Jerusalem and Auschwitz Liberation Anniversary

(written 1/27/20)

In the first reading at Holy Mass today, we read about how King David captured the city of Jerusalem from the Jebusites, a non-Hebrew Canaanite people.

We tend to think of Jerusalem as the most thoroughly “Biblical” of cities, as God’s city. But archaeologists tell us that the city had a 3,000 year pagan history before King David captured it.

According to ancient tradition, the founder of the Hebrew people, Abraham, came from what is now Iraq. He prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac on the spot that later became the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.

So, after King David captured the city from the Jebusites, David’s son Solomon built the Temple on that spot. The site that Abraham had consecrated centuries earlier by his faithful obedience to God.

King David captured Jerusalem by military conquest. Today we recall another military capture. Pope Francis said we should commemorate the 75^th anniversary of the Soviet army capturing the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland. The Red Army liberated the surviving Jewish prisoners.

As a young GI, my grandfather participated in the liberation of a different concentration camp. He was utterly horrified by the sight of the emaciated prisoners, whom the Nazis had all but starved to death. In fact, the sight impacted my grandfather so heavily that he never spoke of it. We never knew that he had participated in the liberation of a death camp. But after he died, my mother and aunt found black-and-white photos he had taken with his little camera, after his division captured the camp.

May God be merciful to us for the horrible crimes we human beings have managed to commit against each other. May He pour out His grace to help us find peace among ourselves.

Catholic Holocaust Remembrance Day

Birkenau, May 1944

From now on, as we celebrate the memory of this new saint every August 9, we cannot fail to remember the Holocaust.

–Pope St. John Paul II, at the canonization of the Jewish philosopher Edith Stein–who had become Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

She did not die on August 9, 1942, in a wild frenzy of racist violence. She died in the due course of the Nazi’s systematic implementation of an explicit policy–a policy they had developed over the course of two decades.

According to National-Socialist racial doctrine—which Hitler and his allies openly proposed as their party platform during the 1930’s—Jews had ‘infiltrated,’ had ‘invaded,’ had aspired to ‘conquer’ the German nation. Hitler alone had the clarity and courage to ‘fight back,’ to enunciate clearly that Germans must preserve the purity of their race.

St. Edith Stein

The Nazis declared this the fundamental national priority. The presence of Jews in the life of the German nation was not, in their eyes, the simple reality of history. It was a problem. The #1 problem.

Hitler and the Nazis unapologetically proposed this idea as the basis for an entire political, legal, and military regime. The power that martyred Sister Teresa Benedicta was not a band of bloodthirsty marauders, obvious monsters, or stereotypical jackbooted thugs. No. A political alliance, based on Hitler’s ideas about German blood, developed an extensive technical and bureaucratic organization. Over the course of a decade, the Nazis established their idea as the organizing principle of German national life.

At Holy Mass today, we hear Moses rejoicing in the gift of God’s law. He revealed it fully on the cross, when the soldier pierced His Heart: the eternal law of love.

We human beings can go wrong. Our laws do not always correspond to the divine decree revealed in the wounded Heart of the Savior. We must constantly search ourselves for the evil of racism. And pray that, by the grace of God, we will see each other as who we truly are–one human family, with the loving God as our Father.

Jewish Saint

Our beloved late Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, beatified St. Teresa Benedicta, canonized her, and then declared her to be a Co-Patroness of Europe.

She held a special place in the Pope’s heart, obviously: The Nazis killed her in the Pope’s homeland, under the brutal regime which he himself endured as a young man. And, like the Pope’s oldest friend from childhood, with whom he liked to play ping-pong, among other things—like Jerzy Kluger, St. Teresa Benedicta was Jewish.

Before St. Teresa Benedicta became Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, she was called Edith Stein. She was a prominent philosopher who had rejected the Jewish faith she grew up with. Then she found Christ, or rather Christ found her. She became a Catholic and a Carmelite nun.

Played ping-pong with the Pope. (RIP. He died this past New Year’s Eve.)

When the bishops where Sister Teresa Benedicta lived protested against the Nazi abuses, the Nazis retaliated by arresting Teresa and sending her to Auschwitz. The saint willingly died with her brother- and sister-Jews, out of love for the crucified Christ, her Jewish Savior, Whom she loved above all.

When Pope John Paul canonized St. Teresa Benedicta, he declared that her Memorial every year should serve as an occasion for the Church to remember the vicious evil of the Holocaust.

Today we pray for all the victims of Nazi violence, that they might rest in peace. And we re-dedicate ourselves to standing up for the universal brotherhood of all mankind.

The Pope said, when he instituted this feast day: “We must all stand together for human dignity. There is only one human family.”

Remember, man…

...you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

T.S. Eliot wrote a complex, difficult, breathtaking poem for Ash Wednesday.

The Holy Father keeps Ash Wednesday in the Dominican church of Santa Sabina, on the Aventine Hill in Rome. He approaches the church in a solemn procession down Via Santa Sabina from the church of San Anselmo, which is about a quarter mile away.

“Tone Deaf”

John Allen calls the skilled pianist in charge of our Church “tone deaf.”

Fifty members of Congress have written to His Holiness, telling him what to do.

Here is the letter I wish he would write back to them.