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Today is the ninth of August. The Catholic Church, the whole of Europe and the entire Catholic world celebrates the feast of St. Edith Stein, religious name Therese Benedicta of the Cross, who was murdered out of hatred for the Catholic faith on 9 August 1942 in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
In fact, for European Catholics this 9 August could become the Day of Hatred of the Catholic Faith. Only six years earlier, in Spain, the socialist and communist parties and the anarchist movement unleashed a nationwide wave of murder, rape and sacrilege that killed tens of thousands of Catholics simply because they were Catholics. In reality, this anti-religious violence had already begun with the proclamation of the Second Republic in April 1931, and had intensified since the victory of the Popular Front in February 1936; but after the military uprising of Franco and other generals in July 1936, the barbarity and red terror turned into the systematic elimination of Catholics in Spain.
Edith Stein was born in Germany into a Jewish family, although in her adolescence she renounced all religious practice and practically converted to militant atheism. Stein’s life is that of one of those heroic women that the 20th century left behind in many European societies. She was the first woman to present a thesis in philosophy in Germany, being a doctor summa cum laude. A student and collaborator of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, she rubbed shoulders with the best of German philosophy of the time, from Max Scheler to Martin Heidegger.
Her love of truth, her anthropological efforts to contribute to a definition of the human being that moved from the singular individual to the person in community – family, municipality, nation, church – and various personal and intellectual experiences (such as her discovery of the work of the Spaniards St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Jesus) led her to embrace Catholicism in 1921, being baptised and also receiving the sacraments of the Eucharist and Confirmation.
Back to Spain. Specifically, to Barbastro; an Aragonese city where, years earlier, another 20th century saint, Saint Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, had been born. During the first months of the so-called Spanish Civil War, in July and August 1936, 88% of the clergy of the diocese of Barbastro were martyred; having the dubious honour of being the place in Spain where red persecution and Christian martyrdom reached its greatest heights, both in the number of people killed and in the courage and strength of faith of the victims.
At the head of the murdered religious was Florentino Asensio Barroso, bishop of the diocese of Barbastro, who was tortured and murdered. They cut off his genitals so that he would bleed to death before finishing him off in the cemetery on 8 August 1936. Even today you can still walk around those places in Barbastro and imagine the cruelty of that martyrdom.
Edith Stein, after her conversion to Catholicism, and because of her Jewish origin, was barred from holding a professorship at a German university. In the First World War she volunteered to go to the front. After the war, she taught at various institutes and gave lectures in Germany, developing a work of extraordinary philosophical value, such as confronting the traditional Catholic philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas and the phenomenology of Husserl, from which she departed.
The Spanish martyrs of Barbastro also included professors and students. Specifically, there was the annihilation by communist anti-Europe of the Claretian community, composed of 60 religious: nine priests, twelve brothers and 39 students, between the ages of 14 and 18.
When Hitler’s National Socialist regime banned certain teachers and subjects from teaching, Edith Stein entered the Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, where she took the habit under the name of Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. From Germany, the Carmelite community sent her to Holland at the beginning of the persecution of Jews.
After the invasion of Holland, she was arrested by the Gestapo and deported on 2 August 1942 to the Auschwitz extermination camp, where she was murdered on this day, 9 August.
Another episode of anti-Catholic hatred in Spain on 9 August took place in Ciudad Real. It was the night of 8-9 August. 40 right-wing detainees (simply militants of right-wing parties, or of Catholic Action, or rank and file Catholics) were taken from the prison of Alcazar de San Juan with the order to put them on the train and transfer them to the provincial prison of Ciudad Real. During the transfer, leaders of the Mancha Roja Battalion went to the station, took them off the train and shot them.
Edith Stein was beatified in 1987 and canonised the following year by Pope John Paul II, who also beatified the martyrs of Barbastro.
John Paul II also named her co-patroness of Europe, together with Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Saint Benedict, Saint Cyril and Methodius. When we speak of recovering Europe’s Christian roots, we cannot refer to something metaphysical or magical. No. It is to recover the memory, the thought and the life of these men and women who fought for faith, community, family and a correct understanding of the world and nations.