Extended family

August 9 is the feast of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein before she entered the Carmelites and went on to die at Auschwitz on this date in 1942. She is distantly related to Tom on his mother's side as well as to his fomer sister-in-law, Hannah Goldschmidt. The monastery I lived in in Chicago was named for her -- the Edith Stein House of Studies -- and I attended her canonization with Fr. Steven Payne and a group of other Carmelites back in 1998.

The painting above was used in 1987 at the beatification ceremony (that is the stage before canonization) and was done by Sr. Marie Celeste, one of the Carmelite nuns I knew from Reno. In the painting we see not only Edith but her blood sister, Rosa, who was shipped off with her to the concentration camp to die, and a crowd of other Jewish victims of Ha-Shoa. When the Gestapo came to the monastery to take them away, Edith is supposed to have said to her sister, "Come, Rosa. We must go for our people." She died because she was Jewish, but she was rounded up to be killed along with other Jewish converts to Catholicism in retaliation against the Dutch bishops who had published a letter denouncing the Nazi persecution of the Jews. 

On this anniversary of my father's death and of the death of Edith, Rosa and countless others, I am reminded that we have yet to learn that we are all one extended family, that we are all one people. All!