A Martyr--but Whose?

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Last week Benedicta McCarthy went to Rome to see her saint made. Back when she was two, the Brockton, Mass., child swallowed an overdose of Tylenol and suffered seizures. Doctors predicted death. But her family prayed to her eponym, a martyred Carmelite nun named Teresa Benedicta of the Cross; and a week later little Benedicta toddled out of the hospital, carrying a balloon and pushing the elevator button herself. Now 14, she is on her school swim team. The Roman Catholic Church saw her recovery as a miracle, and last Sunday, Teresa Benedicta (1891-1942) was scheduled to be canonized.

But most people will continue to know her under a different name, which is a point of some significance. Prior to her martyrdom, Teresa's name was Edith Stein, and she was born Jewish. The consequences of that status led Jewish leaders last week to term the canonization "problematic," "offensive" and "an attempt to appropriate the Holocaust without coming to grips with it." They see it as part of a dissonant motif in Pope John Paul II's otherwise triumphant symphony of Catholic-Jewish brotherhood--a masterwork that is very much part of his grand plan for the church's millennial jubilee.

Stein's story did not lack for 20th century drama. Born into a German Jewish family on Yom Kippur 1891, she had declared herself an atheist by her teens. In her 20s she became one of the first German women to earn a Ph.D., specializing in the philosophical subdiscipline of phenomenology. Introduced to Catholicism through Christian phenomenologists, she was baptized at age 30, and 11 years later, under her new name, she took the vows of a Carmelite nun. Sister Teresa's stance on Jewish issues was predictably mixed: she wrote a letter to the Pope deploring anti-Semitism, but also a spiritual last will and testament offering herself to God "for the atonement of the unbelief of the Jewish people." Her adopted faith, however, did not shield her from the Nazi horror. Stein was made to wear the Jewish star, and although her order transferred her to Holland, the occupying Germans rounded up all Jewish-born Catholic converts there in the summer of 1942, and she died in an Auschwitz gas chamber.

The current unease concerns her identity as a Catholic martyr. Christian conversion is a delicate subject to Jews, since historically it often took place under duress. Although Stein's conversion was clearly voluntary, her "atonement" declaration rankles. (It also contradicts the current Pope's repeated description of the Jews as "elder brothers in faith.") But what most bothers the critics is the assumption that Stein's death resulted from her Catholicism. Witnesses reported that when she tried to confess her faith, an Auschwitz guard rebuffed her with the words, "You damned Jew." Thus her canonization strikes some as the hijacking of a martyr, the usurping of Jewish tragedy for Catholic purposes.

The church doesn't see it that way. "If she hadn't been 100% Jewish, she wouldn't have been killed," agrees Father Peter Gumpel, a senior Vatican saintmaker. But the roundup that doomed her was an explicitly announced reprisal for a brave Catholic stance: the Dutch bishops' denunciation of the German persecution of Jews in a pastoral letter days before. "It was revenge," says Gumpel, and were it not for the bishops' statement, "she wouldn't have been killed. So we have decided to say she is the victim of the persecution of the Catholic Church in Holland by Nazi authorities."

On the whole, Jewish observers regard Stein's canonization--like John Paul II's beatification last week of wartime Croatian Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, who initially supported (but later denounced) his country's pro-Nazi puppet regime--as a small blemish on a sterling record. This is the Pope, after all, who established Vatican recognition of Israel, visited a synagogue and was host of a huge commemorative concert for the Shoah's victims. Yet there is concern that last Sunday's ceremony foreshadows another one: the pronouncement of Pope Pius XII as venerable, an act John Paul II reportedly hopes to accomplish by 2000. Such a pronouncement and beatification are the two steps preceding canonization.

Pius' story can be seen as the macro to Edith Stein's micro. Devout and ascetic in life, long a favorite of the church's conservative branch, the wartime Pontiff has been sharply criticized both by Jewish leaders and church liberals for his refusal to publicly condemn the Nazis, a "silence" that some suggest may have cost untold Jewish lives. Pius' defenders reply heatedly that his efforts to hide Jews in Italy and elsewhere saved thousands. More important, they insist that silence was the best policy--and here Pius' story intersects Stein's. According to Gumpel, Pius was about to issue his own four-page protest against the Jews' deportation when he got word of the Nazis' response to the Dutch church's defiance. He burned his own statement. Challenging Hitler overtly, says Gumpel, "would have been a grand theatrical gesture. But would it have helped the Jews? All evidence says it wouldn't."

Many, not all of them Jewish, disagree. Some say the "evidence" on Pius is not all in, claiming that the Vatican has yet to open all pertinent archives. Others, like the Rev. Richard McBrien, a professor of theology at Notre Dame, feel they know enough to conclude that outrage on Pius' part "would have given pause to the Nazis and perhaps changed the complexion of what happened at the end of the war." McBrien contrasts Pius' silence with John Paul II's risky but successful support of Poland's Solidarity trade union in the 1980s. Some analysts speculate that valid or not, the impulse to protect Pius crippled the Vatican's March statement We Remember, a long-awaited and ultimately somewhat tepid repentance for Christian treatment of Jews up to and during the Holocaust. The document defends Pius in both its body and a spirited footnote; the refusal to acknowledge his faults, critics claim, made the whole enterprise of repentance extremely difficult.

Abraham Foxman, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, who regards this Pope's outreach to the Jews as unprecedented and courageous, nonetheless says there are those who see Stein's canonization as part of a "strategy," that "if you show that everyone was a victim, then the church has no responsibility [and] no guilt in the Holocaust." Such conspiracy buffs might want to toss in the Stepinac beatification, Pius' prospects, parts of We Remember and the erection of crosses outside Auschwitz by right-wing Polish Catholics.

That would clearly be mistaken. The Pope has described Stein as "a great daughter of Israel and the Carmelite order," and a high U.S. churchman reiterated last week that her canonization is seen as honoring the Shoah's Jewish victims. Indeed, early in this decade, it sometimes seemed that John Paul, who lost good Jewish friends to Hitler, would do almost anything to stamp out anti-Semitism and promote an honest respect between faiths. In the past year, however, it has become clearer that when such goals collide with the prerogatives and good name of his own house--the naming of saints, the reputations of his predecessors or even of the wartime church as a whole--his enthusiasm may have its limits.

--Reported by Martin Penner/Rome and Emily Mitchell/New York

With reporting by Martin Penner/Rome and Emily Mitchell/New York