Saints and Sacrifices: Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein at Auschwitz

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross — Edith Stein — are honored this week as martyrs of charity and sacrifice.

In a post some years I invited our readers to join my friend Pornchai Moontri and me in a personal Consecration to Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s dual movements: the Militia of the Immaculata and the Knights at the Foot of the Cross. Our Consecration will took place at Mass on the night of August 15, the Solemnity of the Assumption, and the day after Saint Maximilian’s Feast Day. Visit the website of the Militia of the Immaculata for instructions for enrolling in the Militia Immaculata and the Knights at the Foot of the Cross.

We’re very moved by the number of people who have pledged to join us in this Consecration. The invitation remains always open.

Consecration as members of Saint Maximilian’s M.I. or Knights at the Foot of the Cross does not mean I plan to take on any more suffering or that I will never again complain. It does not even mean that I accept with open arms whatever crosses I bear and embrace them.

A person who is unjustly imprisoned must do all in his power to reverse that plight just as a person with cancer must do everything possible to be restored to health. Consecration does not mean we will simply acquiesce to suffering and look for more. It means we embrace the suffering of Christ, and offer our own as a share in it. In the end, I know I cannot empty myself, as Christ did, but I can perhaps attain the attitude of “Simon of Cyrene: Compelled to Carry the Cross,” of which my own is but a splinter.

I have written in the past that history has a tendency to treat its events lightly. The centuries have made Saint Patrick, for example, a sort of whimsical figure. History has distorted the fact that he became the saint he is after great personal suffering. Patrick was kidnapped by Irish raiders at the age of 16, forced from his home and family, taken across the Irish Sea and forced into slavery.

The life and death of Saint Maximilian are still too recent to be subjected to the colored glasses through which we often view history and sainthood. As with nearly all the saints — and with some of us who simply struggle to believe — great suffering was imposed on Maximilian Kolbe and he responded in a way that revealed a Christ-centered rather than self-centered life. What happened to Father Maximilian Kolbe must not be removed from what the Germans would call his “sitz im leben,” the “setting in life” of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. As evil as they were, they were the forges in which Maximilian cast off self and took on the person of Christ.

Scene from the 1978 mini-series “Holocaust”

“And the Winner Is . . .”

Do you remember the television “mini-series” productions of the 1970s and 1980s? After the great success of bringing Alex Haley’s “Roots” to the screen, several other forays into history were aired in our living rooms. One of them was a superb and compelling series entitled “Holocaust” that debuted on NBC on April 16, 1978. It was a brilliant and powerful example of television’s potential.

“Holocaust” won several Emmy Awards for NBC in 1978 for outstanding Limited Series, Best Director (Marvin Chomsky), Best Screenplay (Gerald Green), Best Actor (Michael Moriarty), Best Actress (Meryl Streep) and a number of Supporting Actor and other awards. As a historical narrative, however, “Holocaust” was deeply disturbing and shook an otherwise comfortable generation all too inclined to want to forget and move on. That was a complaint during the famous Nuremberg Trials of 1945 and 1946.

Just two years after the Allied Invasion of Germany and Poland ended the war and exposed the Death Camps, writers complained that Americans had lost interest and were not reading about the Nuremberg Trials. The aftermath of war revealed the sheer evil of the Nazi Final Solution, and it was more than most of us could bear to look at — so many did not look.

As I wrote in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich,” there are some who would have you believe that the Catholic Church is to be the moral scapegoat of the 20th Century. Viewing “Holocaust” (the miniseries) would quickly shatter any such revisionist history. Its first episode was so graphic in its depiction of Nazi oppression, and caused me so much anguish, that I struggled with whether to watch the rest.

I was 25 years old when it first aired, and finishing senior year at Saint Anselm College, a Benedictine school in New Hampshire. I was a double major in philosophy and psychology, and was in the middle of writing my psychology thesis on the relationship between trauma and depression when “Holocaust” kept me awake all night.

The morning after that first episode, I sought out a friend, an elderly Benedictine monk on campus who recommended the series to me. I thought he might tell me to turn my television off, but I was wrong. “This happened in my lifetime,” he said. “We cannot run from it. So don’t look away. Stare straight into its heart of darkness, and never forget what you see.”

