THE SAINTS IN A YEAR - ST TERESA BENEDICTA OF THE CROSS AND OUR CALL TO BUILD COMMUNION

Fr Billy Swan

One of the three pillars of the synodal pathway is ‘communion’, the other two being participation and mission. It is no co-incidence that in the listing of all three, communion comes first, followed by participation and then mission. The implication is clear – in the measure that the whole Christian community is united in communion with Christ and one another, the more effective she will be to mobilise participation in the life and mission of the Church.

On 9th August, we celebrate the feast day of St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross or Edith Stein as she was known prior to her entry into a Carmelite monastery. Edith Stein was born on 12th October 1891 into a wealthy Jewish family, the youngest of 11 children. Her father died when she was very young. At aged 14 she stopped believing, praying and dropped out of school. Although she abandoned religious practice, she still felt a void and hollowness inside her. Her heart and her mind weren’t being nurtured in the way that she expected and everything she studied felt very mechanical and superficial to her. This led her to revisit the question of God’s existence and to explore again the faith of her Jewish ancestors as well as the claims of Protestantism and Catholicism. As part of her search, she stumbled on the ‘Book of the Life’ – the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. After reading it she exclaimed ‘This is the truth!’. In 1922 Edith was baptised a Catholic Christian and in 1934 she entered the Carmelite convent in Cologne, Germany. She became one of the first female professors at the time, gave lectures and studied at the nearby Institute.

An anti-Semitic tide was rising fast in Germany and this made it impossible for Edith to continue her teaching work. On 1st January 1939 she was taken to Holland.

Shortly afterwards, the German Gestapo ordered the deportation of all Dutch Catholics of Jewish origin to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Her last words to be heard in the convent were to her sister Rosa: ‘Come, we are going to die with our people’. On 9th August 1942, they arrived in Auschwitz and on that same day Edith was sent to the gas chamber. When she was beatified in Cologne on 1st May 1987, the church honoured a ‘daughter of Israel’, as Pope John Paul II put it, who, as a Catholic during Nazi persecution, remained faithful to the crucified Christ, and, as a Jew, to her people in loving faithfulness. Edith Stein was canonised on 11th October 1998 and on 2nd October 1999 was proclaimed as Co- Patron of Europe.

Edith Stein’s life is like a bridge between the life of the mind and the life of charity; a bridge between truth and love, between justice and mercy. She is also a bridge between groups of people who are need of reconciliation in our world today. She is a bridge of communion between non-believers and believers: she is a bridge between Jews and Christians; between individuals and communities. Regarding community, she stated that ‘without community, without the social life, and therefore without forming individuals into community, humanity’s last end is unattainable’.

For someone like Edith Stein and her Jewish background, one’s individual identity was inseparable from the collective identity of the community to which one belongs. Edith insisted that we are ‘born from community, in community and for community’. For Edith, being part of a community provides a certain dynamism of life for the individual members that they otherwise could not attain on their own.

Edith also encouraged members of a community to be ‘carriers of community’ – in other words to be ambassadors for the community to which one belongs. We see examples of this with people who represent their counties and countries in sport, their families and the Church communities they come from. Here is a call for all of us to embody the community that we are part of, that stands behind us and that we represent. It underlines the importance of us being builders of community and not just people who take community for granted..

St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross is a teacher of giant stature in the Church and a teacher of how communion is built and sustained. She enlarged the space of her tent to embrace the world with its need of healing and communion at a time of great darkness. May all of us in the Church be inspired by her to build communion with God and each other – a communion and unity badly needed in the Church and in the world.