Quote of the day, 2 August: St. Edith Stein

Naturally we are very grateful that we are allowed to stay here at least until further notice. (As people see it, it should be called: not being sent away.) The “further notice” now depends totally on the development of the overall situation—a further reason to pray untiringly for the great common concerns. Surely we are united in doing this.

Saint Edith Stein
Letter 333, 2 February 1942

The Nazis wanted to exterminate all Jews. This group of Jews who had become Catholic forms a separate whole. They became companions because they were arrested and murdered for the same reason.

On August 2, 1942, the Nazis arrested a large number of Catholic Jews in the occupied Netherlands and sent them to their deaths at Auschwitz. The provocation for this action was a pastoral letter that had been read in Catholic churches on the previous July 26.

This letter included the text of a telegram that had been sent by the leaders of ten Christian denominations to the German occupying forces on July 11. Both the pastoral letter and the telegram protested the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands.

From various sides, the question has been raised whether these murdered Catholic Jews can be considered martyrs for the Catholic faith. Some respond that they cannot because, as they rightly point out, the Nazis had already determined to exterminate all Jews, and Catholic Jews were not exempt. The Catholic Jews were not murdered because they were Catholic, this position maintains, but because they were Jewish.

This argument does not, however, do full justice to the reality. While Catholic Jews would have been murdered even without the telegram and pastoral letter, there are significant arguments for considering them a separate group, distinct from the other Jews who were killed during the Holocaust.

That they are blood witnesses for Catholic faith and morality is precisely what sets them apart. The Catholic Jews who were arrested on August 2 form a distinct group because their deaths can be directly linked to actions taken by the Catholic bishops in the Netherlands.

The occupying forces made the decision to arrest Catholic Jews on July 27 because the bishops had stood up for human dignity and human rights in accordance with their Catholic vision of man.

To repeat, it was the intention to exterminate all Jews, including those who had been baptized. What made the Catholic Jews in the country a special group of martyrs is that they were arrested and murdered because the Nazis wanted to take revenge on the Catholic Church in response to the bishops’ protest against the inhumane treatment of all Jews. The occupiers’ attempt to prevent the reading of the telegram proves how afraid the Nazis were that Christian leaders could mobilize the people against the planned “Endlösung” [the “Final Solution”].

Father Paul W. F. Hamans

Chapter 1, The Murder of Catholic Jews in Response to the Dutch Bishops

Note: On the same Sunday when Dutch Catholics heard their bishops’ letter read aloud, Saint Titus Brandsma was executed by lethal injection in Dachau.

Hamans, PWF & McInerny, R 2010, Edith Stein and Companions: On the Way to Auschwitz, Ignatius Press, San Francisco.

Featured image: Screenshot from the 1944 Westerbork Transit Camp Film, filmed by Rudolf Breslauer under orders of SS commander Albert Gemmeker. Public domain. Source: https://youtu.be/sTocq4aR27s?t=92

https://youtu.be/sTocq4aR27s

#Holocaust #Jews #martyrs #Netherlands #pastoralLetter #StEdithStein

The Pastoral Letter from the Dutch bishops
26 July 1942

Saint Edith Stein’s biographer and former novice mistress, Sister Teresia Renata Posselt, O.C.D. of the Carmel of Cologne witnessed from a distance the events in the Netherlands leading to the arrest of Edith Stein. She tells us that even in Germany, Hitler’s regime was targeting Discalced Carmelite nuns:

The first victims were the Sisters in Luxembourg who were driven out of their monastery in February 1941 so that it could be made into a clubhouse and dance-hall for the B.d.M. [League of German Girls]. Scarcely had these homeless nuns found refuge with their Sisters in Pützchen before this Carmel also, together with the Carmel of Aachen, was dissolved in a space of two hours by the arbitrary power of the Gestapo. Düren followed in August of the same year.

Sr. Teresia Renata indicates that during that same time frame, relations between the regime and the Dutch bishops had deteriorated:

In Holland, the regulations issued against the Jews grew steadily more fierce. In August 1941, a conflict had already arisen between the Dutch Episcopate and the German authorities.

Among the measures in Holland that caused the Dutch bishops to bristle: a 1941 decree from the regime, which stated that only Jewish teachers could teach Jewish children. The decree meant that Catholic children of Jewish parentage no longer could attend Catholic schools. Cardinal de Jong of Utrecht protested, declaring that Catholic schools would never exclude children because of their heritage.

When the Nazi regime next decreed that signs stating “Forbidden to Jews” should be posted on all public buildings, once again the Dutch bishops refused to comply. But all of these measures paled in comparison to what followed, as Sr. Teresia Renata explains:

Yet the exclusion of Jews from public life was nothing when compared to the mass deportations of men, women, and children, indeed of whole Jewish families, that began in 1942. As was generally feared, many of them went to meet certain death in the Polish concentration camps, where they were either gassed or driven to do inhuman work in the salt, lead, or tin mines.

Thus it followed that a telegram was sent to the highest Nazi official in the Netherlands (Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart) on 11 July 1942 by a united, ecumenical representation of Dutch churches expressing their anger at the deportations.

The Nazi regime replied that any converted Jews who became Christians before 1941 would be spared deportation. However, the Dutch churches, including the Catholics, were not appeased; they were still opposed to the mass deportations of the Jews.

Sr. Teresia Renata describes what happened next:

[T]herefore they resolved to issue a joint protest in writing that was to be read publicly in all the churches on Sunday 26 July 1942. The proclamation should contain the text of the telegram sent to Seyss-Inquart on 11 July 1942. But even before the day on which it was to be read, Seyss-Inquart and Schmidt [his associate, the General-Kommissar] found out about the content of this joint letter of the church communities.