He was right, and his words were eerily similar to those of biographer, George Weigel, who wrote of Pope John Paul II and his interest in Saint Maximilian Kolbe in Witness to Hope (HarperCollins, 1999):

“Maximilian Kolbe . . . was the ‘saint of the abyss’ – the man who looked into the modern heart of darkness and remained faithful to Christ by sacrificing his life for another in the Auschwitz starvation bunker while helping his cellmates die with dignity and hope.”

— Witness to Hope, p. 447

That was what the Holocaust was: “the modern heart of darkness.” I have been a student of the Holocaust since, but I am no closer to understanding it than I was on that sleepless night in 1978. As I asked in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich”:

“How did a society come to stand behind the hateful rhetoric 
of one man and his political machine? How did masses of people become convinced that any ideology of the state was worth the horror unfolding before their eyes?”

We have all been reading about the breakdown of faith in Europe, and about how decades-old scandals are now being used to justify the abandonment of Catholicism in European culture. This is not a new phenomenon. This madness engulfed Europe just eighty years ago, and before it was over, six million of our spiritual ancestors were deprived of liberty, and then life, for being Jews.

Hitler’s “Final Solution” exterminated fully two-thirds of the Jewish men, women, and children of Europe — and millions of others who either stood in his way or spoke the truth. Among those imprisoned and murdered were close to 12,000 Catholic priests and thousands more women religious and other Catholics. The determination to rid Europe of the Judeo-Christian faith did not begin with claims of sexual abuse, and this is not the first time such claims were used to further that agenda.

The Great Lie and Revealed Truth

This of all weeks keeps me riveted on the Holocaust.  It was in this week that two of my dearest spiritual friends were murdered a year apart at Auschwitz by that madman, Hitler, and his monstrous Third Reich.  Father Maximilian Kolbe traded his life for that of a fellow prisoner on August 14, 1941, and Edith Stein — who became Carmelite Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross — was dragged from a cattle train and murdered along with her sister, Rosa, immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942.

We must not forget this line from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Vol. 1, Ch.10, 1925): “The great mass of people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” In order for a lie to disseminate and prevail, the truth must be controlled. In 1933, the Third Reich imposed the “Editor’s Law” in Germany requiring that editors and publishers join the Third Reich’s Literary Chamber or cease publishing. In 1933 there were over 400 Catholic newspapers and magazines published in Germany. By 1935 there were none.

The Nazi law was imposed in each country invaded by the Reich. In Poland, Father Maximilian was one of many priests sent to prison for his continued writings, but time in prison did not teach him the lesson intended by the Nazis. He was imprisoned again, and he would not emerge alive from his second sentence at Auschwitz. He was not alone in this. Nearly 12,000 priests were sent to their deaths in concentration camps.

“Come, Let Us Go For Our People.”

Edith Stein was the youngest of eleven children in a devout Jewish family in Germany. She was born on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on October 12, l891. As a young woman, Edith broke her mother’s heart by abandoning her Jewish faith in adolescent rebellion. She was also brilliant, and it was difficult to win an argument with her using reason and logic. She was a master of both.

Edith received her doctorate in philosophy under the noted phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, and taught at a German university when the Nazis came to power in 1933. During this time of upheaval, Edith converted to Catholicism after stumbling across the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila. “This is the truth,” Edith declared after reading it through in one sleepless night. A few years after her conversion, Edith Stein entered a Carmelite convent in Germany taking the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Blessed by the Cross).

March 27, 1939 was Passion Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. In response to a declaration of Adolf Hitler that the Jews would bring about their own extinction, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross wrote a private note to her Carmelite superior. She offered herself in prayer as expiation against the Anti-Christ who had cast all of Europe into a spiritual stranglehold. In her letter to her superior, Sister Teresa offered herself as expiation for the Church, for the Jews, for her native Germany, and for world peace.

As the Nazi horror overtook Europe, Sister Teresa grew fearful that she was placing her entire convent at risk because of her Jewish roots. Edith was then assigned to a Carmelite Convent in Holland. Her sister, Rosa, who also converted to Catholicism, joined her there as a postulant.

