The beatification of Edith Stein outraged many Jews. Of all the Christians killed by the Nazis, why had the church chosen a convert who had asked God, in the midst of the Holocaust, to accept her life in atonement for the “unbelief’ of the Jews? Why was the church placing the crown of martyrdom on the head of a single apostate Jew when millions of other Jews–children, grandparents, mothers and fathers–had perished at the hands of the Nazis? Once again, it was said, the first Polish pope was attempting to rob the Holocaust of its specific evil–the genocide of European Jewry–by focusing attention on those Christians who were also Nazi victims. Was this not, it was suggested, an attempt to use the saint-making process to deflect attention from the church’s own complicity through silence in the Nazis’ war on the Jews?
The beatification of Edith Stein remains one of the most controversial episodes in the papacy of John Paul II, who has made more saints than all of his 20th-century predecessors combined. From the perspective of the church’s professional saint-makers, however, the cause of Edith Stein was one of three important cases from the Nazi era which allowed the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints to expand and, to a certain extent, redefine martyrdom.
Strictly speaking, only God makes saints. What the church does is provide the mechanism for identifying exceptional holiness. The primary purpose of canonization is to provide contemporary examples of holiness for the edification and, it is hoped, the emulation of the faithful. Candidates for sainthood are traditionally judged in one of two ways: either as martyrs (“martyr” means witness) who died in defense of Christian faith or morals or as “confessors” who manifest the requisite virtues–especially faith, hope and charity–to an exceptional or heroic degree. The church laboriously investigates a candidate’s life and death. It also requires “divine signs” in the form of miracles, usually medically inexplicable healings, received in reponse to prayers addressed to the candidate. Normally two miracles are required in support of the heroically virtuous–one for beatification and one more for canonization. Martyrs, however, can be beatified without a miracle and need only one for canonization.
Of the two paths to sainthood, martyrdom is the oldest and surest, based as it is on the death of Jesus himself. Like Jesus, the classical martyr does not seek death but freely accepts it when challenged and forgives his enemies. In the 18th century, Pope Benedict XIV established criteria which continue to guide the saint-makers. Essentially, advocates of a cause must prove that the “tyrant” was provoked into killing the victim by the latter’s unambiguous profession of faith. Therefore, advocates must prove that a profession of faith took place, that the tyrant acted in odium fidei (hatred of the faith) and that the victim’s motives were clearly religious. Furthermore, witnesses must testify that the victim was willing to die for the faith right through the moment of shedding his blood.
The Nazis represented a new species of tyrant. There is no doubt that they killed tens of thousands of Christians. But the way they did it confounded the inherited categories and rules by which the professional saint-makers have traditionally judged causes of martyrdom. Unlike the Romans, the Nazis did not publicly proclaim a hatred I of the Christian faith. On the contrary, Adolf Hitler was baptized a Catholic and never renounced his religion. Jews were arrested and killed because they were Jews. But those Catholics who opposed the Nazis were accused of sedition or treason or other political crimes. The Nazis, in short, understood what the church means by martyrdom and were not interested in playing the conventional tyrant.
The way the Nazis disposed of their victims also caused problems for the church’s saint-makers. Sometimes their victims simply disappeared. More often they were sent to death camps where they were killed en masse with no witnesses to testify to their steadfastness in faith. How were investigators to know whether a potential martyr had not despaired of God, or, what amounted to almost the same thing, come to hate his persecutors?
The first victim of the Nazis to be proposed for sainthood as a martyr was Titus Brandsma, a Dutch Carmelite priest, teacher and journalist who criticized the Nazis, especially their treatment of Jews. Brandsma was arrested in January 1942 and later sent to Dachau, where he joined 2,700 other imprisoned clergy, most of them Catholic priests. According to witnesses, he was repeatedly beaten unconscious. In July he was put in the camp hospital as a subject for medical experimentation. On Sunday, July 26, he died from an injection of phenic acid.
After the war, when the Dutch Carmelites proposed Brandsma for sainthood, Vatican experts warned them that it would be exceedingly difficult to prove that he had been killed for religious rather than political reasons. Better, they were advised, to argue the case on the basis of his virtues and hope for a confirming miracle. But the Carmelites persisted. Witnesses from Dachau testified that Brandsma had urged his fellow inmates to pray for their sadistic guards, and did so himself. Even the nurse who injected Brandsma with phenic acid came forward–with a promise of anonymity from the church tribunal–to testify that Brandsma had prayed for her as well.
