VATICAN CITY (CNS): Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, St Edith Stein – a Catholic convert from Judaism who was soon to enter a Carmelite convent – wrote to Pope Pius XI asking him to condemn Nazi ideology.
The saint, who died at the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in 1942 and was canonised in 1998, wrote to the pope on April 12, 1933, saying the whole world was “waiting and hoping that the Church of Christ would make its voice heard”.
The letter, which St Edith Stein referred to in other writings, was published for the first time in German and Italian newspapers on February 19 after scholars were given copies of the original from the Vatican Secret Archives.
An official of the archives confirmed that the letter was one of the hundreds of documents involving Vatican-German relations before World War II opened to scholars on February 15.
St Edith Stein wrote to the Pope, “As a daughter of the Jewish people, who through the grace of God has been a daughter of the Catholic Church for 11 years, I dare to express to the father of Christianity that which is worrying millions of Germans.”
She said the behaviour of Hitler and his supporters betrayed “total contempt for justice and for humanity, not to mention love of one’s neighbour”.