Catholics in France, Belgium, Holland and throughout Europe organized to rescue tens of thousands of Jewish children from deportation to the Death Camps. Philip Friedman, in Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust (The Jewish Publication Society, 1980) commended the Catholic bishops of the Netherlands for their public protest about the Nazi deportation of Jews from Holland. In retaliation for those bishops’ actions, however, even Jews who had converted to Catholicism were rounded up for deportation to Auschwitz.

A 2010 book by Paul Hamans — Edith Stein and Companions: On the Way to Auschwitz — details the horror of that day. Hundreds of Catholic Jews were arrested in Holland in retaliation for the bishops’ open rebellion, and most were never seen again. This information stands in stark contrast to the often heard revisionist history that Pope Pius XII “collaborated” with the Nazis through his “silence.” He was credited by the chief rabbi of Rome, Eugenio Zolli, with having personally saved over 860,000 Jews and preventing untold numbers of deaths.

The last words heard from Sister Teresa as she was forced aboard a cattle car packed with victims were spoken to her sister, Rosa, “Come, let us go for our people.” On August 9, 1942, Sister Teresa emerged from the cramped human horror of that cattle train into the Auschwitz Death Camp to face The Sorting.

Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel described The Sorting:

“How do you describe the sorting out on arriving at Auschwitz, the separation of children who see a father or mother going away, never to be seen again? How do you express the dumb grief of a little girl and the endless lines of women, children and rabbis being driven across the Polish or Ukranian landscapes to their deaths? No, I can’t do it. And because I’m a writer and teacher, I don’t understand how Europe’s most cultured nation could have done that.”

That August 9th, Edith Stein went no further into the depths of Auschwitz than The Sorting. Some SS officer glared at this brilliant 50-year-old nun in the tattered remains of her Carmelite habit, and declared that she was not fit for work. This woman who had worked every day of her life, who taught philosophy to Germany’s graduate students, who scrubbed convent floors each night, was determined to be “unfit for work” by a Nazi officer who knew it was a death sentence.

Edith and Rosa were taken directly to a cottage along with 113 others, packed in, the doors sealed, and they were gassed to death. Their remains, like those of Maximilian Kolbe a year earlier, went unceremoniously up in smoke to drift through the sky above Auschwitz. And Europe thinks it would be better off now without faith!

“Thus the way from Bethlehem leads inevitably to Golgotha, from the crib to the Cross. (Simeon’s) prophecy announced the Passion, the fight between light and darkness that already showed itself before the crib … The star of Bethlehem shines in the night of sin. The shadow of the Cross falls on the light that shines from the crib. This light is extinguished in the darkness that is Good Friday, but it rises all the more brilliantly in the sun of grace on the morning of the Resurrection.

“The way of the incarnate Son of God leads through the Cross and Passion to the glory of the Resurrection. In His company the way of everyone of us, indeed of all humanity, leads through suffering and death to this same glorious goal,”

— Edith Stein/Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Michelangelo and the Hand of God: Scandal at the Vatican

Seen with the eyes of any faith at all, this story leaves you wondering just how the hand of God is writing your own history. The story is true, and it’s fascinating.

“Calendar with frontal nudity – Not Allowed.”  I received that notice from the prison mail room several years ago instructing me that I had two choices: have the pornographic contraband destroyed or sent out.  I had no idea what it was, but the sender was my younger brother, Scott.  I was furious with Scott. I thought his judgment had fallen off a cliff somewhere and he tried to send me a Playboy calendar — or worse. “He should know better!” I thought. “What on earth would make him think I would want a nude calendar?”

The next day I received a letter from Scott: “I hope you like the calendar!” he wrote. That confirmed it!  My brother had gone mad!  When I finally reached him by telephone, he told me that the calendar was entitled “Vatican City: Scenes from the Sistine Chapel.”

