{Religious Properties}[6th December 1987]

[Redbook4:200-203][19871206:2355]{Religious Properties}[6th December 1987]

.2355

[continued]

I have just been watching the Everyman programme on the canonisation of Sister Teresia [sic] Benedicta,* née Edith Stein, who was murdered** in Auschwitz/Birkenau as a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism.

There is a problem when religions try to understand each other. Nothing could seem more natural to a Christian than to pray at the scene of Human suffering; and some (or one) of the Jewish 'talking heads' agreed that prayer, in the right spirit, could be appropriate. But the photographing of happy Confirmation parties in the S.S. Headquarters at Birkenau was disconcerting, and some (or one) of the Jewish 'talking heads' seemed to think that the canonisation was part of a process of hi-jacking the Holocaust.

This presumably rests on the idea that the Holocaust is something specifically Jewish. In a historical sense, the extermination camps did not only [↔] murder Jews.*** But even if they had, one must ask whether human suffering can be the property of one nation, religion, culture or race.

The aid given to Ethiopian famine victims arises from the assumption that their suffering is not an exclusively Ethiopian experience: it is something that touches us all; that we feel, not directly but with an inner sense; and that we are called upon by that inner sense – Con-science, the ability to know the Spirit of God {(}and thus to recognise evil{)}, working through and with other faculties and Virtues – to help reduce. It seems that Christians see suffering as common property, and that Jews do not – perhaps.

*[Edith Stein, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, 1891-1942, born into an observant Jewish family, apparently became an atheist by her teenage years, was baptised into the Roman Catholic faith in 1922, admitted to the Discalced (“Barefoot”) Carmelite monastery in Cologne in 1933, and received the religious habit of the Order as a novice in April 1934.]

**[on 9 August 1942.]

***{cf. Gypsies}

[continues]

[PostedBlogger22042017]