Edith Stein: a Eucharistic Witness unto Death

St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross – Edith Stein - died a martyr on this day 84 years ago.  She was among the Catholics of Jewish origin arrested after the Dutch bishops publicly condemned Nazi persecution of the Jews.  They were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were murdered in the gas chambers.  I recall seeing aghast the remains of that place when I visited there in 2011: it was a ghastly reminder of the industrial scale of evil perpetrated by the Nazi regime and its accomplices.

Edith Stein was born in 1891 in Germany in what is now modern-day Poland.  She was a gifted child - encouraged by her mother to think critically.  During her teen years, she abandoned the Jewish faith of her childhood and described herself as an atheist in her early adulthood.  She was awarded  a doctorate in philosophy at the age of 26.  A reading of the autobiography of St Teresa of Avila in 1921 made such a deep impression on her that she decided to embrace Catholic Christianity in 1922.  She is on record for saying this:

The grain of wheat: the martyrdom of St Oscar Romero

About Romero –
The Archbishop Romero Trust

Central America has been a particularly troubled part of the globe over the decades; it has been the crossroads of competing political ideologies and economic interests. The Roman Catholic Church continues to play an important role, there as well as elsewhere, in speaking out for the poor and the  marginalised.  On 24 March,1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot dead while celebrating Mass in the chapel of Divine Providence Hospital in El Salvador.

He died at the altar while offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, uniting his life to the sacrifice of Christ.  His crime was that he had spoken out courageously and continually against injustice and State terror. He had called on members of the security forces not to obey immoral orders to kill. 

A holy priest who had earned a reputation as a somewhat quiet and conservative man dedicated to piety moved into a troubled place when he had been appointed archbishop of El Salvador in 1977. As the Vaticannews site says:

United in Christ – the eucharistic witness of Saints Peter and Paul

Today is the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles. St Peter, the first among the Apostles, was the rock on which Jesus built his Church. Saint Paul was the Apostle who, in a particular way, brought the Gospel to the Gentiles. Both ended their lives in Rome, where they were martyred.

Tradition recognises Peter as having oversight of the early Christian community, and as the first Bishop of Rome, the beginning of a line of bishops who would lead the Church there and exercise a ministry of unity and oversight among all the churches throughout the world.

The mysteries of the altar

Why Relics? | St. Innocent of Alaska Orthodox Monastery

When we enter a church, we see an altar. Usually it is large and stands out, though sometimes it is more like a small table. Whatever shape or size it takes, it is the centre of worship. Tradition has also associated the altar with the place where the Eucharist is reserved – in the Tabernacle in the West, or in the Artophorion in the East. If we look more closely, however, we begin to see that there is far more here than first meets the eye.

It may be helpful to step into a setting less familiar to many of us: the sanctuary area of an Eastern Orthodox church which uses the Byzantine rites. This sacred space is normally reserved for clergy and those with a blessing, and is only partially revealed to the congregation during the Divine Liturgy when the Royal Gates are opened.