I never did get to see the calendar. I had it returned to my brother with an apology from me for thinking he had lost his marbles. I’m not sure at what point Michelangelo’s work became pornography. It’s a recent phenomenon, but not necessarily a new one. In Witness to Hope, his famed biography of Pope John Paul II, George Weigel described the Holy Father’s insistence that Michelangelo’s work be restored to its original design:

“In addition to authorizing the restoration of the frescoes . . . John Paul made sure, when it came time to clean the Last Judgment, that the restorers removed about half the leggings, breechcloths, and other drapings with which prudish churchmen had hidden Michelangelo’s nudes, years after the masterpiece had been completed.”

— Witness to Hope (HarperCollins, 1999) p. 713

In the years before I was accused and sent to prison ( see the About Page), I had a beautiful framed reproduction of Michelangelo’s famed “Creation of Adam,” one of the magnificent frescoes he painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel between 1508 and 1512. It’s an image that just about every one of the world’s one billion Catholics has seen whether they have visited the Eternal City or not. A few years ago, a priest in Ottawa sent me a card bearing a part of that same image, the hand of God reaching toward the hand of Adam to bestow life. It was on my cell wall for two years before it disappeared one day when I was moved from place to place.

When things aren’t “Going My Way” — which you know is often if you’ve been reading my posts — I sometimes drift into thinking that God’s hand in history is an illusion. Then I come across stories like the one I’m about to tell you — the story of how Michelangelo came to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

HOLD ON! Don’t go just yet! I promise not to write a history lesson every week, but this is one of the strangest stories I have ever encountered, and I just have to write about it. So bear with me, please, as I again meander down that path. Seen with the eyes of any faith at all, this story leaves you wondering just how the hand of God is writing your own history. The story is true, and it’s fascinating.

The Poseidon Adventure

In Greek mythology, Laocoön was a priest of the Roman god of the sea, Neptune. He tried to dissuade the leaders of Troy from bringing the famed Trojan Horse into the city.

“What madness, citizens, is this? Have you not learned enough of Grecian fraud to be on your guard against it? For my part, I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts.”

In the mythological story, Poseidon, the Greek version of Neptune, became angry at the Trojans and sent sea serpents to kill Laocoön and his sons just as he tried to convince the Trojans not to bring the horse through the city gates. As the Trojans witnessed the death of Laocoön, they took it as a sign not to heed his advice. They brought the Trojan Horse inside the city walls to their peril. You know the rest.

In 38 B.C., on the Island of Rhodes off the coast of Turkey, three Greek sculptors created The Laocoön, a magnificent freestanding marble sculpture depicting the attack of Poseidon’s serpents upon the priest and his sons. It was the world’s most famous sculpture, and the best known example of ancient Hellenistic art known to exist at that time. Over centuries, The Laocoön became legendary. Then it became lost. With one city state sacking another, the magnificent Laocoön faded from history, and its very existence became a legend. Pliny wrote of having seen it, and described its every detail in the late first century, A.D. By the time of Michelangelo 1500 years later, every sculptor knew the legend of The Laocoön, but it had been many centuries since anyone had seen it.

When in Rome

In 1505, 30-year-old Michelangelo Buonarroti was commissioned to create life-size free standing marble sculptures of each of the Twelve Apostles for the Cathedral at Florence. It was an extremely ambitious plan that he doubted he could complete in his lifetime. Michelangelo began his work on a life size sculpture of St. Matthew, the first of the immense project.

Just after beginning, however, Michelangelo was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II. In a game of one-up-manship typical of the time, the Pope usurped the Florence project by ordering Michelangelo to stay in Rome and create a marble tomb that would immortalize the pope. It was originally intended to be the most ambitious monument the world had ever seen, comprising forty life-sized marble sculptures. Under duress, Michelangelo began sketching out this folly.

Scandal Time — The Prequel

What was going on in the Catholic Church parallel to all this is an eye-opener. Over a roughly sixty year period from 1470 to 1530, a succession of popes became embroiled in the labyrinthine temporal politics of the reigning princes and kings of the Italian city-states. It was all, to say the least, colorful and overtly scandalous. If you ever feared the Church may not endure the scandals of our day, think again! They are as nothing next to what went on in Rome five centuries ago.

