Raised as a Jew, Stein was an atheist philosopher who converted to Catholicism in 1921 when she was 30. She became a Discalced Carmelite nun in 1938 and took the name Sr Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Pope John Paul II declared her a martyr in 1987 and canonised her in 1998. St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross is the co-patroness of Europe.

On Tuesday - her anniversary - Cardinal Michael Czerny joined with her Carmelite sisters and celebrated a Mass for St Teresa Benedicta near Auschwitz.

Like her, members of Czerny's family were also arrested and sent to concentration camps. Some were sent to Auschwitz.

Czerny's homily recounted St Teresa Benedicta's story and how it intersected with his maternal Czechoslovak family.

"With Edith Stein, I share Jewish origins, the Catholic faith and a vocation to religious life ..." he said.

Even when she considered herself an atheist, "her sensitive moral conscience and intellectual honesty led her to reject relativism and subjectivism".

Stein wrote that her "first encounter with the Cross" took place in 1917.

She was visiting a recently widowed friend who told her about her late husband's conversion and her own.

The friend explained that the peace she received at her baptism prevailed even during this time of loss.

Stein "was struck by the serenity that the woman maintained in spite of tragedy," Czerny said.

"No human force could account for or explain such peace," Stein later wrote.

"It was the moment when the light of Christ, Christ on the cross, shone."

In 1933, Stein wrote to Pope Pius XI urging him to speak out against all expressions of antisemitism.

It wasn't until 1998 the Church formally apologised for not taking more decisive action to challenge Nazism and the so-called ‘final solution' to the ‘Jewish problem'.

By the end of the war, Czerny's family was scattered or dead.

His grandmother and her children were considered Jewish as his grandmother was of Jewish descent. His grandfather refused to divorce his Jewish wife, so he was arrested too.

Both her grandmother and two uncles spent time at Auschwitz before being transferred elsewhere. Only his grandfather and mother survived.

Source

• America Magazine
• AP News

And there, in the avoidance of religious truth and its call to love and mercy, Edith found peace and consolation — a peace that would sustain her all the way to Auschwitz.

As Pope Francis calls believers to the peripheries, he has stressed that such places of obscurity are not only geographical locations.

While the pope avoids any misplaced hyper-spiritualization of the actual physical fringes of society, he does comfortably broaden the term to include an existential dimension.

And so, the peripheries are not only localities in the world, but can also be dimensions within the human heart.

This reality is exemplified in the life, conversion, and martyrdom of the great St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, whose birth name was Edith Stein.

The Catholic Church celebrated the saint's feast day this past week. The holy day was an occasion to recount Edith Stein's story, and to be inspired by her witness to truth and charity.

Edith was born into a large Jewish family in 1891. When she was a young child, her father died and her mother refused to re-marry.

Instead, her mother worked as a single parent, which was uncommon at the time, and provided for the family through unrelenting determination and hard work.

This example of independence and tenacity greatly influenced Edith throughout her life.

Edith was very attentive to her studies, and was regularly noted for her brilliance.

As a young woman, Edith could not intellectually find reasons to believe in God, and such beliefs became a periphery in her heart.

She became an ardent atheist but studied philosophy because she wanted to understand the mysteries and intrigue of life.

During World War I, Edith served as a nurse and this experience led her to deeper reflections on sacrifice, suffering, misery, and hope. Continue reading

Sources

• Crux article by Father Jeffrey F. Kirby, a Crux contributor.
• Image: The Tabard Theatre Company

Jane Haining is the only Scot named as "righteous among the nations" - non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis - by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial. Read more

Speaking at his first weekly public audience at the Vatican since June, the pope reflected on his visit to the notorious Nazi concentration camp near Krakow where more than a million people, mostly Jews, died during World War II.

He said his decision to remain silent while visiting and praying inside the camp was "more eloquent than any spoken word could have been.

"I felt the presence of all the souls who passed through that place," the pope told a large crowd inside a Vatican audience hall.

