Homily for the Memorial of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Mass for the Convocation of Teachers of the Catholic Schools of the Diocese of Fort Worth

August 9, 2024
St. Mark Catholic Church
Argyle, Texas

Hosea 2:16bc, 17cd, 21-22
Psalm 45:11-12, 14-15, 16-17
Matthew 25:1-13

In today’s first reading from Hosea we hear, “I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart. She shall respond there as in the days of her youth, when she came up from the land of Egypt.” These words of the prophet Hosea refer to God’s Chosen People of Israel, calling them to return to fidelity to the covenant that was struck by God with them through the chosen leadership of Moses. The characteristic of the “desert” is not that it is arid and hot, but rather that it is an uncharted wilderness and requires trust on the part of the traveler to navigate the journey.

In a certain way, our apostolate of Catholic education requires us as ministers of Christ and His Church, laity, religious, and priests, to foster that trust among our students and their parents because so much of their contemporary existence in this postmodern world is uncharted because they lack a sense of belonging and purpose. In the words of Victor Frankel, “Man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).”

Then, what do we offer our students, their families, each other by which to chart a pathway amidst this deconstructed wilderness of our contemporary age so they can evade the predation of conformism and of totalitarianism that prowl about the wilderness.  Saint John Paul II stated in his homily for the canonization of today’s saint, “The modern world boasts of the enticing door which says everything is permitted.  It ignores the narrow gate of discernment and renunciation.  Pay attention, your life is not an endless series of doors!  Have the courage to decide.”

The saint whom we commemorate today can assist us by her prayers and by the example of her heroic martyrdom in the Holocaust as a Jewish woman and at the same time as a Catholic nun. She was killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau on this date in 1942. The events leading to her death began on July 11, 1942, with the sending of a telegram by the Dutch Catholic bishops and the leaders of other Christian churches to authorities of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

The telegram read: “The undersigned Dutch churches, already deeply shocked by the actions taken against the Jews in the Netherlands that have excluded them from participating in the normal life of society, have learned with horror of the new measures by which men, women, children, and whole families will be deported to the German territory and its dependencies. The suffering that this measure will bring upon tens of thousands of people, the knowledge that these measures are contrary to the deepest moral sense of the Dutch people, and, above all, the hostility of these measures against the divine norms of justice and mercy urge the churches to direct to you the urgent petition not to execute these measures.”

The Nazis initially responded by announcing a compromise that they would not arrest and deport Jews who had been baptized and converted to Christianity prior to 1941. Originally the leaders of all the Christian Churches in Holland had agreed to make a public protest, but when the Gestapo were informed, they immediately threatened to deport Jews who had been baptized as Christians, which hitherto had not occurred. The Roman Catholic bishops alone did not give in to this blackmail. The consequences were disastrous: Jews who had joined the Lutheran, the Calvinist, or other Christian Churches were not deported in August 1942, whereas those who had become Catholics were. The Gestapo forced the Dutch newspapers to publish a statement affirming that because of the public protest of the Catholic clergy, Jews who had become Catholics would henceforth be considered their worst enemies and be deported at the earliest opportunity.

Because she was Jewish, Edith Stein known by her Carmelite religious name as Teresa Benedicta a Cruce, was arrested by the Nazis on August 2, 1942, with her sister Rosa and sent with many other Catholics and Jews from the Netherlands to the concentration camp in Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chambers. A few days before her deportation, she had dismissed the offer made by her superiors of an escape to another Carmel outside of the Netherlands by stating: “Do not do it! Why should I be spared? Is it not right that I should gain advantage from my Baptism? If I cannot share the lot of my brothers and sisters, my life, in a certain sense, is destroyed.” She died at Auschwitz-Birkenau on August 9, 1942. She left behind the message “Ave Crux, Spes Unica” on a scrap of paper thrown from the train to Auschwitz. This translates: “Hail the Cross, Our Only Hope.”

When Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce began her last theological work, The Science of the Cross, in the Carmel in the Netherlands, a work which remained unfinished because it led to demonstrate her own Way of the Cross at her arrest by the Nazis, she remarked, “When we speak of the science of the cross, it is not . . . mere theory, . . . but living, real and effective truth.” When the deadly threat to the Jewish people also overshadowed her, she was ready to demonstrate with her own life what she had already recognized in writing: “There is a calling to suffer with Christ and thereby to cooperate in His work of redemption . . . Christ lives on in His members and continues to suffer in them; and the suffering endured in union with the Lord is His suffering, set in the great work of redemption and fruitful in it.”

Like Saint Teresa Benedicta, our Baptism in Christ offers us no advantage for success in this world. It is not a ceremonial badge. The Cross is our only hope. It is our only hope in our lives and in our schools. It describes your apostolate as teachers and administrators because the Cross provides the compass by which we navigate the contemporary wilderness that Frankel describes and that we are witnessing with grave concern in our social and political life in the United States and throughout the world replete with war, racial enmity, antisemitism, human slavery, political corruption, murder, and the wholesale abandonment of belief in God by many people. The Cross is our compass in this wilderness because in the Cross of Jesus Christ we see fused together perfect love and the full truth about God and human beings.

Our mission is urgent as Jesus reminds us in today’s Gospel to “stay awake for we know neither the day nor the hour.” The doors that we open for our students and their parents are not an endless series of doors where everything is permitted but rather the doors of truth, beauty, and goodness marked by the Cross. In our schools, we cannot compromise on the Cross. In the words of Saint Teresa Benedicta, “Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other becomes a destructive lie.” May this be the hallmark of our apostolate of Catholic education.