Word: popes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...name was Edith Stein, and she was born Jewish. The consequences of that status led Jewish leaders last week to term the canonization "problematic," "offensive" and "an attempt to appropriate the Holocaust without coming to grips with it." They see it as part of a dissonant motif in Pope John Paul II's otherwise triumphant symphony of Catholic-Jewish brotherhood--a masterwork that is very much part of his grand plan for the church's millennial jubilee...
...philosophical subdiscipline of phenomenology. Introduced to Catholicism through Christian phenomenologists, she was baptized at age 30, and 11 years later, under her new name, she took the vows of a Carmelite nun. Sister Teresa's stance on Jewish issues was predictably mixed: she wrote a letter to the Pope deploring anti-Semitism, but also a spiritual last will and testament offering herself to God "for the atonement of the unbelief of the Jewish people." Her adopted faith, however, did not shield her from the Nazi horror. Stein was made to wear the Jewish star, and although her order transferred...
...current unease concerns her identity as a Catholic martyr. Christian conversion is a delicate subject to Jews, since historically it often took place under duress. Although Stein's conversion was clearly voluntary, her "atonement" declaration rankles. (It also contradicts the current Pope's repeated description of the Jews as "elder brothers in faith.") But what most bothers the critics is the assumption that Stein's death resulted from her Catholicism. Witnesses reported that when she tried to confess her faith, an Auschwitz guard rebuffed her with the words, "You damned Jew." Thus her canonization strikes some as the hijacking...
...whole, Jewish observers regard Stein's canonization--like John Paul II's beatification last week of wartime Croatian Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, who initially supported (but later denounced) his country's pro-Nazi puppet regime--as a small blemish on a sterling record. This is the Pope, after all, who established Vatican recognition of Israel, visited a synagogue and was host of a huge commemorative concert for the Shoah's victims. Yet there is concern that last Sunday's ceremony foreshadows another one: the pronouncement of Pope Pius XII as venerable, an act John Paul II reportedly hopes to accomplish...
Abraham Foxman, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, who regards this Pope's outreach to the Jews as unprecedented and courageous, nonetheless says there are those who see Stein's canonization as part of a "strategy," that "if you show that everyone was a victim, then the church has no responsibility [and] no guilt in the Holocaust." Such conspiracy buffs might want to toss in the Stepinac beatification, Pius' prospects, parts of We Remember and the erection of crosses outside Auschwitz by right-wing Polish Catholics...