"I felt the compassion, the mercy of God, which a few holy souls were able to bring into that abyss. In that great silence, I prayed for all the victims of violence and war."

Francis also said he realized the importance of remembering past events and ensuring "the seed of hatred and violence not be allowed to take root in the furrows of history."

Francis visited the camp last week while he was in Poland for World Youth Day and had emotional encounters with 10 camp survivors, whom he embraced.

Around 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered at the complex of death camps near the Polish city of Oswiecim, near Krakow, during World War II.

Today the main sites, Auschwitz and Birkenau, showcase the horror of the Nazi genocide and draw visitors from around the world. Read more

Francis will visit the camp while he is in Poland for World Youth Day.

He will follow in the footsteps of his predecessors, St John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who also visited Auschwitz.

In 2006, Benedict XVI questioned God amid what he described as a "stupefied" silence: "Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?"

"I pray to God not to allow a similar thing ever to happen again," he said.

According to Fr Antonio Spadaro, who edits a Jesuit-run journal in Rome and is a confidante of Francis, the current Pope, like John Paul II and Benedict XVI before him, "finds this to be a mandatory, one could say fundamental, stop".

As with Benedict, during his visit Francis will share an interreligious prayer with leaders of the local Jewish community.

Fr Spadaro believes that just as the German pontiff questioned God during his visit to Auschwitz, Francis is bound to question humanity, as he did in 2014, when he visited the Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem, in Israel.

"Adam, where are you?" Francis asked at the time.

"Adam, who are you? I no longer recognise you. Who are you, o man? What have you become? Of what horror have you been capable? What made you fall to such depths?"

"In Auschwitz he will ask this question again to remind men and women that what was done here is incomprehensible," Fr Spadaro told Crux, minutes after a visit to the extermination camp.

On the other hand, the priest added, "in the relationship with God, Auschwitz is the icon of a world that doesn't know mercy".

More than 1 million Jews from all over Europe, 150,000 Poles, 25,000 gypsies, 15,000 Soviets and 25,000 prisoners from other ethnic groups were deported to Auschwitz in World War II.

Of these, 1.1 million were killed, and 90 per cent of those killed were Jews.

Sources

• Crux
• Image: The Observer

His brilliant memoir Man's Search for Meaning contains moving reflections on how noble the human spirit can be even amidst filth, cruelty and horror.

Here are seven inspiring quotes from this famous book:

1. Here is his first day at Auschwitz, a scene that you have probably read many times. Frankl's experience just was as brutal as everyone else's.

We who were saved, the minority of our transport, found out the truth in the evening. I inquired from prisoners who had been there for some time where my colleague and friend P had been sent.

"Was he sent to the left side?" "Yes," I replied. "Then you can see him there," I was told. "Where?" A hand pointed to the chimney a few hundred yards off, which was sending a column of flame up into the grey sky of Poland. It dissolved into a sinister cloud of smoke.

"That's where your friend is, floating up to Heaven," was the answer.

2. The struggle for survival in the camp could lead to great spiritual richness:

And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise. Continue reading

Sources

• Michael Cook, editor of MercatorNet
• Image: Conquering the Mind's Battlefield

1. Watching his parents pray when he was a child and when life was hard for them. We must never underestimate the power of example - often much more powerful than argument.

2. Accompanying the sick at Lourdes. I have done this too, so recognise the importance of immersing oneself in a Catholic culture, where the sick and infirm are loved and celebrated, especially when in one's ordinary circumstances of life euthanasia is constantly being promoted as the sensible "choice".

3. Visiting Auschwitz and recognising that atheism has no explanation for evil. I have not done this, though I have visited a smaller Nazi transit camp in Holland, which was grim in its own way. The sheer scale of Auschwitz is what horrifies visitors i.e. the sheer scale of the human capacity for evil.

