| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| | | | | | |
 | ||
| | |
This appeared in The Hebrew Catholic #64, pp. 29-30. All Rights Reserved. The Road To Edith Stein’s Sainthood Ed. This article originally appeared in Newsday, 4 June 1997, pgs. B3-B7; excerpts by David Moss, with thanks to Irwin Ferber for sending us the article. The searing significance of August 9th had long been clear to the Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy ...
McCarthy, 56, an Eastern Rite Catholic priest, is a preacher of nonviolence, a cofounder of Pax Christi USA, a Catholic peace organization. For him, August 9th symbolizes the thinking that has given Christians license to kill, in the name of the state, for almost 1,700 years. On the morning of August 9, 1945, an American bomber dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki the second and final atomic bomb of World War II. The destruction was similar to the incineration of Hiroshima on August 6. But for McCarthy, the symbolism of Nagasaki was even more devastating. The crew was Christian. So was the target marker that they used on the ground, Urakami Cathedral. So was the community that lived around the cathedral a community that had survived long persecution by non-Christians, only to perish in the hellish heat of a bomb dropped by other Christians. For three centuries after the death of Jesus, when his followers still recalled vividly his nonviolent command to love the enemy, Christian leaders forbade Christians to fight in the Roman army. Then, before the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, the Roman Emperor Constantine had a vision of a cross leading him to victory. His forces won, and he established Christianity as the state religion. From then on, Christians routinely fought in the army. This ‘Constantinian Christianity’ gnawed at McCarthy for years, as he married, earned a law degree, taught at the University of Notre Dame and founded its Program for the Study and Practice of Christian Non-violence. In 1971, he began preaching Gospel non-violence full-time. In 1981on August 9th coincidentallyhe was ordained in the Eastern Rite, which allows the ordination of married men. He kept preaching non-violence. "It became clear to me that there was some kind of terrible blockage in the Christian consciousness that wasn’t even allowing them to see it,” McCarthy said. So, in 1983, he began using a new tactic an annual 40 day fast for non-violence, ending on August 9th. Between the first and second year of the fast, he began to focus on Edith Stein. As he prepared a retreat for seminarians as St. Gregory the Theologian Byzantine Catholic Seminary in Newton, Mass., where he is now rector, he came a cross a fact about Stein that shook him: She died on August 9. He said to himself: “Isn’t that strange?” Then he began researching her life. [Ed. Keeler, briefly recounts Edith Stein’s career. This information is available elsewhere, so we leave it out for reasons of space.] As the Nazis led them away, Edith comforted her sister: “Come, Rosa. We’re going for our people.” A later published record showed that Edith died at Auschwitz on August 9. Rosa apparently perished the same day. McCarthy saw a symmetry in the date and a key resonance between her death and the bombing at Nagasaki: “All the people that killed her were Christians,” he said. So, starting with the second of his annual 40-day fasts, he wove her story into the official statement of the fast. At the end of the 1984 fast on August 8, Boston time, or August 9 in Auschwitz the 12th child of Charles and Mary McCarthy was born. They named her Teresia Benedicta, after Stein. In March 1987, the McCarthys did something they had never done before: left the children and went on a retreat in Rome. They returned on Friday, March 20. “we got to the door of the house, and the children came running out and said Benedicta was in the hospital,” McCarthy recalled. The cause turned out to be a massive overdose of the pain-killer Tylenol. “We know how to keep medicine out of the hands of children,” McCarthy said. But a doctor’s wife had given them samples not in child-proof bottles. “She obviously found them and had a great time unwrapping the paper wrappings.” Benedicta was lethargic, delirious and vomiting. Her kidneys were beginning to fail, and she had serious liver damage. “We listed her for a transplant in about the middle of her course, when she had gotten quite sick and it wasn’t clear whether she was going to get better or not,” said Dr. Ronald Kleinman, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “I was telling her mom that I thought that the prognosis was pretty guarded and I wasn’t sure she was going to recover unless she had a liver transplant.” All weekend, despite the crisis, McCarthy and his wife debated whether he should keep a commitment to lead a nonviolence retreat in Minnesota, from Sunday to Tuesday. Early Sunday morning, they left their bleary-eyed hospital vigil and went home. “When I walked in the bedroom, there was a book on the floor, lying open.” McCarthy recalled. The quote he saw was from Jesus to Teresa of Avila, to this effect: “You take care of my business, and