Pope Julius II reigned for a decade from 1503 to 1513. History considers him one of the more brilliant and just of the Renaissance popes, yet he was suspected of having bribed his way into the papacy. His chief concern as pope was to expand the Papal States to compete more effectively — some would say more ruthlessly — among the city-state model of government in place at the time.

The principal fault of popes in the Renaissance period was their unbridled capitulation to the agendas and values of the secular world, and it led to schism — to the Protestant Reformation which turned out to be anything but a reform. Removing all central teaching authority from their churches caused dissension and divisions splitting them into hundreds of sects. Those divisions continue today.

It’s an ironic twist of history that many of those who hold the Catholic Church in contempt for caving in to secularism in the 16th Century also demand that the Church repeat the mistake in the 21st Century. In Connecticut last year, legislation was proposed to strip the Catholic Church of authority over Catholic parishes in that state. Its major proponents were largely members of Voice of the Faithful whose motto is “Keep the Faith; change the Church.” Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it.

Digging Up The Past

Back to Michelangelo. Just months into his conscripted labor on the Pope’s personal tomb, Michelangelo dismayed of ever completing it, and decided to flee from Rome to return to Florence against the Pope’s wishes. Pope Julius was long on ego and short on funds. He dedicated most of the funds available to the restoration of St. Peter’s Basilica and the architectural marvel that is the centerpiece of our Church today. The Pope’s unfunded ambition for his 40-sculpture personal tomb left Michelangelo in near despair.

This is where the story gets bizarre. Just as Michelangelo prepared to leave Rome in 1506, however, he visited the home of a friend who happened to be the son of Guiliano de Sangallo, the chief architect for Pope Julius’s renovation and enlargement of St. Peter’s Basilica. As Michelangelo visited his friend, a messenger came charging in.

On that same day in Rome in 1506, landowner Felice di Fredi was clearing his vineyards of large stones. He had no idea — or at least no appreciation — that the stones were the remnants of ancient walls that once surrounded the golden home of Emperor Nero.

“CLUNK!” Fredi’s shovel struck something large, white, and very hard. In four large sections, he dug up a large marble structure. Someone sent word to the papal architect, Guiliano de Sangallo, who set out on horseback accompanied by his son and their guest, Michelangelo to assess the unearthed marble treasure.

Upon arrival, the elder de Sangallo took one look at the sculpture and exclaimed: “It’s The Laocoön that Pliny describes!” Out of long buried history, the world’s oldest and most famous freestanding marble sculpture arrived at the Vatican to cheers and applause accompanied by Michelangelo himself, the world’s most accomplished sculptor of the time. The Laocoön remains in the Vatican Museum to this day.

Michelangelo was profoundly influenced by The Laocoön. It was the turning of a sharp corner in the history of art, and in the enduring treasures of our own faith history. The odds against Michelangelo being at that very place in time to witness the unearthing of the world’s most famed marble sculpture were astronomically impossible. Yet there he was, under duress, and as a direct result of the secular scandal of the Renaissance papacy.

After taking some time to study The Laocoön, Michelangelo left Rome for Florence to resume his work on the sculpture of St. Matthew. The Laocoön was a large part of his motivation. Michelangelo was in awe of its design and tortured realism of human bodies in motion, and was eager to apply that same realism to his first love, marble sculpture. He dug furiously at the marble block in Florence believing that he was to free St. Matthew imprisoned within it.

Two years later, Michelangelo was on his back on high scaffolding painting the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It was a discipline imposed on him by Pope Julius for his disobedience. Michelangelo was angry and resentful, and his powerful emotions exploded into his art on the Sistine ceiling. The expressive and powerful recreation of humans in motion that Michelangelo first witnessed in The Laocoön was the principal model for his design and imagery in the Sistine Chapel ceiling — that, and his own deeply felt anger and disillusionment with the Pope and his ambition.

When Christ placed the Church in the hands of human beings, He knew exactly what was in store for history. The very art with which the world now associates our faith came as the result of the most scandalous adventures in human folly the Church has ever seen.

The Church Triumphant, the Church of faith, is parallel to the Church of human history with all its corruption and failings. It’s a lesson to be learned for those reeling from the burden of scandal in our Church in this day. It’s true that the gates of Hell cannot prevail against it.

But not for lack of trying!