On the morning of Friday, 1 May, the Holy Father celebrated Mass in Cologne. During the Mass he beatified the martyred Carmelite nun, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
There are the ones who have survived the great period of trial; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb." (Rev 7:14)
Today we greet in profound honour and holy joy a daughter of the Jewish people, rich in wisdom and courage, among these blessed men and women. Having grown up in the strict traditions of Israel, and having lived a life of virtue and self-denial in a religious order, she demonstrated her heroic character on the way to the extermination camp. Unified with our crucified Lord, she gave her life "for genuine peace" and "for the people" (see "Edith Stein, Judin, Philosophin, Ordensfrau, Martyrin").
Cardinal, dear Brothers and Sisters,
Today's beatification marks the realization of a long-outstanding wish on the part of the Archdiocese of Cologne as well as on the part of many individuals and groups within the Church. Seven years ago the members of the German Bishops' Conference sent a unanimous request. for this beatification to the Holy See Numerous bishops from other countries joined them in making this request. As such, we are all greatly gratified that I am able to fulfills this wish today and can present Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross to the faithful on behalf of the Church as blessed in the glory of God. From this moment on we can honour her as a martyr and ask for her intercession at the throne of God. In this I would like to express congratulations to all, most of all to her fellow sisters in the order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel here in Cologne and in Echt as well as in the entire order. The fact that Jewish brothers and sisters, relatives of Edith Stein's in particular, are present at this liturgical ceremony today fills us with great joy and gratitude.
2. "O Lord, manifest yourself in the time of our distress and give us courage." (Esther 4:17)
The words of this call for help from the first reading of today's liturgy were spoken by Esther, a daughter of Israel, at the time of the Babylonian captivity. Her prayer, which she directs to the Lord God at a time when her people were exposed to a deadly threat, are profoundly moving:
"My Lord, our King, you alone are God. Help me, who am alone and have no help but you, for I am taking my life in my hand . . . you, O Lord, chose Israel from among all peoples... and our fathers from among all their ancestors as a lasting heritage... be mindful of us, O Lord... Save us by your power. ( Esther 4:17).
Esther's deathly fear arose when, under the influence of the mighty Haman, an archenemy of the Jews, the order for their destruction was given out in all of the Persian Empire. With God's help and by sacrificing her own life Esther rendered a key contribution towards saving her people.
3. Today's liturgy places this more than two-thousand-year-old prayer for help in the mouth of Edith Stein,a servant of God and a daughter of Israel in our century. This prayer became relevant again when here, in the heart of Europe a new plan for the destruction of the Jews was laid out. An insane ideology decided on this plan in the name of a wretched form of racism and carried it out mercilessly.
Extermination camps and crematoriums were rapidly built, parallel to the dramatic events of the Second World War. Several million sons and daughters of Israel were killed at these places of horror - from children to the elderly. The enormously powerful machinery of the totalitarian state spared no one and undertook extremely cruel measures against those who had the courage to defend the Jews.
4. Edith Stein died at the Auschwitz extermination camp, the daughter of a martyred people. Despite the fact that she moved from Cologne to the Dutch Carmelite community in Echt, her protection against the growing persecution of the Jews was only temporary. The Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews was rapidly implemented in Holland, too, after the country had been occupied. Jews who had converted to Christianity were Initially left alone. However, when the Catholic bishops in the Netherlands issued a pastoral letter in which they sharply protested against the deportation of the Jews, the Nazi rulers reacted by ordering the extermination of Catholic Jews as well. This was the cause of the suffering by Sister Teresa Cruce together with her sister, Rosa, who had also sought refuge with the Carmelites in Echt.
On leaving their convent Edith took her sister by the hand and said: "Come, we will go for our people". On the strength of Christ's willingness to sacrifice himself for others she saw in her seeming impotence a way to render a final service to her people. A few years previously she had compared herself with Queen Esther in exile at the Persian court. In one of her letters we read: "I am confident that the Lord has taken my life for all Jews. I always have to think of Queen Esther who was taken away from her people for the express purpose of standing before the king for her people. I am the very poor, weak and small Esther, but the King who selected me is infinitely great and merciful".
5. Dear brothers and sisters, the second reading in this special Mass is from Saint Paul's letter to the Galatians. He wrote there: "May I never boast of anything but the cross of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Through it, the world has been crucified to me and I to the world." (Gal 6:14).
During her lifetime, Edith Stein too encountered the secret of the cross that Saint Paul announces to the Christians in this letter.
Edith encountered Christ and this encounter led her step by step into the Carmelite community. 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 Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, literally, "blessed by the Cross".