I’ll take care of your business.” That got his attention. “I said to myself, ‘That’s God talking.’” So he left for the retreat. While he was away, Mary got on the phone and asked people to pray to Edith Stein for Benedicta’s recovery. Meanwhile, McCarthy continued to lead his retreat, constantly aware of the unfolding tragedy at home. “I called back, called back, called back, and everything’s getting worse,” McCarthy recalled. Then something happened. “At the hour the retreat ended, Benedicta was healed.” The retreat ended at 1 o’clock, Minnesota time, on Tuesday afternoon, March 24. A year later, McCarthy found in hospital records that a doctor had written in her chart a 2 o’clock Boston time: “This child has made a remarkable recovery.” That evening, doctors told Mary McCarthy that Benedicta would have to be on medication for at least a year. But when she walked out of the hospital, she was not taking any medication. Her liver and kidneys were working normally again. “Everything repaired perfectly,” McCarthy said. In a felicitous but unrelated confluence of events, a few weeks after Benedicta left the hospital, Pope John Paul II stood before an audience in Cologne on May 1 and beatified Edith Stein the next-to-last-step before canonization as a saint. John Paul is a philosopher, and he knew and respected her work. He also admired her journey from disbelief to faith, through philosophy. “In keeping with her intellectual abilities, she did not want to accept anything without careful examination, not even the faith of her fathers.” John Paul said in his homily. "As such, she was engaged in a constant search for the truth.” During that visit, John Paul also sounded another theme: her Jewishness. He reminded German bishops that Stein “was a daughter of the Jewish people: in solidarity with them and in Christian hope she shared their sufferings on the way to the Shoah.” ... With the testimony of more than 100 witnesses and her writings as evidence, the supporters of the cause persuaded the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints that she had led a life of heroic Christian virtue. But the rules require two miracles through the candidate’s intercession: one before beatification and one before canonization. If the Vatican examined her as a martyr, however, and not just as a holy woman, her cause did not need a miracle before beatification. In 1983, the German bishops made that request. Eventually, the Vatican agreed and declared her Blessed Edith Stein, without benefit of a miracle. But, before she could become St. Edith Stein, she needed one miracle. [Ed. Keeler describes the panel that investigated the miracle. Rev. Kieran Kavanaugh, a Carmelite scholar, was vice postulator of her cause. Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law appointed the panel led by Msgr. Robert Deeley of the diocesan tribunal. The panel, meeting in seven sessions, from the middle of 1992 to 1993, included Dr. James F. McDonough, former president of the Massachusetts Medical Society and former chairman of the board of the New England Journal of Medicine.] The key witness was Dr. Ronald Kleinman, who testified before Deeley’s group and later before a group of physicians in Rome. “What I said to them was that at the midpoint of this, I didn’t expect her to recover,” Kleinman recalled. “I was willing to say that it was miraculous that she turned around ...” Her turnaround from desperately ill to completely well was amazingly fast. “What convinced me was the rapidity with which she got better,” said McDonough, who had brought a skeptical attitude to the case. For Kleinman, who is Jewish, this was a unique exposure to the inner workings of the saint-making bureaucracy of the church. “The priests who were working to investigate this and also to support her cause for canonization were very, very careful, very deliberate,” he said. “I didn’t at any point feel that this was a foregone conclusion.” Finally, earlier this year, four years after the Deeley panel had submitted its report, the Vatican announced in April that it had accepted the cure as miraculous. On May 22, John Paul announced that she will be canonized, on a date not yet known. ... For Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, the relationship of her life to Catholic-Jewish relations is clear. “The mystery of the life and death of Edith Stein is a symbol of how Christians should have been relating to the Jews over the centuries, as well as a magnifying glass on how Christians have been relating to the Jews,” he said. “By her life and death, she teaches the Christian community that it should, like Jesus himself, live with, pray with, suffer with and, if need be, die with the Jewish community not hate, oppress and kill the blood brothers and sisters of Jesus.” | ||
| | |
About the AHC • The Hebrew Catholic • Topics • Discussion • Store • Contacts • How to Help | |
| |
©Association of Hebrew Catholics. All Rights Reserved. • 4120 W Pine Blvd • St Louis MO 63108 | ||
| | |
So, without the doubly tragic meaning of the date, it is impossible to understand the story of the miracle that led to the Catholic Church’s recently announced verdict that Stein is a saint.