Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

On April 1, 1933, the Nazis began their boycott of Jewish businesses across the country.  It was not the first indication of the persecutions in store.  A week earlier, thirty brownshirts had broken into Jewish homes in a small town in southwest Germany, herded the occupants into the town hall, and beaten them up.  The boycott, however, was something different.  As Saul Friedlander has commented, it was “the first major test on a national scale of the attitude of the Christian Churches toward the situation of the Jews under the new government.” 

 

Among the many thousands of individuals affected by the Jewish boycott was Edith Stein, a German-Jewish philosopher who had been influenced by Max Schler at the University of Freiburg, where she researched a doctorate entitled “On the Problem of Empathy.”  An atheist from her teens, Stein was initially drawn to Christianity emotionally, but felt a different kind of attraction after reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Ávila, the sixteenth century Carmelite mystic.   She wrote that her “return to God made me feel Jewish again,” and she thought of her conversion to Christianity as existing “not only in a spiritual sense, but in blood terms.”  She became a Catholic in 1922 and by April 1933, when the boycott came into operation, she had been accepted for a philosophy post at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster.  The April decree against the Jews deprived her of the appointment.

 

By October 1933, she had entered the Carmelite convent at Cologne, taking the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.  From the cloister she wrote a passionate letter to Pius XI, begging him to “deplore the hatred, persecution, and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews, at any time and from any source.”  Her letter drew no response.  Four years were to pass before he came to issue the tardy encyclical on anti-racism, Mit brennender Sorge.

Stein was later rounded up and deported, along with many other Jewish converts to Catholicism.  She died in Auschwitz.

(taken from Hitler’s Pope)

 

 

Nick Cave & Warren Ellis/The Mother

Om/Meditation is the Practice of Death

Chris Bell/You and Your Sister

Giant Sand/Dusted

Colorpulse (ft. Carl Sagan)/A Glorious Dawn