4. The memory of his father's stories of meeting an Australian priest, Fr Marsden, who was chaplain to the Australian troops forced to work on the Thailand railway in World War II. Interestingly, I had also heard of this priest, when reading the short memoir by the late Fr Hugh Thwaites SJ, describing his time as a prisoner of war of the Japanese. Then a young man, not yet a Catholic, Fr Thwaites was struck by the quiet heroism of Fr Marsden, who never failed to lift the spirits of the men under his spiritual charge, whatever the appalling circumstances they endured. Continue reading

• Francis Phillips reviews books for the Catholic Herald.

He will visit the former Nazi death camp in southern Poland on July 29, on the third day of his visit to the country.

Two of his predecessors have also visited the camp, John Paul II - himself Polish - in 1979 and retired pope Benedict XVI in 2006.

1.1 million people, including a million Jews from across Europe, were killed by Nazi Germany at the camp from 1940 to 1945.

The other victims were mostly non-Jewish Poles, gypsies and Soviet prisoners.

Continue Reading

Another half a million died there from disease and starvation. A year after his tenure came to an end, he returned to oversee the execution of 400,000 Hungarian Jews.

And yet even an "animal" such as he was not beyond the reach of God's mercy.

My wife and I learned about Höss when a young nun from Poland came to speak at our church this week. I was taken aback when I first heard the telling, in part because I thought Sister Gaudia was speaking of Rudolf Hess, the deputy to Adolf Hilter.

The names sound similar. But what happened to Höss, who held a less prominent position in the Third Reich, was perhaps more stunning.

The lecture was part of the parish's observance of the Jubilee Year of Mercy, declared by Pope Francis.

Sister Gaudia and Sister Emmanuela, members of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy — the congregation to which St. Faustina Kowalska belonged — are touring the United States, speaking about Christ's revelations to St. Faustina and the image and devotion of the Divine Mercy.

Sister Gaudia, by the way, is part of the planning committee for World Youth Day 2016, which will take place in Krakow this summer.

Seventy or so years ago, Krakow, and all of Poland, was a very different place than it is today. Sister Gaudia spoke of Auschwitz, one of the Nazis' deadliest camps, with its extensive use of gas chambers and medical experimentation, set right in the heart of her country. One in six Jews killed in the Holocaust died there.

But the camp was not only for Jews. Catholics, such as Saints Maximilian Kolbe and Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), were here as well. Continue reading

Sources

• Aleteia, from an article by news editor John Burger.
• Image: Express UK

"You have a feeling of insecurity about tomorrow. There's a level of chaos because global powers do not agree on the most minimal consensus."

Röhrig is the star of Son of Saul, a tense, almost unbearable thriller set in Auschwitz in 1944 among the Sonderkommando - prisoners given a stay of execution to work in the gas chambers.

It's so frank and unflinching, it makes even the finest of previous Holocaust films look crass. "With movies like Schindler's List, you have an evil guy and you have a good guy," says Röhrig. "There's no such thing. We are all evil and good inside."

Contemporary resonance, though unintentional, is unavoidable. This is a film about whether one participates in the suffering of others.

"I gave up thinking that society is anything other than an abstraction long ago. You have different societies in every country. But whichever group you belong to, you're never exempt from taking a side when it comes to crimes against humanity.

"That's true in Syria and America and Israel and everywhere. Every day, we all have to make a case-by-case evaluation: is this an important enough demonstration to go on? Is this where I should send my money? Is this a petition I should sign?

"I do not believe in living in an apolitical ivory tower. One of the lessons of 1944 lies with the bystanders - we can't just let things happen."

Just in case it's not yet evident, Röhrig is not your average starlet. Son of Saul is his first movie, but at 48 he's gentle, intense, heavily bearded and unswayed by the glitz. More than that: he's allergic to it.

Such escapism as the entertainment industry offers he holds partly responsible for exactly this apathy. "Consumer society targets your senses and threatens thinking entirely. ‘Why aren't you laughing? There is so much fun! Why don't you try this cake or that Coke?'"

So Cannes can be hard to stomach? "No question. There is a certain level of shallowness - emptiness even - that is really painful." Continue reading

Source

• The Guardian
• Image: History