Edith Stein's entire life is characterized by an incessant search for truth and is illuminated by the blessing of the cross of Christ. She encountered the cross for the first time in the strongly religious widow of a university friend. Instead of despairing, this woman took strength and hope from the cross of Christ. Later she wrote about this: "It was my first encounter with the cross and the divine strength it gives those who bear it . . . It was the moment in which my atheism collapsed ... and Christ shone brightly: Christ in the mystery of the cross". Her own life and the cross she had bear were intimately connected with the destiny of the Jewish people. In a prayer she confessed td the Saviour that she knew that it was his cross that was now being laid on the Jewish people and that those who realized this would have to accept it willingly on behalf of all the others. "I wanted to do it-all he has to do is show me how". At the same time she attains the inner certainty that God has heard her prayer. The more often swastikas were seen on the streets, the higher the cross of Jesus Christ rose up in her life. When she entered the Carmelite order of nuns in Cologne as Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce in order to experience the cross of Christ even more profoundly, she knew that she was "married to the Lord in the sign of the cross". On the day of her first vows she felt, in her own words, "like the bride of the lamb". She was convinced that her heavenly Groom would introduce her to the profound mysteries of the cross.
6. Teresa, Blessed by the Cross was the name given in a religious to a woman who began her spiritual life with the conviction that God does not exist. At that time, in her schoolgirl years and when she was at university, her life was not yet filled with the redeeming cross of Christ. However, it was already the object of constant searching on the part of her sharp intellect. As a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl in her home town of Breslau, Edith who had been raised in a Jewish household, suddenly decided, as she herself put it, "not to pray anymore". Despite the fact that she was deeply impressed by the strict devotion of her mother, during her school and university years Edith slips into the intellectual world of atheism. She considers the existence of a personal God to be unworthy of belief.
In the years when she studied psychology, philosophy, history and German at the Universities of Breslau, Gottingen and Freiburg, God didn't play an important role, at least initially. Her thinking was based on a demanding ethical idealism. In keeping with her intellectual abilities, she did not want to accept anything without careful examination, not even the faith of her fathers. She wanted to get to the bottom of things herself. As such, she was engaged in a constant search for the truth. Looking back on this period of intellectual unrest in her life she saw in it an important phase in a process of spiritual saturation. She said: "My search for the truth was a constant prayer". This is a comforting bit of testimony for those who have a hard time believing in God. The search for truth is itself, in a very profound sense a search for God.
Under the influence of Edmund Husserl and his phenomenological school of thought the student Edith Stein became increasingly dedicated to the study of philosophy. She gradually learned to "view things free of prejudice and to throw off 'blinkers'". She came into contact for the first time with Catholic ideas through a meeting with Max Scheler in Gottingen. She described her reaction to this meeting as follows: The barriers of rationalistic prejudice, something I grew up with without "being aware of it fell and suddenly I was confronted with the World of faith. People I dealt with on a daily basis, people I looked up to in admiration, lived in that world".
Her long struggle for a personal decision to believe in Jesus Christ was not to come to an end until 1921, when she began to read the autobiographical " Life of Saint Teresa of Avila". She was immediately taken with the book and could not put it down until she had finished it. Edith Stein commented: "When I closed the book I said to myself: 'That is the truth!'" She had read through the night, until sunrise. In that night she found truth-not the truth, of philosophy, but rather the truth in person, the loving person of God. Edith Stein had sought the truth and found God. She was baptized soon after that and entered the Catholic Church.
7. For Edith Stein baptism as a Christian was by no means a break-with her Jewish heritage.Quite on the contrary she said: "I had given up my practice of the Jewish religion as a girl of fourteen. My return to God made me feel Jewish again." She was always mindful of the fact that she was related to Christ "not only in a spiritual sense, but also in blood terms". She suffered profoundly from the pain she caused her mother through her conversion to Catholicism. She continued to accompany here to services in the synagogue and to pray the psalms with her. In. reaction to her observation that it was possible for her to be pious in a Jewish sense as well, she answered:
"Of course, seeing as it is something I grew up with".
Although becoming a member of the Carmelite Order was Edith Stein's objective from the time of her encounter with the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila, she had to wait more than a decade before Christ showed her the way. In her activity as a teacher and lecturer at schools and in adult education, mostly in Speyer, but also in Munster, she made a continuous effort to combine science and religion and to convey them together. In this she only wanted to be a "tool of the Lord". "Those who come to me I would like to lead to him", she said. During this period of her life she already lived like a nun. She took the vows privately and became a great and gifted woman of prayer. From her intensive study of the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas she learned that it is possible "to approach science from a religious standpoint". She said that it was only thus that she was able to decide to return seriously (after her conversion) to academic work. Despite her respect for scholarship, Edith Stein became increasingly aware that the essence of being a Christian is not scholarship, but rather love.