But the real problem was proving that Brandsma was not arrested and killed for purely political reasons. Almost miraculously, church investigators discovered the transcripts of Brandsma’s interrogation in front of Nazi judges in Holland. From these, Brandsma’s advocates were able to show two reasons why the Nazis condemned him to death. “The first was because he had refused to expel Jewish children from Catholic schools, " recalls Father Redemptus Valabek, a genial American Carmelite who pressed Brandsma’s cause. “So we were able to show that he was defending the rights of the church to educate the children who were sent to Catholic schools, including non-Catholics. The second reason was that as ecclesiastical adviser to Catholic journalists in Holland he made a personal appeal to them not to accept Nazi propaganda in their newspapers.”
In short, Valabek succeeded in having Brandsma declared a martyr because he was able to demonstrate that he was killed for defending certain Catholic principles. Although those principles–freedom of education and of the press–were not inherent in Catholic faith and morality, they were rights the church asserted as an institution, and Brandsma, as his advocates demonstrated, had made them his own.
Valabek promoted him as the patron saint of journalists who, God knows, need one. But it was the pope’s prerogative to establish the meaning of the church’s new martyr. At the beatification ceremony on Nov. 3, 1985, John Paul II found his text in the Old Testament: “God hath tried them . . . as in gold in the furnace He hath proved them, and as victim of a holocaust He hath received them.”
For the saint-makers, however, the success of Brandsma’s cause had another, more precise meaning. They now had a precedent for arguing that Catholic victims of the Nazis could be officially declared martyrs when it could be shown that the local church authorities had provoked the tyrant into acting against the church. That precedent was at the heart of Edith Stein’s cause.
On the same Sunday in July 1942 that Titus Brandsma was killed, the Catholic bishops of Holland published a letter denouncing the latest Nazi scheme to deport Dutch Jews “to the East”–the Nazis’ euphemism for the death camps in Poland. In retaliation, the Nazis ordered the immediate arrest of all Catholics of Jewish descent. On the following Thursday, Sister Theresa Benedicta–born Edith Stein–was arrested at the Carmelite convent in Echt. A week later she died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, together with her sister, Rosa, and 300 other baptized Jews from Holland.
Born on Yom Kippur to prosperous Jewish parents in Breslau, Stein proclaimed herself an atheist at the age of 15 and distinguished herself as a philosophy student under the eminent German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. Impressed by the faith of some of the Christians in Husserl’s circle, she converted to Catholicism at the age of 30 and, devoted to the mystical theology of St. Theresa of Avila, became a Discalced Carmelite nun.
When the German bishops initiated Stein’s canonization process, they sought sainthood on the basis of her heroic virtues, not martyrdom. The assumption was that she had been killed because she was a Jew. By 1983, the case for her heroic virtue was ready for the Vatican. There was little doubt that she would be declared “venerable.” But there was considerable doubt that she would soon be beatified because she lacked the necessary miracle.
The problem was that the Nazi death camps left no bodies–at least no bodies that could be distinguished from the bones and skulls shoveled into mass graves. Without a body, there can be no tomb where the faithful can come and ask the candidate to intercede with God for divine favors. Without a body, there can be no relics, either. In the case of Edith Stein, even those second-class relics–rosaries and crucifixes she used, clothes she wore–were destroyed when the Nazis burned the Carmelite convent in Echt. Thus, without these very tangible means whereby Catholics for millennia have invoked intercession, Stein’s cause seemed destined for a lengthy stay in that limbo reserved for those venerables who lack the miracles required of blesseds and saints.
On March 3, 1983, the German hierarchy pushed Stein’s cause in a different direction, formally petitioning John Paul II to consider Stein for martyrdom. Supported by the bishops of Poland, they argued that her death could be seen as an act of retaliation against the Catholic bishops of Holland for their public protest against the deportation of Dutch Jews. Therefore, they concluded, there were grounds for recognizing her as a martyr for the church.
There were at least two good reasons to suppose why the bishops wanted Stein declared a martyr. First, it would obviate the need for a miracle: as a martyr, she could be beatified (but not canonized) without one. Second, not to declare her a martyr would suggest that the Catholic church had not nurtured blood witnesses to the Nazi horrors. To the bishops of Germany and Poland, the church had to correct this history.
The cause of Edith Stein was of special interest to John Paul II as well. He shared her interest in phenomenology and had known many of Stein’s intellectual friends. In any case, the Polish pope was genuinely moved by the figure of a modern intellectual who had come to the Catholic faith through the disinterested pursuit of truth. Few candidates for sainthood in the 20th century provided such an example for intellectuals in or outside the church.
