"Siblings all, in our common home"

"[He and Stein shared their] Jewish origins, the Catholic faith, a vocation to religious life [as well as the reality that Stein's and Czerny's maternal grandmothers were roughly the same age and] and came to a similar end."

"My mother's family -- both parents and two brothers -- were also Catholic but shared the Jewish origins that the enemy abhorred."

"My maternal grandmother Anna, my grandfather Hans and my uncles Georg and Carl Robert were all interned in Terezin, where Hans died."

"My grandmother and uncles were transported to Auschwitz. From here my uncles were sent to labour camps and eventually murdered there."

Michael Czerny, 76, Vatican Cardinal

Cardinal Czerny at the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum   Vatican News

 

Marking the 80th anniversary of the gas chamber killing of Jewish-born Catholic convert Edith Stein, Cardinal Michael Czerny, another convert from Judaism, celebrated a Mass close to the former Auschwitz death camp while recounting the story of his own family's Jewish origins. Cardinal Czerny's grandmother died of typhus in 1945, but it is unknown where she was buried, though she died in Auschwitz.

A cardinal closely associated with Pope Francis's pontificte, and a Jesuit who ministered in El Salvador, Cardinal Czerny is head of the Vatican office responsible for the pontificte's priority portfolio of migration, the environment, development and social justice. A Canadian citizen born in Czechoslovakia, Cardinal Czerny accompanied Pope Francis on his visit to Canada meant as a penance for the Church's historic role in operating aboriginal residential schools.

But in Poland he was there to commemorate the anniversary of the day that Carmelite nun Edith Stein was put to death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Mass was held in the nearby Carmelite convent in Owiecim, the Polish town that gave the camp its name, though not its ghastly purpose. The cardinal delivering an address, spoke of the nun's background and its intersection with his own -- who with his relatives came from Brno, in former Czechoslovakia.

Born in Breslau in 1891, Stein was a German Jew. The town renamed and part of Poland now, was where Stein's conversion to Catholicism took place in 1922, joining the Carmelite order in Cologne, later transferred to the Netherlands following the intensification of Nazi attacks in 1938. Arrested in 1942 following the Hitlerian order that Jewish converts be arrested, she was sent to Auschwitz.

She was canonized by John Paul II as a martyr in 1998, made a patron saint of Europe the year that followed. They saw fit for whtever reason to leave the Judaic faith, but they could not leave their Jewish ethnic heritage behind; born Jews they would die Jews; her death hastened by a Nazi genocidal program of relentless determination to expunge Europe of its Jews. There was no shortage of victims in the vast numbers of Jews annihilated.

 

The 80th anniversary of the death of Edith Stein, Sr Teresa Benedicta is marked 9 August  Vatican News

"So Auschwitz links the witness and relics of St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross with my grandmother’s story and spirit, wherever her remains may lie. For me it is very moving to celebrate Edith Stein’s 80th anniversary and, at the same time and place, the 77th of Anna Löw, to mourn my grandmother and honour her, to think of her reunited with all our family and also with St Teresa Benedicta."

"Through their intercession, we pray for peace in Ukraine and throughout the world, “Never again one against the other, never, never again!... never again war, never again war!” And may those whose personal and family histories are both Jewish and Christian, contribute to the necessary dialogue between our faiths so as to live as fratelli tutti, siblings all, in our common home."

Cardinal Mchael Czerny, Auschwitz, Poland