When Edith Stein finally entered the Carmelite Order in Cologne. In 1933; this step did not represent an escape from the world or from responsibility for her, but rather a resolved commitment to the heritage of Christ On the cross. She said in her first conversation with the prioress there: "It is not human activity that helps us—it is the suffering of Christ. To share in this is my desire". On being registered in the order she expressed the wish to be named "Blessed by the cross" she had the words of Saint John of the Cross printed on the devotional picture presented to her on taking her final vows: "My only vocation is that of living more".
8. Dear brothers and sisters. We bow today with the entire Church before this great woman whom we from now on may call upon as one of the blessed in God's glory, before this great daughter of Israel, who found the fulfillment of her faith and her vocation for the people of God in Christ the Saviour. In her conviction those who enter the Carmelite Order are not lost to their own - on the contrary they are won for them. It is our vocation to stand before God for everyone. After she began seeing the destiny of Israel from the standpoint of the cross, our newly beatified sister let Christ lead her more and more deeply into the mystery of his salvation to be able to bear the multiple pains of mankind in spiritual union with him and to help atone for the outrageous injustices in the world. As "Benedicta a Cruce" - Blessed by the Cross - she wanted to bear the cross with Christ for the salvation of her people, her Church and the world as a whole. She offered herself to God as a "sacrifice for genuine peace" and above all for her threatened and humiliated Jewish people. After she recognized that God had once again laid a heavy hand on his people, she was convinced "that the destiny of this people was also my destiny".
When Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce began her last theological work, "The Science of the Cross", at the Carmelite convent in Echt (the work remained incomplete since it was interrupted by her own encounter with the cross) she noted: "When we speak of the science of the cross this is not . . . mere theory but rather vibrant, genuine and effective truth". When the deadly threat to the Jewish people gathered like a dark cloud over her as well she was willing to realize with her own life what she had recognized earlier: "There is a vocation for suffering with Christ and by that means for involvement in his salvation . . . Christ continues to live and to suffer in his members. The suffering gone through in union with the Lord is his suffering, and is a fruitful part of the great, plan of salvation".
With her people and "for" her people Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce traveled the road to death with her sister Rosa. She did not accept suffering and death passively, but instead combined these consciously with the atoning sacrifice of our Savior Jesus Christ. A few years earlier she had written in her will: "I will gladly accept the death God chooses for me, in full submission to his holy will. I ask the Lord to accept my suffering and death for his honour and glory and for all interests . . . of the holy Church". The Lord heard her prayer.
The Church now presents Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce to us as a blessed martyr, as an example of a heroic follower of Christ, for us to honour and to emulate. Let us open ourselves up for her message to us as a woman of the spirit and of the mind, who saw in the science of the cross the acme of all wisdom, as a great daughter of the Jewish people, and as a believing Christian in the midst of millions of innocent fellow men made martyrs. She saw the inexorable approach of the cross. She did not flee in fear. Instead, she embraced it in Christian hope with final love and sacrifice and in the mystery of Easter even welcomed it with the salutation "ave crux spes unica". As Cardinal Hoffner said in his recent pastoral letter, "Edith Stein is a gift, an invocation and a promise for our time. May she be an intercessor with God for us and for our people and for all people".
9. Dear brothers and sisters. today the Church of the twentieth century is experiencing a great day. We bow in profound respect before the testimony of the life and death of Edith Stein, an outstanding daughter of Israel and, at the same time, a daughter of Carmel, Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce, a person who embodied a dramatic synthesis of our century in her rich life. Hers was a synthesis of a history full of deep wounds, wounds that still hurt, and, for the healing of which responsible men and women have continued to work up to the present day. At the same time, it was a synthesis of the full truth on man, in a heart that remained restless and unsatisfied "until it finally found peace in God".
When we pay a spiritual visit to the place where this great Jewish woman and Christian experienced martyrdom, the place of horrible events today referred to as "Shoah". We hear the voice of Christ the Messiah and Son of Man, our Lord and Savior.
As the bearer of the message of God's unfathomable mystery of salvation he said to the woman from Samaria at Jacob's well:
"After all, salvation is from the Jews. Yet an hour is coming, and is already here when authentic worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. Indeed, it is just such worshippers which the Father seeks. God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth".
She is among the blessed. Amen.