For Dominican friar Ambrose Eszer, the Congregation official in charge of Stein’s cause, the challenge was to prove that she had died for the church, and therefore for the faith, and not solely because of her Jewishness. The key to his case was a collection of documents discovered in 1980 in the Royal Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam. According to those documents, the Nazis were prepared to spare converted Dutch Jews if the bishops would agree not to publicize their opposition to the deportation order. When the bishops refused, the Nazis ordered the immediate arrest of all Catholics with Jewish blood. Therefore, Eszer argued, the Nazis were provoked by the bishops’ defiance into committing a specific act in hatred of the faith.
Up to this point, the case was similar to the argument put forward on behalf of Titus Brandsma. The crucial difference was that Stein, unlike Brandsma, was not personally connected to the bishops’ action. Thus, it could not be argued that she had provoked the tyrant by her own act. Nor was there any evidence that, after her arrest, she had been asked for or given a profession of faith. Indeed, on the one occasion when she identified herself as a Catholic (which was obvious from her habit, to which the Star of David was pinned), the concentration-camp guard who put the question to her rejected her answer. “You damned Jew,” he shouted, “stand there!”
To meet the expected objections, Eszer proposed a novel response. “The provocation of the ’tyrant”’ he argued, “was made by the action of the Dutch bishops, to which Sr. Benedicta definitely adhered … " In effect, then, the Dutch bishops’ provocative act became a kind of class action that applied to all converted Jews who died as a result. Furthermore, Eszer argued, there was no reason to suppose that she had not persevered in her faith. In her spiritual will she had already offered herself to God as an atoning victim “for peace” and for “the unbelief of the Jewish people.” In other words, Eszer argued that Stein’s whole life as a Catholic was evidence of her readiness to accept martyrdom if and when it came.
Proving that Stein died a martyr for the faith was an exciting challenge, especially for a theologian from Germany. Eszer was 9-years-old when she died, 11 when the Nazis surrendered and thus of the first generation of Germans who could fairly claim no responsibility for Hitler’s actions. “The modern tyrant is very sophisticated,” he said. “He pretends not to be against religion or even interested in it, so he does not ask his victims what their faith is. But in reality he is either without religion or makes some ideology into an ersatz religion. We see that with the communists and we saw it with the Nazis. Due to the overriding concerns of the war, Hitler felt that the ‘final solution’ of the Catholic problem was to be held off until the war was over. But the Nazis’ hatred of the church erupted spontaneously when the Dutch bishops protested the deportation of the Jews and so we can see that the death of Edith Stein was an act committed in hatred of the faith. Our critics say that she must be honored as a Jewish martyr and that we cannot accept.”
Eszer’s argument was spelled out in a long brief on behalf of Stein and was accepted by the historians, theologians and cardinals of the congregation assigned to judge her cause. On Jan. 25, 1987, Stein became the first person in the congregation’s 400-year history to be confirmed as both martyr and confessor. All that remained was for the pope to find a way of formally beatifying Stein without offending Jews. Thus, in his homily at the beatification ceremony, he deftly declared that “in the extermination camp she died as a daughter of Israel ‘for the glory of the Most Holy Name’ and, at the same time, as Sister Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, literally ‘blessed by the cross.’ . . . She gave her life ‘for genuine peace’ and ‘for the people’.” Prudently, he left unmentioned her desire to atone for Jewish “unbelief.”
According to the criteria for making saints, giving one’s life for another is not, of itself, proof of martyrdom. To be declared a martyr, it must be proven that the candidate was, under one rubric or another, killed for the faith. In one of the most controverted cases ever to come before the congregation, the cause of Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan friar who gave his life for another prisoner at Auschwitz, tested this requirement twice.
The essential facts of Kolbe’s heroic gesture are undisputed. At 6 p.m. on July 30, 1941, the prisoners of cellblock 14 were ordered to stand at attention for Kommandant Fritsch. A prisoner from the cellblock had escaped and because of this 10 men would be chosen to starve to death. Among those selected was Francis Gajownicezek, who began to weep. “My poor wife and children,” he sobbed. When the 10 were chosen, Kolbe stepped forward and asked that he be chosen in Gajownicezek’s place.
Fritsch stared at him. “Who are you?” he asked. “I am a Catholic priest,” Kolbe replied. His wish was granted. The 10 were marched to basement cells in bunker 11 and stripped. They had no furniture or blankets, only a bucket to hold their urine. But according to Bruno Borgowiec, an inmate assigned to remove bodies from the death cells, the buckets were always dry. “The prisoners,” he testified at Kolbe’s church tribunal, “actually drank their urine to satisfy their thirst.” For 16 days, Kolbe led the condemned men in prayer and hymns as one by one they died. On Aug. 14, the last four, including Kolbe, were given a lethal injection.
