A Vatican cardinal marked the 80th anniversary Tuesday of the gas chamber killing of the Jewish-born Catholic convert Edith Stein by celebrating a Mass near the former Auschwitz death camp and telling the story of his own family’s Jewish origins and their fate under the Nazis.
Michael Czerny is one of cardinals most closely associated with Pope Francis’ pontificate. A Jesuit who ministered in El Salvador, Czerny heads the Vatican office responsible for Francis’ priority portfolios of migration, the environment, development and social justice. A Czech-born Canadian, Czerny recently joined Francis on his landmark visit to Canada to apologise to Indigenous peoples for the Catholic Church’s role in running the country’s notorious residential schools.
On Tuesday, Czerny commemorated the anniversary of the day Stein was killed in Auschwitz’s gas chambers by celebrating Mass in a nearby Carmelite convent in Oswiecim, a Polish town under Nazi German occupation during the war. There, he delivered a homily that recounted Stein’s story and how it intersected with his own and that of his relatives, who hailed from Brno, in the former Czechoslovakia.
Stein was a German Jew born in 1891 in Breslau, now the Polish city of Wroclaw, who converted to Catholicism in 1922 and became a nun. She joined the Carmelite order in Cologne, Germany, but was transferred to the Netherlands after the intensification of Nazi attacks in 1938. She was arrested in 1942 after Hitler ordered the arrest of Jewish converts and was sent to Auschwitz, where she was killed on 9th August, 1942. St John Paul II canonized Stein as a martyr in 1998 and made her a patron saint of Europe the following year.
Read the article by Nicole Winfield in Sight Magazine.