Word: steinfuls
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...Joel Stein...
...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...
Pius' story can be seen as the macro to Edith Stein's micro. Devout and ascetic in life, long a favorite of the church's conservative branch, the wartime Pontiff has been sharply criticized both by Jewish leaders and church liberals for his refusal to publicly condemn the Nazis, a "silence" that some suggest may have cost untold Jewish lives. Pius' defenders reply heatedly that his efforts to hide Jews in Italy and elsewhere saved thousands. More important, they insist that silence was the best policy--and here Pius' story intersects Stein's. According to Gumpel, Pius was about...
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...
That would clearly be mistaken. The Pope has described Stein as "a great daughter of Israel and the Carmelite order," and a high U.S. churchman reiterated last week that her canonization is seen as honoring the Shoah's Jewish victims. Indeed, early in this decade, it sometimes seemed that John Paul, who lost good Jewish friends to Hitler, would do almost anything to stamp out anti-Semitism and promote an honest respect between faiths. In the past year, however, it has become clearer that when such goals collide with the prerogatives and good name of his own house--the naming...