On 24 July the Nazi officials made concerted efforts to persuade church leaders to omit the text of the 11 July protest telegram from their public proclamation to be read from the pulpit. Some were ready to relent, but Cardinal de Jong of Utrecht stood his ground. That a worldly power should intervene to influence the pastoral duties of the bishops was unthinkable.

Furthermore, the Dutch bishops’ pastoral letter had already been written on 20 July and distributed. It was impossible to retract the statement on purely practical grounds.

Thus on Sunday 26 July 1942, the pastoral letter of the Dutch episcopal conference was read in every church at every Mass. Sr. Teresia Renata tells us that the letter began as follows:

We are experiencing a time of great distress, as well from a spiritual as from a material standpoint. But there are two problems greater than any others, that of the Jews and that of those who are deported to forced labor abroad.

We must all become deeply aware of these dangers, and it is the purpose of this joint pastoral letter to make you conscious of them.

Such distress must also be brought to the notice of those who exercise power over these people. Therefore the Most Reverend [Catholic] Episcopate of the Netherlands, in conjunction with almost all the other church communities in the Netherlands, has turned to the authorities of the occupying forces; for the Jews among others, in a telegram with the following content dispatched on Saturday 11 July of this year:

“The undersigned church communities of the Netherlands, deeply shaken by the measures taken against the Jews in the Netherlands that have excluded them from participation in the normal life of the people, have learned with horror of the latest regulations by which men, women, children, and whole families are to be deported to the territory of the German Reich…”

The Nazi response was swift. On the following Sunday, 2 August 1942, Jewish converts in religious Orders were rounded up all over the Netherlands. St. Edith Stein and her sister Rosa were among them.

On the same day, General-Kommissar Schmidt publicly announced that the deportations were a direct reprisal against the pastoral letter that was read in the churches on 26 July. Sr. Teresia Renata tells us that Schmidt pressed the issue further:

Since the Catholic hierarchy… refuses to trouble about negotiations [to edit their letter], then we, for our part, are compelled to regard the Catholic Jews as our worst enemies and consequently see to their deportation to the East with all possible speed.

So it was that a Verbite priest remarked later: “all these religious, both men and women, truly died in testimonium fidei [in witness to the faith as martyrs], because their arrest was an act of reprisal for the bishops’ pastoral letter.”

Sister Teresia Renata Posselt, O.C.D.

Chapter 20, Plans of escape (excerpts)

Note: On the same day that the Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter was read in all the Dutch parishes, St. Titus Brandsma died a martyr in Dachau, on 26 July 1942. Edith and Rosa Stein were among scores of “Catholic Jews” who were arrested on 2 August 1942.

Posselt, T 2005, Edith Stein: The Life of a Philosopher and Carmelite, translated from the German by Batzdorff S, Koeppel J, and Sullivan J, ICS Publications, Washington DC.

Featured image: The Dutch episcopal conference met in the Bishop’s Palace in Utrecht on 14 December 1943. From left to right: Bishop J.P. Huybers (Haarlem), Bishop P. Hopmans (Breda), Cardinal Archbishop Dr. J. de Jong (Utrecht), Bishop G. Lemmens (Roermond, in which diocese the Carmel of Echt was located), Bishop W.P.A.M. Mutsaerts (Den Bosch). Image credit: NIOD Photo Archives (used by permission) 

https://carmelitequotes.blog/2024/08/01/posselt-nedbish/

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“I knew this meant that I was signing my own death warrant, but that certainty did not prevent me from doing my duty…. We are in the hands of God.”

Saint Titus Brandsma

Back in the Netherlands, the Dutch Bishops were promulgating a new pastoral letter to be read at every Mass on the very Sunday when Titus was dying. 

It began with the observation, “These are times of great afflictions, two of the most unjust being the oppression of the Jews and the sentences to forced labor in concentration camps …”

It concluded,

“Let us pray to God, beloved brothers and sisters, through the intercession of the Mother of Mercy, that He be a refuge for those men and women who, torn from their beloved families, are condemned to forced labor. … May He protect them body and soul, preserve them from despair and discouragement, and keep them true to their faith. May the Lord also grant strength to their families who were forced to watch as they were taken away. May He aid the afflicted and oppressed, the imprisoned and the flogged, all those who see themselves under the threatening cloud of danger….”

How mysterious the ways of the Lord! At the very time when Titus was passing from this world to the Father in Heaven, the entire Dutch Church was praying for him. 

The pastoral letter of the Dutch hierarchy had great impact on the entire country. It had also made an equal, though contrary, impact on the Nazi forces of occupation. Reprisals were not long in coming. 

The commissar of the Third Reich made his response with actions: on August 2 all Catholics in the Netherlands who had Jewish ancestors were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The commissar stated publicly: “All this is in retaliation for the pastoral letter of the bishops.”

Father Miguel Maria Arribas, O.Carm.

Chapter XIII, Holocaust

Note: Saint Titus Brandsma arrived in Dachau from Kleve Transport Camp on 19 June 1942. He died by an intravenous injection of carbolic acid on 26 July 1942 at 2:00 p.m. Saint Edith Stein was deported from the Carmel of Echt, Holland in the arrests on August 2nd.

Arribas O.Carm., M 2021, The Price of Truth: Titus Brandsma, Carmelite, Carmelite Media, Darien, Illinois.

Featured image: In February 2011, photographer Payam Fahr captured this image of the Dachau gate in the midday sunlight. Image credit: payam_fahr / Flickr (Some rights reserved)

https://carmelitequotes.blog/2024/06/18/titus-arrivdach/

#bishops #concentrationCamp #Dachau #martyrdom #Nazi #Netherlands #oppression #pastoralLetter #prayer #StEdithStein #StTitusBrandsma