Introduction
We offer this Mass for the Jewish People and for peace in the Holy Land. It is said that the future of the world belongs to the intercessors and connectors. Today’s Saint Teresa Benedicta, formerly Edith Stein, helped change the world through prayer and empathy. She is a patron Saint of Europe on account of her connections with Germany and the Netherlands, her roots in Jewish faith, her life as a contemplative nun and her tragic death in the gas chamber. Her dust remains with millions of her coreligionists around Auschwitz which must be Europe’s darkest place in current memory. She offered her death as an intercession to God for her Jewish people to connect as she did with Jesus Christ our Saviour.
St Teresa wrote words that might challenge us as we begin Mass calling to mind our shortfalls in love: ‘If ‘God is within us and if God is love, it cannot be otherwise than that we love our brothers and sisters. Therefore our love of human beings is the measure of our love of God. For the Christian, there is no such thing as a stranger. At any time it is our neighbour who stands before us, the one who needs us the most’
Sermon
‘I will bethroth you with integrity and justice, with tenderness and love… and you will come to know the Lord’ (Hosea 2:21-22) we heard promised in the Old Testament reading anticipating the love of God revealed in the Cross of Jesus and documented in the New Testament. Today’s Saint first became familiar with this passage from Hosea as a child in a practising Jewish family in Germany.
Edith Stein, now honoured as St Teresa Benedicta, born in 1891, went on to lose her faith when she was 14 and had a distinguished career as a philosopher. Reading the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Ávila during her philosophical studies helped her engage with the tenderness and love of God prophesied by Hosea revealed upon the Cross. She was baptised in 1922 continuing to teach at a Dominican girls’ school and study Catholic philosophy.
She became a lecturer but was thrown out of her post in 1933 as a result of the Nazi régime’s anti-Semitic legislation. In 1938 she was professed as a Carmelite nun in Cologne and took prophetically the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Her order moved her to the Netherlands to keep her safe from the growing Nazi threat. While a Carmelite she wrote an important philosophical book linking to the understanding of empathy and also wrote on St John of the Cross.
On 20 July 1942 the Dutch Bishops’ Conference had a statement read in all churches condemning Nazi racism. In retaliation the authorities ordered the arrest of all Jewish converts to Christianity. Edith Stein was taken to Auschwitz and killed in the gas chamber on 9 August 1942. Pope John Paul II canonised her in 1998 as a ‘martyr for love’ and she has been made co-patron of Europe along with St Benedict, St Bridget, St Catherine of Siena and SS Cyril & Methodius.
In her philosophical work ‘On the Problem of Empathy’, Stein argued that the way we encounter humans is not the same as the way we encounter other things in the world, and this difference is no add on but something basic to being human. Our basic empathy helps us know that someone is fearful, ashamed or happy. We just know. We can also, uniquely, adopt the perspective of the other. We can, in a way which we are unable to do as fully with non-human encounters, care. Stein’s word for what we encounter in the other is their “spirit”, a term that is problematic for philosophers on account of its religious connotations. In relation to her own pilgrimage from Judaism through atheism to Christianity her study of empathy is a document of her spiritual awakening which led her to give her life by intention for the Jewish people with, in and through Jesus Christ. In the face of the anti-Semitism that took her to death she told her Prioress before heading to Auschwitz: ‘Human action cannot help us, but only the sufferings of Christ. My aspiration is to share them’.
As we celebrate St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross we seek to emulate her love for God and empathy with humankind which took her, and will sometimes take us, to bear suffering cheerfully and creatively to bring light to those around us living in darkness and the shadow of death.
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