Word: catholicization
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...