8/9/2017 – Wednesday of 18th week of ordinary time – St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) - 1891 - 1942 – Matthew 15:21-28

       The story of the Canaanite woman has always intrigued me, especially in the way in which it allows Jesus to grow in his ministry and in the way he sees that his message of salvation is intended for the whole world and not just for a particular group of people.  As we have been hearing the story of Moses and the people of Israel these past few weeks in our first readings from the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, we know that the people of Israel were God’s chosen and favored people.  However, God had plans for the whole world when he sent his son, plans that Paul and the other Apostles continued as they went out as missionaries to the world, to people of every race and every nation.  The Canaanite woman challenges that narrow view of salvation that was prevalent in Ancient Israel in her day.  She never gives up.  Her faith propels her to be persistent and patient; it is through her great faith that Jesus brings healing into her life. 

      “Remember us, O Lord,” cries out the psalmist today.  I thought about those words in the context of our saint for today - a woman named Edith Stein, whose name as a Carmelite nun was Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. We have many saints that we celebrate who were members of the Carmelite religious order.  We think of St Teresa of Avila, St Therese of Lisieux, St John of the Cross, and St Teresa of the Andes. The saint we honor today, St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, was born in part of the German empire in the late 19th century to an observant Jewish family.  She earned a PhD in philosophy and became a professor at a university, but along the way became an atheist, abandoning her Jewish faith.  Her study of the writings of St Teresa of Avila drew her to Catholicism.  She writes about how the writings of Teresa of Avila touched her:  “This was my first encounter with the cross and with the supernatural strength it gives.  For the first time I saw the redemptive sufferings of Christ overcoming death.” After her conversion and baptism, she became a Carmelite nun at the age of 43.  As the Nazis became more powerful, she was transferred to a convent in the Netherlands in the midst of  WWII, where she was thought to be safe, but a statement read in Catholic parishes in the Netherlands in 1942 condemning the Nazis brought about the imprisonment of Jewish converts to Catholicism in that country. After spending time in different concentration camps, she died in Auschwitz at the age of 50 in 1942. She was canonized in 1998.  In 1999, just a year after her canonization, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Edith Stein, Bridget of Sweden, and Catherine of Sienna to be the co-patron saints of Europe.  

    We look into the human heart at the grace of God that can be at work in our hearts, but we also see a lot of violence and destruction that can come out of our human heart as well. We see the horror of WWII, the terrorist shootings at a night club or houses of worship or a movie theater here in the United States in recent years, the gang shootings that are tearing apart cities like Chicago, and we wonder how a human heart can do such things.  God calls us to his love and to the salvation he offers to all of us.  May we open our hearts to that reality.