Kolbe’s heroic act of love–for a man he did not know–added luster to an already considerable reputation for holiness. He was founder of the Knights of the Immaculata, an international religious movement that grew out of his intense, almost fanatical devotion to the Virgin Mary. Not surprisingly, his intercession was invoked often after his death by Poles, the Franciscans and the Knights of the Immaculata. When his cause was taken up by the congregation, Kolbe had two miracles to his credit.
Thus, when Pope Paul VI beatified Kolbe in 1971, it was as a confessor, not a martyr. Nonetheless, he said later to a group of Polish bishops, including Karol Wojtyla, Kolbe might unofficially be considered a “martyr of charity.”
However appropriate, “martyr of charity” had no theological standing. The Polish hierarchy and many of Kolbe’s fellow Franciscans remained dissatisfied. They insisted that Kolbe was a martyr, and in 1982, when a delegation of German bishops visited Kolbe’s death cell, they were pressured–a fact they have never acknowledged–into signing a petition to have him canonized as a martyr.
Kolbe’s status changed after Karol Wojtyla became John Paul II. Auschwitz was within his jurisdiction as archbishop of Cracow and on his first visit to Poland as pope he knelt in prayer on the cement floor of Kolbe’s death cell. Still, what the German and Polish bishops were asking for required exceptional procedures.
At John Paul’s direction, the cause was taken out of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and placed under the jurisdiction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. A special commission of 10 cardinals was established to discuss the martyrdom issue. Two judges were assigned to review the evidence and arguments, one from the historical perspective, the other from the philosophical. Father Peter Gumpel was the historical judge and, in his characteristically precise manner, he recounted what took place: “The question was whether Kolbe had died as a martyr for the faith. I personally never said he was not a martyr. What I did say was we have no absolutely certain proof that he was a martyr [for the faith], and in these cases you have to be absolutely certain.”
In a secret ballot never before revealed, a majority of the 10 cardinals voted that Kolbe did not meet the criteria necessary for a martyr of faith. But their judgment was merely advisory. On Nov. 9,1982, before 250,000 faithful at St. Peter’s Basilica, one of the largest crowds ever for a canonization, John Paul II proclaimed: “And so, in virtue of my apostolic authority I have decreed that Maximilian Maria Kolbe, who, after his beatification was venerated as a confessor, shall . . . be venerated also as a martyr.”
But what kind of martyr? The pope wasn’t saying. He did, however, recall the words from the Gospel of John, “There is no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends.” By using that text, some saint-makers insist, John Paul II sanctioned the concept of martyr for charity as a new category of saint. But if there can be martyrs for faith and charity, why not for peace or justice? These are the questions that now confront the Vatican as it ponders martyrs like Archbishop Oscar Romero from bloody Central America.
In theory, anyone can become a saint. But make a saint, proponents must first show that the candidate enjoys a longstanding reputation for holiness among the people. A cause becomes official when a focal bishop initiates a formal investigation to determine whether the candidate’s life merits that popular reputation and contains a spiritual message for the faithful. Investigators collect everything written by and about the candidate and take testimony from available witnesses. If the candidate is judged worthy, all the documents are sent to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which prepares an official biography arguing for the candidates heroic virtue or martyrdom. A panel of nine theologians judges the case. If two thirds approve, the cause is sent to the cardinals of the Congregation and then to the pope, who declares the candidate “venerable.“The same process is followed in judging posthumous miracles attributed to the candidate. One miracle is required for beatification, that is, declaration of a “blessed” or local saint. A second miracle is required for canonization as as to be honored–and invoked–by the entire church.
Many prospective saints are hometown favorites. Here are the prospects for some with wider reputations.
Cardinal John Henry Newman: Will be declared venerable soon but still lacks a miracle for beatification.
Pius XII and John XXIII: To please the right and the left, the Vatican would like to canonize both popes or neither.
Oscar Romero: John Paul II hopes to depoliticize the Salvadoran archbishop, by making him a church martyr.
Dorothy Day: Ideal American candidate, but Catholic left fears canonization would turn pacifist into a plaster saint.
Jose Maria Escriva de Balaguer: Founder of secretive Opus: Dei movement nearing sainthood at record pace.
Isabella I of Spain: Vatican is studying her case for 1992, but officials are wary of canonizing a queen who expelled Jews.
