs.

You get sense from the popular "Hitler's Pope" and "Hitler was a Christian" folderol that all Christians were uniformly carrying the water for the Nazis.  The subtext of this idea is the notion that all Christians - and particularly priests and pastors - were virulent anti-semites that supported the Nazi party on anti-semitic grounds.  This kind of mindset gets cemented by the attention that books like Daniel Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners," John Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope" and  James Carroll "Constantine's Sword" from the popular media, which helps to cement a zeitgeist that acts in the place of real knowledge.

One of the problem with such broad-brush approach to history is that it is slanderous to the many Christians who opposed the Nazi party on the grounds of their faith and suffered the consequences.  When I read about such instances, I am honestly surprised because despite the fact that I know that there were such martyrs, conditioned by the zeitgeist, I'm surprised to see so many.

A case in point is this article from Huffington Post, which still manages to give the story a liberal, anti-catholic spin, which is probably the only reason that the story gets attention:

Beatification Of WWII Martyrs Divides Lutherans, Catholics

LUEBECK, Germany (RNS) Residents of this north German city have long taken pride in four native sons -- three Catholic priests and a Lutheran pastor -- who were beheaded in quick succession on Nov. 10, 1943 by the Nazi regime.


The commingled blood of Catholic priests Johannes Prassek, Hermann Lange, Eduard Mueller and Lutheran pastor Karl Friedrich Stellbrink spawned an ecumenical cooperation between the city's majority Lutherans and minority Catholics that still lasts.

But the Vatican's decision to beatify the three priests on June 25 -- but not Stellbrink -- is testing that ecumenical spirit, and has some religious leaders worried that the event could drive a wedge between the two communities.

"People worry that the priests who are beatified will be seen as higher than Stellbrink, and that the focus will be on the three, not the four," said the Rev. Constanze Maase, pastor of Luther Church in Luebeck.

"We recognize that beatification is an important part of the identity of the Catholic Church. But there is a sadness, because it makes the ecumenical work more complicated," he said.

Prassek was a 30-year-old chaplain at Luebeck's Sacred Heart Catholic Church when he met Stellbrink, a 47-year-old pastor at the nearby Luther Church, at a funeral in 1941. They had a shared disapproval of the Nazi regime, and Prassek soon introduced Stellbrink to his two Catholic colleagues, Lange and Mueller.

The four clergymen were active but discreet in their anti-Nazi activities, speaking out against the Nazis and distributing pamphlets to close friends and congregants.

That changed when the British Royal Air Force bombed Luebeck on March 28, 1942. After Stellbrink spent the night tending to the wounded, he went to his church to celebrate Palm Sunday, and attributed the bombing to divine punishment.

Stellbrink was arrested a few days later, followed soon after by the priests. All four were sentenced to death. Rather than fear their executions, the four were said to have died as happy martyrs, confident that they were going to be with God.

"Who can oppress one who dies," Prassek wrote in a farewell letter to his family.

Just as Christian tradition sees the blood of the martyrs as the seeds of the church, many observers credit the four clergymen with spawning a German ecumenism that had been almost unheard of until then.

What an impressive story, and let's acknowledge that in many ways Pastor Stellbrink's strength is particularly noteworthy in light of the fact that at least the Catholic priests knew that their church opposed Nazism, whereas Pastor Stellbrink's church was divided between the "German Christians" - who supported the "nazification" of the Protestant church - and the "Confessing Church" - which didn't.

But the anti-Catholic angle is just weird. Are we supposed to assume that the Lutheran church and Lutherans now recognize the Catholic Church as the authority on who is in heaven?  Has the Lutheran church amended its position on intercessionarly prayer, and that Lutherans are really go to say, "St. Karl Stellbrink, ora pro nobis."  I certainly can say such a thing, and there are examples of non-Catholics who have been canonized - such as St. Nicetas the Goth - but I just don't see Lutherans bending their knee to a Catholic saint.

Moreover, we could just imagine the outrage we would be hearing if the Catholic Church decided to beatify a Lutheran pastor - assuming that its post-Trent rules for canonization even allow such a thing.  Such a move would be taken as an indication of the Catholic Church's "imperialism" and its condescension that Karl Stellbrink's sacrifice was meaningless unless he was Catholic.

It's just another convenient stick for the folks at Huffington Post.


One thing that this rather inane story shows is that the Catholic Church matters.  It is the one church that non-members believe that they have a stake in running.  Non-Catholics, and Non-Christians, are constantly interjecting their views on what doctrines and practices that the Catholic Church should have and follow, as if (a) their opinion mattered and (b) the Catholic Church's doctrines and practices mattered.

Let's face it, when was the last time you saw a news story about non-Methodists being concerned about some doctrine or practice of the United Methodist Church.

Ditto for Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, etc.

Apart from the modern political angle, the historical circumstance is fascinating. How often did this kind of thing happen? What motivated the Nazis to pick up the priests?  Did they preach an anti-Nazi or "defeatist" sermon?  Who knows?  But this kind of thing was all too common at the time, notwithstanding the view of people like Cornwell who wish to opine on the decision and courage of people on the spot from the safety and security of the offices.

Final Jeopardy Questions

Saint Artemius and Saint Nicetas the Goth.

Answer: who are two Arians included in the Catholic list of saints.

And this is the - either really cool or really gross - uncorrupted hand of St. Nicetas the Goth.



That's pretty amazing, given the fact that St. Nicetas the Goth was killed in 372 after being tossed into a fire. He was a Goth warrior - back when being a Goth warrior really meant something, and he wrote several dissertations on faith, the creed, the Trinity, and liturgical singing, and is believed by some scholars to be the author of Te Deum", which is particularly impressive since the Gothic alphabet was just fresh off the presses.

I really like the sound of Saint Nicetas the Goth's name.

He's also the saint that the Orthodox pray to for the preservation of children from birth defects.

The Roman martyrology also includes St. Elesbaan, who was a Monophysite. This is interesting:

Procopius, John of Ephesus, and other contemporary historians recount his invasion of Yemen around 520, against the Jewish Himyarite king Yusuf Asar Yathar (also known as Dhu Nuwas), who was persecuting the Christians in his kingdom. After much fighting, Kaleb's soldiers eventually routed Yusuf's forces and killed the king, allowing Kaleb to appoint Sumuafa' Ashawa', a native Christian (named Esimphaios by Procopius), as his viceroy of Himyar. As a result of his protection of the Christians, he is known as St. Elesbaan after the sixteenth-century Cardinal Cesare Baronio added him to martyrology despite being a Monophysite heretics.[2][3][4]

Along with St. Elasbaan are Aretas and the Martyrs of Najra, who apparently were Monophysites but are Catholic saints.

This Catholic Online site says about Aretas and the Martyrs of Najra:

Also called the martyrs of Najran, a large group of Christian martyrs, possibly as many as 340, who suffered at Nagran, in south­western Arabia. Abdullah ibn Kaab, also called Aretas, was the leader of the martyrs and the chief of the Beni Harith. He and his companions were slain by Dhu Nowas, or Dunaan, a Jew who commanded heathen Jews and Arabs. A woman and her small children were among the victims. The martyrdom is recorded in the Koran.

That last part is interesting in light of Philip Jenkins' recent book, The Lost History of Christianity, which argues that much of Islamic practice is based on Syriac Christian practices.

So, the answer to the question "Is the Pope Catholic" is "Yes, but not all the saints are."